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Caius -> RE: Is good grammer a reasonable standard? (5/9/2010 2:53:10 AM)
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Hmmm, I have to take a second to say, I like the cut of your jib after-all, aBT. I really kind of laid into you there, and you refused to be rattled. You just made your response as straight-forward and concise as could be. Mind you, I still think you are as wrong as wrong can be on this subject, but you're ok.
Anyway, to the matter at hand... There aren't so much standards as transitory trends, same as any language. The only semi-permanent rules are those of descriptive grammar (see my post above if unfamiliar with this linguistic term). Even educated persons will vary considerably in what they consider 'acceptable,' if they are already predisposed to that kind of judgemental attitude. And anyway language is one of those queer areas where very frequently more education can lead to more ignorance if it's not handled in an empirical manner. Language is a powerful force (indeed, clearly one of the most necessary) when it comes to indoctrination. It works almost like magic in how it can create both solidarity within a group by isolating its members from those without. The 'highly educated' are by no means immune to this effect; in fact they are in many ways one of the most vulnerable because that sense of elitism is implicit in such a group's very definition and they are more than willing to believe they have a superior handle on a subject that was so essential to the educational process. But the fact of the matter is, they don't. They simply have a claim to a similar kind of idiolect. But in no significant objective, factual way is it more complex, efficient, powerful, or in any way superior. The most uneducated person on the planet is just as likely to be someone who can turn a phrase impressively as another given the highest degree of education.
See, the thing is, what modern linguistics (and cognitive science in general) has taught us, is that we are born pre-loaded with most of our linguistic ability. Children begin using language in set ways, adhering to many general syntactic/morphological rules regardless of whether they are explicitly taught to or not. It's called the "poverty of the stimulus" phenomena. And of the langauge ability that you do garner from experience, the vast majority of it is gained during early childhood, while the brain is still 'plastic' and capable of being molded to the more finer rules of a given language. What you learn thereafter is a drop of water in the bucket, really. So higher education mostly only teaches you how to speak in a more stylized way (and often to judge others who don't speak in that style) it doesn't in any real sense teach you to speak better. In fact, the only real advantage you might gain from higher education in terms of language ability would be the opportunity to expose yourself to as many different styles of speaking. Unfortunately because education is often as much about stamping an identity as exposure to new ideas, many of the more 'refined' institutions (actually, most) will go the other way, limiting study of a language to the forms expected of persons of a certain class and disparaging others. I know it sounds cliche, but if those aspects of education are true in any area, it's in language instruction.
I probably should have worded myself as above from the start, but what can I say, it's a bias I long ago grew wearisome of and sometimes I can be a prick when I know I'm absolutely, completely in the right. ;)
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