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Eugine_Nier comments on Folk grammar and morality - Less Wrong
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Comments (61)
This is not necessarily a bad thing. How useful a language is to you depends on how many other people speak it.
I fully agree!
Western governments seem somewhat reticent to talk about how they crushed local dialects in the name of "education" (for understandable political reasons - it doesn't sound very good when presented like that, and gives arguments to local separatists); maybe it would be better if they just 'fessed up and said "Oh OK we admit those "grammar lessons" in school were just a pretext to impose linguistic uniformity; not that we have that we can drop those pointless lessons".
What would happen if the government dropped grammar lessons. Is the parents who could afford to would arrange for special grammar tutors for their children. The version taught by those tutors would then become a signal of high status and other parents would demand that their children be taught it as well.
Would they really? I'm not a parent, but I at least like to think I'd spend extra money teaching my kids useful things that are also status signals, like economics or calculus or writing (real writing, not "don't split infinitives"). Basically anything you could easily get tutoring for is a better use of time and money than grammar education.
And are the kids going to give everyone they meat a lecture on calculus?
Also, the rules probably wouldn't include "don't split infinitives". Using that as your mental example is skewing your intuition.
Notice that on most internet forums posts with bad spelling and grammar are taken less seriously. This is because readers see that they signal low quality content.
I'm wondering if this was deliberate, to illustrate your point.
If so, bravo, it worked really well.
Actually, it was a typo, but now that you mentioned it, it does help, so I'll leave it up.
Would you still say that if you lived in an area where the local, everyday language was of exceptionally low status - e.g. Ebonics, Brummie, or Neapolitan?