[Week 4] Essay - I Literally Can't Even

(comic by Hilary Price)

                This comic reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to hold about linguistics students. My friends and I are always asked things like, “how many languages do you speak?” It’s even become a bit of an inside joke among linguists and students because it’s asked so often. Linguists generally don’t learn how to speak hundreds of languages, they study how languages work. Because of that, many find questions about how many languages they speak irritating. But I would rather talk about that all day before I even begin to approach the question: “Don’t you just HATE it when people say things incorrectly?!”

                One of the first things we were taught in our general linguistics class was that small grammatical or orthographical errors are generally irrelevant when it comes to communication. In other words, we care more about getting the message across than we do getting the grammar or spelling right. On a larger scale, there are varieties of English that are seen as “bad” when really they’re just a different dialect. For example, African American Vernacular English is seen by many as ungrammatical. In reality, AAVE has its own grammar rules and patterns that are just a little bit different from Standard English. So while an AAVE sentence may be ungrammatical according to Standard English rules, it can be very much grammatical for other speakers of the dialect.

                On a more personal note, I think I’m especially sensitive to people calling me a “grammar Nazi” because lately my English has been in a state of decline. I assume it’s just because I’ve been focusing so much on foreign languages that I’m just not used to English anymore. It’s not all that severe, but where writing something like this short essay would have been a breeze to me in the past, it’s a lot more challenging now. Despite this new problem of mine, I’m still functioning just fine as a linguistics student. My peers would be more offended if I called English a Romance language than they would if I spelled something incorrectly. I certainly don’t think people shouldn’t care about grammar (I have my pet peeves too!), but I can’t help but feel for that guy who gets attacked on Facebook for spelling “definitely” incorrectly.

                To tie this all back to the comic, it doesn’t even occur to me to say “fewer” in many situations. I don’t think that makes me uneducated. I do know when to use “fewer” and when to use “less,” but it seems that “less” has started to take on the role of “fewer” these days. Just as “awesome” is less about “awe” and more about really great things.  Maybe it’s my background as a linguistics student, or maybe I’m just a little more flexible than some people when it comes to these things, but language change is evolution that we can observe in real time! Even if I don’t want to hear about how “ratchet” someone’s clothes are or how that girl “literally can’t even,” I think it’s really fascinating and (in casual contexts) should be embraced.