Language as Transient: When Syntax Matters and When it Doesn't

When I was younger, I was absolutely obsessed with learning the “correct” syntax for the English language, and would make constant mental judgements of the grammar and usage of those around me, sometimes even using it as a major factor in my estimations of their mental fitness. I even wore this as a badge of honor for a while.

I’d say around seven years ago — when I was fifteen, for those of you keeping score at home –I began to re-evaluate my position, as I found reasons to constantly challenge* the rigid set of rules that determine what is “correct”.** As more evidence surfaced, and I challenged the status quo, I started to think about why the status quo wasn’t effective enough. In the end, I decided that the ruling bodies that determine what is “correct” are too sluggish in doing so, and that language is evolving faster than they can make sense of.

Most people become more stubborn as they age. So, let’s suppose that a given person’s opinions about language were pretty much set in stone at around 30 years old. That means this person has around 50 more years to cling to those rigid beliefs — but over the course of 50 years, the vernacular changes drastically. That’s why there are so many people who are disgruntled about the way the language is, in their eyes, being abused. That which was once pure to them (i.e. when our example was 30) is being tainted, non-words are becoming words, and old words are being redefined. The only way to relieve such a person of their*** subbornness tends to be to an appeal to authority, such as pointing out the new entry of a word in the dictionary the person most respects. I call these people late adopters — they actually refuse to reconsider their stance until the ruling bodies have already reconsidered, revised, and re-published their stance.

I do not believe that language should be free of rules. Quite the contrary: I believe that, in the interest of fostering clear communication, it is important to maintain syntactical standards. But I feel that these standards should be adaptable enough to accomodate the transient nature of the language they govern. I think less weight should be placed on minor infractions of these standards, especially when the infractions in no way cloud the meaning of the speaker or writer. For instance, understanding the distinction between “your” and “you’re” is still important, because using the wrong one can cloud meaning. But the rule stating that writers must never start a sentence in a conjunction, like I’ve done twice in this paragraph, is obsolete.

Rules are a means to an end. Rules exist to govern behavior so that a certain goal, for instance peace or communication, can be achieved. In all areas where there are rules, a problem I’ve seen in a lot of conformists (and especially detail-oriented conformists) is that they allow their means to become their end: they decide that the rules must be followed at all times, even silly ones that are no longer necessary or sufficient to achieving that end, and then they defend those rules to the bitter end (ten bucks for my crappy pun, thanks). Stubborn so-called grammarians are among these sheep-like rule followers. But let me reiterate: I am not a language anarchist! My big picture view is that language syntax exists to make sure that communication is clear, and as such I respect the need for language syntax. But many people seem to think it exists for some higher purpose, because they follow it at all costs — even when the rules actually cloud communication! This was lampooned in a brilliant scene in one Mike Judge film, wherein an officer describes the victim as the guy “off in whose trailer they were whacking”, referencing blind obedience of the rule that no sentence should ever end in a preposition. Obscene or not, if this example doesn’t make it very clear how blind adherence to language rules can actually cloud communication, then what will?

*I believe that split infinitives should be allowed because it feels so awkward to avoid them. Also, because Picard uses one at the beginning of every single episode, and I have intensely blind faith in Picard’s decisions.

**In that last sentence, I made what some would consider to be a syntactical error by failing to enclose the trailing period in my quotation marks (while it would be silly to enclose the period within parenthetical asides such as this one). Further, the quotation marks syntax already makes such allowances for question marks and semicolons, but not periods. I think that it’s about time this awkward and inconsistent rule be destroyed. Most computer programmers with language aptitude share my opinion that, if we’re going to enforce a syntax, we should at least be consistent.

***I am a supporter of the singular they — not that it needs my support, as its heavy usage indicates that its eventual widespread acceptance is inevitable, just like that of “snuck” or “apron” was. It may not happen in my lifetime or yours, but it will happen.

When it rains, it pours and pours and pours and pours and pours

It’s been a roller-coaster week. This story is like the icing on the cake. I think I’ll write this story in reverse, starting with the moral.

What I’ve learned: There really is a God, but however potent he may be, he isn’t omniscient — he apparently only has access to information that is posted on the internet, perhaps on this very blog. Oh, and he’s got some mischief in him.

The story: Last night, as we headed to my car to make a trip to the Container Store — one of my favorite stores — Shelly pointed out, “Hey, is that your car with the window down?” I sprinted. Within a few steps, I realized that yes, this was my car, but no, the window wasn’t down: the window was just gone. There was glass everywhere, especially on the front passenger seat. My MP3-CD player was ripped out, along with most of my middle dashboard, which is used for heating/cooling, and had my clock and hazard button.

