Finally, my bread and butter chapter: What do Teachers Need to Know About Linguistics?
Human beings are hardwired for language; our minds are designed for it so much that by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, all babies are more ore less fluent in the language spoken around them. But this isn't really leading to a good point in my mind, so I'll hop to something else.
As I mentioned earlier (while talking about a later reading, somewhat ironically), learning to be an effective writer can in someways be paralleled to learning to become an effective speaker of another language. Aaaaannnnnddd nope, there's nothing here either, nothing on point anyway. Let's hop to something else.
Okay, okay, okay, Laura and Amanda were just talking about (several weeks ago) about language change and stereotypes in writing and whatnot. Language change is one of my very favorite things to think and talk about because I love it so much and because it makes so many people so angry which is probably another reason I love it so much. Recently, last year I believe, the word "irregardless" was recognized by some dictionary or other as an official word that means "regardless" and so many people were so angry about it and I loved it because language change is an unceasing, unloving, uncaring beast that moves slowly and inexorably forward, picking up and discarding words as they are used and disused, caring naught for proper grammar or usage. It's fascinating. It's a slow process, but even with how slow it is, writing change is even slower, as Lindemann sort of hints at.
This fits in to what Laura was talking about in her lamentation on the state of the youth, which, as she suggests, is similar to the same one that has been written by every generation about the one that follows it. (I myself write similar lamentations on the regular, looking forward to the day when I can be Old Man Edwards that kids make up scary stories about like in The Sandlot. But that's all by the way.) What is considered well spoken is what is determined to be well spoken by the public at large. Most people who grow up in a particular society have multiple ethoi, and generally have a sense of what is formal language and what is informal language. The key, then, is teaching and showing the situations in which such language is appropriate and when it isn't. It will probably change.
It's really just a different kind of literacy, the same as any other I would think. Which kind of ties into what Amanda was talking about with Standard American English and slang and whatnot and being kind of unsure about when and where to slip between these various points on the formality spectrum. It seems to me that for a lot of us (and the younger generation) we're in a position where we understand what's classically formal and informal and appropriate and inappropriate, but we also understand that a an increasing number of people are more and more OK with less formal language and formerly ultraserious situations, or else we recognize that being hyperliterate and wellspoken doesn't preclude being postmodern or multimodal, mixing "high brow" and "low brow." Text speak, I think, is just an extension of a process that's been happening in earnest in academia (certain sections of it, anyways) for a few decades. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm not even saying you have to accept it and can't fight against it, I just think that in order to go forward you have to at least acknowledge that it is a thing.
To paraphrase the great poet whoeveritwas, "you can't stop it, you can only hope to contain it."
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