Anonymous asked:
It could also be grammar. “they” and “them” are grammatically incorrect when referring to one person, and yet many people, understandably, like them.
love, it’s a pun
Also, linguists couldn’t care less whether some books list it as a rule that singular they is grammatically incorrect. Prescriptivists - people who enforce made up language rules - are sworn enemies of linguists everywhere.
Am I evil if I follow prescriptivist rules, and teach people to follow prescriptivist rules, not because they are right but because they are high-SES signals? I do my best to follow these sorts of rules, even though I wish that there were fewer of them, because that signals high-SES and that is just a really useful signal to project.
Is it problematic to optimize for, among many other things, giving an impression of high-SES? I think so. I also don’t think that it is actually bad. Problematic just means something that you need to think about and consider carefully.
For example, I negatively judge university students (an english-speaking university in an english-speaking country) who I hear speaking non-English living languages with each other (If I hear someone speaking classical latin I am more likely to just listen in). This is obviously problematic, especially as most of the students I overhear appear Asian and are speaking a language I can identify as Asian (I tend to suspect Chinese, but that is more from base rates than anything else). Yet I have a reason (Don’t go to another country and not immerse yourself), I am consistent (I judge even more heavily everbody who voluntarily resides in the ______ House, where all the students from ______ University live, whose students do all speak English fluently), and I don’t act on this negative judgement, so I think that I am not obviously wrong.
There is a way in which deliberately trying to project high-SES is classist: if I didn’t, then it would be harder to distinguish high-SES from low-SES, and so I perpetuate the system and all that jazz. But I am also responding, with the appearence of rationality, to the incentives in my environment. And I know that the Modern Orthodox SJ (used very broadly, if you have a better term or phrase to encompass this crowd I welcome it) Movement defines isms in such a way that a computer at your average financial institution is racist because it perpetuates inequality, but that is also the point where I start talking about the non-central fallacy, so it is less of an issue to me than it might otherwise be.
I don’t think optimizing your speech for high SES signaling is evil.
1) Signaling SES through speech has as far as I know been a thing forever in every language, so I don’t think your refusal to buy in is going to do much to change the system, and it is going to hurt your career prospects (and your career is probably the biggest way you’re likely to do good things for the world).
2) Following prescriptivist rules seems like it might be more of a signal of education than social status: if you learned silly grammar rules in school, you probably learned other things in school too. The bigger problem might not be prescriptivist signaling but rather that quality of education received is so highly correlated with SES.