Now, this is a crappy thing to have happen, but I realize that there’s very little that’s unique about the situation: I was out of neighborhood parking one-day-passes, so I parked in a shadier area, literally and figuratively, because it had free street parking. I didn’t take the faceplate off my MP3 player, because I have profound ADHD and that’s simply not the sort of thing I can keep on top of. My MP3 player was an Alpine, a well-known and pretty pricey brand. While mine was one of the cheapest ones they make, I guess you really can’t count on some unemployed crackhead idiot to be all that distinguishing about his targets.

The backstory: I guess you’re probably wondering, and rightfully so, so what’s all this got to do with God and the internet? Well, here’s a brief recap of my last entry from about five days ago: I bought a MP3-CD player a few months back, never got around to burning more than a few MP3-CDs, and was just getting the hang of it and getting really into it. Thursday, for the first time, I sat down and burned off tons of my albums to MP3-CDs — I made one disc for all of Sublime, another for all of Dashboard Confessional, and so on. It was really nice to get that glimpse of audiofile paradise, when I could drive for six hours with Incubus and never hear a repeat track, or could listen to a twelve-hour business audiobook without changing discs, but sadly I won’t be able to revisit that paradise in the near future.

Moreover, I’m flat broke and it’s freezing outside, and I have to get down to Urbana for class today, so as fellow Chicagoan Wesley Willis would’ve said, I’m in for a hell ride.

On the plus side, unless God reads this and decides to invalidate the forecast too, I got some welcome news from weather.com:

Today’s forecast: abundantly sunny.

I swear I did not edit their wording.

Pleather Nemesis

To get my mind off things, sometimes I subject myself to mindless tasks. I know I’m not alone in that regard — lots of people find they cannot do laundry until they have a tough exam or deadline coming up, and I’ve also heard tell of one or two nervous cleaners out there. Escapism isn’t something I have needed in recent years, so I had forgotten how productive I can be in one regard when under a lot of stress in another. But now I am rediscovering this ability.

About three months ago, I picked up an MP3-CD player for my car — that is, a CD player that can play discs that were written in data format, rather than just in audio format. This means that, instead of a disc having a maximum capacity of 80 minutes of music regardless of quality, I can easily fit seven or eight times as much high-quality music on a single disc, and I can fit upwards of twenty-five hours of audiobook content on another. This latter advantage was the main reason I purchased the MP3-CD player, of course, because thanks to my lengthy commute I had become quite the devourer of audiobooks and, in turn, of 80-minute discs. Sometimes I would go through two discs a day, and audiobooks aren’t the kind of content that you listen to more than once (with the exception of Tom Peters’ brilliant audiobook but annoyingly over-designed physical book Re-Imagine and Bill Bryson’s silly, but thoroughly enjoyable A Short History of Nearly Everything), so I would just toss them after using them, like Palahniuk’s single-serving friends. It was a crude, time-consuming, and wasteful method of feeding words into my brain, to say the least. Two weeks after I made this purchase, my manager at work gave me permission to begin working from home, effectively removing my commute and the main reason I had made this investment to begin with.

I had removed all of the traditional CDs from my car when I made the purchase, so that I could begin to replace them with MP3-CDs. For years, I have had in my car a 72-disc pleather Case Logic CD case, and it would hold my 72 favorite CDs at any given time. For the last three months, however, that pleather case has not been in my car. It has sat here, next to my computer, waiting for me to get around to converting those 72 and countless more CDs into something more like 10 discs — few enough to put in one of those visor-mounted velcro deals. In the meantime, I had little to no music in my car, and often nothing but two or three audiobooks. So here I sat on this powerful technology that I was too lazy to utilize, but about which I was too optimistic (and financially invested) to revert to my old ways entirely. That pleather case sat here, near my computer, engaging me in a three-month stalemate. But no longer.

In the name of escapism, my left brain, typically a rather submissive chap, took over. I woke up well before my first class, ran and organized my laundry, shaved and showered thoroughly (as opposed to the insanely rushed, panicky effort I usually give to these grooming tasks — and even then, only before an interview or something), and went to class early so I could prepare for the quiz and get a good seat. I did well on the quiz (again, totally out of character), drove straight home, and stared down at my pleather nemesis. It was time.

Here’s the process: It takes Exact Audio Copy and LAME maybe 15 minutes to rip a normal audio CD and encode it into MP3 format. Then, I use Tag&Rename to standardize the indices of Artist, Album, Title, etc. After I’ve converted pretty much all of my music from a given artist in this fashion, I make a compilation and burn it as an MP3-CD. I Sharpie in the names of the albums it contains, and finally, put it in my visor-mounting velcro CD Case Logic thingie. Thus overwhelming stress in one regard leads, again, to powerful motivation to do something else — anything else, really.

Escapism is the opposite of catharsis, and is akin to stretching a rubber band more and more before it snaps. But, in the meantime, it sure is a lot easier to participate in, and it definitely did wonders for my selection of clean laundry and car audio.