I’ve gotten used to the world of email and blogging. Back in October I read a (typically good) short article in Smithsonian Magazine about Regional American Dialects entitled “Say What?” by Ulrich Boser [1].
The last line quotes University of Pennsylvania linguist Bill Labov commenting on linguistic drift:
“But it’s not really like biological evolution. No linguist believes that language gets better as it changes.”
To which my mind immediately snapped: “Say What?!?” I typed a quick reply commenting on the misapplied value judgment attributed to the course of biological evolution. I got an email this week advising me that the editors will print my “letter” in the December 2006 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
Oops.
My e-missive may be edited for style and content, but not as savagely as my pro-science letters to the local paper used to be, before I gave up that quixotic activity back in the 1990’s. As you may have noticed, I write in a fairly terse and compact style. Their removing words and clauses to make my letters fit a unit of column-inches did obscure — or even reverse — the meaning of almost every letter I sent them.
If you’re not bored, yet, here’s what I wrote to the editors of Smithsonian Magazine [2]:
To: Smithsonian Editor, Letters to
Subject: Say What?The last line of the Ulrich Boser column about American dialects, “… it’s not really like biological evolution. No linguist believes that language gets better as it changes,” had me exclaiming, “Say what!?”
Biologists don’t believe that evolution is toward something “better”. This is one of the dangerous misconceptions about evolution theories that gives Creationists strength. Language (memes) and biology (genes) both drift in arbitrary directions, then attrition or a crisis eliminates those variations that are weaker under those local circumstances.
Are blind cave lizards better than their sighted ancestors? Is “yall” better than “youse” as a replacement for the ancestral Germanic plural-you “Euch” that was completely lost in British English? Hind-sighted value judgments can be made, but the process is not toward “better” in either field.
It’s possible that this letter might pump people into DangerousIntersection.org [3], if readers Google me by name, especially with “evolution”. I really didn’t expect them to publish my little rant.
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