"Word Crimes" mocks online commenters and their neglect of standard English grammar.[5] In the song, Yankovic spoofs those who use numbers in place of letters, which he criticizes as only acceptable if they are children, or Prince (referring to successful Prince songs with numbers in their title, such as "I Would Die 4 U").[2] He also lampoons people who use the word literally to describe non-literal situations.[6] The song highlights other common prescriptions: Yankovic mentions the usage of less versus fewer, and the use of "to whom" as opposed to "to who". Spelling is also brought up, as he states that there is no "x" in the word espresso (n.b. expresso). Regarding punctuation, he comments on the use of "it's" as a possessive instead of the correct "its,"[6] and the optional use of the Oxford comma.[7] Yankovic also mentions the common confusion between "doing good", "doing good deeds", and "doing well". Also mentioned in the song is the idiom "I couldn't care less" being commonly corrupted as "I could care less".[6]
The video also is filled with Easter eggs that appear quickly onscreen during lyrics. The graphic for the title phrase is modeled after the Merriam-Webster dictionary logo.[18] During the line "You're a lost cause," a poster for ABC's Lost appears, with the sentence "Learn your ABC's, doofus" using the ABC logo.[11] The number 27, which frequently appears in previous works by Yankovic, appears throughout the video. An illustration on a college notebook cover includes Pac-Man and the character Trogdor the Burninator from the Homestar Runner animated web series.[14] The graphic for the lyric "irony is not coincidence" pokes fun at Alanis Morissette's use of the word "ironic", noting that "rain on [one's] wedding day" is merely coincidence, whereas a better example of irony would be a fire truck being destroyed by fire.[19] The video also includes cameos by Doge and the Microsoft Office Assistant "Clippit" (also known as "Clippy"),[16] and references to the Sacramento-based offices of the California Department of Food and Agriculture where Heather is employed.[15]
Weird Al’s Word Crimes
The work has received some negative attention from linguists and educators, who view the prescriptivism celebrated in the song as scientifically ill-informed, arbitrary, and encouraging of unnecessary and damaging social distinctions.[25][26] Mignon Fogarty of the podcast Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing considered that the video, which has a high likelihood of being used in educational settings, speaks down to those with poor grammar, criticizing "the call to feel superior and to put other people down for writing errors".[27] Shortly after the song was released, Yankovic stated that he had been unaware that the word spastic used in the song is "considered a highly offensive slur by some people", particularly in the United Kingdom, and apologized for its presence in his lyrics.[28]
Seems to me that linguists generally mock specialists in other fields who complain that their terms of art are misunderstood and misused by people outside the field (first example that comes to mind is mathematicians with the word "parameter"). So when the shoe is on the other foot, maybe whinging about it is unbecoming.
9. Matching the tense of the question, the answer is "because I'm young". You have to get your information from somewhere. It's the same reason I recited the pledge of allegiance when we were supposed to in elementary school; I'd never do that today. (The question is worded as if it's asking what makes some people a better source of outside authority than other people when it comes to deciding what's "right". I think this is a false premise, so I've answered as if the question didn't contain the words "but not others".)
Whether or not he personally owns the opinion that professionals and university graduates ought to know how to effectively communicate in their mother tongue is, frankly, irrelevant. Yankovic is a comedian who has written a catchy tune based upon extremely common language-based pet peeves. Many people, from closet grammarians and English teachers to crossword fanatics and ESL students, get pissed when native speakers make simple errors with spelling and structure.
Actually, as to the (11)th question, I believe the standard answer is that a possessive is a syntactic inflection ("case") of a noun, while a contraction involves more than one word. But as far as I can see this theory is totally unable to account for sentences like "the man who is sitting down's cape is on fire", where "down" isn't even a noun. Are there other languages for which it's accepted that a phrase may have its own case independent of whatever words it contains?
If you're just talking about whether case markers can attach to phrases instead of individual words, yes. It's called analytic case, and contrasted with the synthetic case of languages like Latin. Analytic case is basically what prepositions do in English.
Dick Margulis: The difference between the usages of "parameter" and "grammar" that are found objectionable by the mathematician and the linguist, respectively, is that the former is based on nothing more than a gross misunderstanding of the meaning of the word (perhaps a confusion with "perimeter"?), whereas the latter is well established standard English that has been articifically rejected by the contemporary linguistic community in favor of a more technical meaning, which has the stated advantage of being "SUPER FUN!" Of course, there is nothing unusual or wrong about appropriating a common English word as technical jargon, but to insist that the rest of the world abandon the older usage, and that our failure to comply can only mean that "everyone misunderstands the very substance and nature of their field of study", is absurd.
Hey, at least linguists will always have Vampire Weekend's Oxford Comma. "Who gives a f### about an Oxford comma/ I've seen those English dramas too/ they're cruel/ so if there's any other way/ to spell the word/ it's okay with me with me"
If the discussion is standard vs. non-standard English, not even long-haired hippie descriptive linguists deny the benefits of proficiency with Standard English. But this does not imply that proficiency with some non-standard form is undesirable. In other words, if you criticize some non-standard usage, why are you assuming this was a failed attempt at Standard English? There may be some good reason to believe this, but the existence or non-existence of such a reason has little correlation for criticisms.
The sub-tempest in a tea pot over Al's misuse of the word :grammar" strikes me as the equivalent of economists freaking out over confusion of an increase in "demand" with an increase in the "quantity demanded."
"1. a. That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing. Often preceded by an adj. designating the language referred to, as in Latin, English, French grammar.
For example, when a Judge hands down a judgment his words are chosen carefully and with precision. When two parties seek to enter into a legally binding agreement the precise use of language plays a crucial role in this process. When a writer composes a novel, grammar and spelling are crucial in conveying the writer's intent, crucial in lifting the writing from mundane to engaging. When a doctor compiles a report regarding a patient's prognosis and future treatment, language plays a highly crucial role in conveying information accurately.
Actually, no. Were people unable to distinguish between the nominative and objective cases, they would make no distinction between, e.g., they and them. The fact that the vast majority of English speakers do, however, regularly distinguish between those words but not between who and whom is evidence not that the nominativeobjective distinction has been lost,* but rather that who can now quite simply be used for either nominative or objective case.
Let's not get into semantics or prevarication. In the context of this post words such as, racist, elitist, classist, stuffy and pretentious, are a veiled disparagement usually directed at prescriptivists.
Whom has almost completely vanished from speech and I'm sure you've noticed that who has also replaced it in much of what you read. If you keep looking at a printed version of the word whom in a particular work of literature though, I suppose it will exist for as long as the page does.
That's a common misunderstanding. To a descriptivist, the rules of a language are to be discovered by examining the conventions that exist in the linguistic community. There may be several parallel conventions that exist in different speech communities and at different levels of formality, but there is still such a thing as a mistake. A mistake is any usage that fails to conform to relevant conventions. If you think the people around you understand the word dog to mean cat, it would be a mistake to use it with that meaning. It's not an alternative convention in use by a separate linguistic community or whatever. It's a mistake.
They literally mean they do not care, and they repeat a phrase they do not understand or have not thought about. Not the end of the world. But I encourage every speaker to consider their phrases and words such that they use them in a way that their meaning is clear.
I believe that communication works best when the people doing it a) agree what the words mean, and b) are communicating with the best of intentions toward each other and to the purpose of the communication (eg, *not* setting out to judge the communication, the language or the person). 2ff7e9595c
Comments