Anonymous asked:
Yes I definitely support good and clear writing. The grammar mistakes that annoy me are ones that make writing unclear (misplaced modifiers, etc.), but some prescriptivist rules (don’t end sentences with prepositions or splice commas or use singular “they”) actually obfuscate language more than they help.
I am definitely down with pragmatic (pseudo)prescriptivism, by which I mean encouraging people to use grammar that adds clarity of meaning or encourages correctness. Sometimes this is in support of standard prescriptivist advice, sometimes it’s opposed, sometimes it’s neutral in which I revert to “do what you want, prescriptivism has classism issues.” E.g. I value the oxford comma for clarity of lists, I support splitting infinitives on the grounds that it doesn’t cause any problems, and I support the (re)introduction of the singular they for being able to talk about people without asserting a gender1.
There’s also a bit of trickiness around appropriation here because there are some aspects of minority dialects that would be really nice to introduce in general. E.g. African American Vernacular English has some really awesome tense structures. Take a look at the Wikipedia article for it — isn’t the distinction between stressed/unstressed been in the sentence “She been running” really awesome? And it’s not something you can duplicate easily in General American.
And while I would really like to learn this grammatical structure and introduce some parts of the dialect into my speech, I really, really can’t. I would definitely just sound like I was making fun of black people. Especially as someone whose only dialect is General American2 and who would likely only be able to replicate the grammar, not necessarily the accent or other dialectical3 differences.
As with many things with appropriation, it’s really sad that it works out this way, and it would be really nice if this could be adopted generally without it being a “fuck you” to black people, and honestly since so much of culture is building on previous bits of culture the fact that we have to not adopt things4 is part of what keeps black people segregated from white people and helps enable further discrimination. None of which means its ok to act in a way that will almost definitely look like making fun of black people! But it’s still all really really sad and frustrating and seriously why does the world have to suck.
We actually do lose a little bit in using “they” as a general singular no-gender-asserted pronoun. Specifically, singular they has a bit of a connotation of being of indeterminant gender rather than not being gendered (by which I mean I feel a bit of a connotation of “I am talking about a generic person and so don’t know their gender” or “I am talking about a person I don’t know well enough to know their gender”). But I don’t think losing this connotation is sufficient reason to not have a pronoun where you don’t have to include gender, and I definitely don’t think this is a sufficient reason to throw gender nonbinary people under the bus.
I could imagine someone supporting singular they as a gender indeterminant singular and something like zie as a gender nonbinary singular. That’s not me, but I can see why one might want that.
(As with all discussions of pronouns, for specific people the correct policy is “use the pronoun they want.” Well, unless they’re a dick about it and are like “my preferred pronoun is ‘fuck having preferred pronouns’”. Fuck those people. (Still don’t misgender them, that’s not a correct way to be an asshole at someone who’s being an asshole. If you can’t figure out which pronoun to use, ‘they’ is a good singular “I don’t know your gender” pronoun.)) ↩
Seriously, if you look at the Wikipedia map for the regional home of General American, it includes the area where I grew up. ↩
Not certain if this is the right word, but spell check thinks it’s ok. So surely it’s correct (</sarcasm>). ↩
Like this, although this particularly example is probably fairly idiosyncratic to me and is probably not a key example of appropriation problems being a factor in cultural segregation. ↩
I don’t really understand the AAVE tense system but it seems pretty awesome, and I think the fact that we don’t all use it (and can’t use it) makes the world a slightly sadder place.
And I agree that the connotation of “they” as gender indeterminate is a little awkward when it’s used for a specific person. But it seems likely that those connotations will start to go away.