It is exceedingly common to find academic linguists who pour scorn on
teachers' attempts to correct students who confuse words, saying that it is
pedantic to try and stem the inevitable onrush of language change.  For
example, they have in their sights anyone who would point out to their
students the semantic difference between such pairs as 'refute' and 'deny',
'sensuous' and 'sensual', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'.  Another pair
is the transitive verb 'lay' and the intransitive 'lie' -- over here in
England it used to be comparatively rare to hear someone say 'Lay on the
bed' or I've been laying here half an hour', instead of 'Lie on the bed' or
'I've been lying here half an hour', but it is becoming increasingly common
(I notice, for example, that Americans say 'the lay of the land' and not
'the lie of the land').

Some linguists, however, are straying from the scientific compound.  A
scientist should be examining the changes happening in the corpus of words,
regardless of their causes.  Even a sociolinguist, interested in those
causes, does not take sides.  It is not for the  linguists to lay down rules
about what should or should not be preserved.   If educators in some society
find that it aids community feeling to inculcate a 'standard' speech and are
concerned to produce the results they intend, that is just one of the
historical factors that a linguist would have to acknowledge, not a feature
that he or she should be condemning out of hand as 'pedantic'.  They have a
tendency to move from a statement like 'Change in language is a normal
process' (David Crystal, 'How Language Works, 2006, p. 483) which is
undeniable, to 'Educational resistance to particular changes is futile', for
it might be perfectly 'normal' in a society to resist such changes.  They
say that one should not be using a word such as 'decay' of a language: no,
not at the level of scientific inquiry, but yes, if one considers that, say,
the distinction between 'refute' and 'deny' is valuable.  The continual use
of 'refute' (which means to set out a would-be conclusive, carefully argued
disproof of something) for 'deny' (which is merely to contradict something
someone has said) might lead to a double loss -- the simultaneous
disappearance of the useful word 'deny' and of the meaning of 'refute', for
which there is no adequate synonym.  Confusion of the two indicates someone
who can have had no training of any kind in the rhetoric of argument, surely
a necessity in a democracy.  Would it not be an instance of decay if that
should come about?

I detect a neo-romantic ideology at work here:  its dream is of a childhood
innocence as a delicate fruit the bloom of which must not be touched.  There
is also a mistaken class element that reads the attempt to teach standard
English as elitist, interfering with the natural dialects of the
working-class.  I have found many students of working-class background who
readily outstrip their middle-class schoolfellows in learning about
language, and end up being able to move from dialect to Standard English and
back again without any loss of local colour in their pronunciation.  Among
their peers, of course, there are many who obstinately distort their speech
to signal conformity with and loyalty to 'us' rather than 'them'.  Is that
determination to be blessed as irresistible because it is 'normal'?

Edmond Wright

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