Playing Devil's Advocate to Cristina…Sorry Cristina

After having read about how ellipses are being overemployed and misused across writing, I turned to my peers.  In her most recent blog, Cristina Angel mentions the problems that this epidemic is causing.  According to her, ellipses should be used only in the academic way, in formal writing. Whatever happened to letting language evolve?

I’ve been critiqued by my peer, Cristina Serrano, for not acknowledging the opposition in my recent blog about the value of descriptivists and their one-to-five scale. That being said, this blog post will be all about playing devil’s advocate.  Although I agree with most of what Ms. Angel says, I’ll acquiesce to Ms. Serrano’s request.

Ms. Angel, in your bashing of the modern adaptation of the ellipses, you claim that “we are not even completing sentences.” So? In the evolving world of texts, there is no need for complete sentences, or even complete thoughts.  As the author pointed out when he sent a text to his mom that simply read “All Star Game…..” there is an inherent understanding between texters that enables them to interpret even the vaguest of messages.  This “relaxed way,” of writing, as you call it, allows people to be free.  It gives them the liberty to take the conversation anywhere…

Example:

Person 1: “All Star Game……”

Person 2: “Yeah…I hope the East can finish strong…”

Person 3: “…Soccer is much more interesting…”

Person 4: “I’m tired……”

While this may not seem coherent to a stranger, or a linguist trying to figure out why the English language was saved in the year 2014, it is logical to me, and that’s all that matters.  The privacy of the texter’s world makes it so that as long as the people directly involved understand, the “horrible… consequences” that you speak of are rendered obsolete….and that’s that….

Invading the Crimea of Language

Rules, as I have always been taught, are not made to be broken.  From the clichéd I before e except after c to the basic principle that every sentence needs a subject and a verb, English is no exception to the notion that there are rules aplenty. 

So, as I read Greene and Garner discuss the proper usage and importance of rules in the English language, I was at awe.  I had never realized that there was a place for the oh-so-miraculous descriptivist. A descriptivist, as I have garnered my own definition, is someone that describes language in terms of how it is being used.  OMG thats awesome! I just used an abbreviation for oh my god, and did not use an apostrophe after the second t in thats (although I feel that I might crack at any moment and be obliged to use proper punctuation.) Yes, that is awesome, but a prescriptivist— that is, someone who emphasizes the way language should be used— would say that it’s inappropriate.

Who is right?  As Greene says, there is nothing better than “reasonable moderates.” However, he then proceeds to assign a scale to determine a score from descriptivist to prescriptivist.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Mr. Greene. The very inclination of their having to be a scale provides proof that Greene, a self-proclaimed descriptivist, might in fact by fooling himself.  One cannot be a 3 out of 5 in terms of being bothered by improper language usage.  I’ll let this mistake go, but if he doesn’t capitalize God the next time, I’ll completely discredit him as an author… Is this the way the “3/5” benchmark would work? Or better yet, would they allow God to not be capitalized but require that English be capitalized? The way I see it, one is either a prescriptivist or a descriptivist, there’s no gray area when it comes to following the rules of language.

As for myself, I’m all for adapting and evolving to the language being used today.  While I would feel some odd nostalgia if the English that I consider to be proper becomes archaic, I don’t know (or idk?) if that’s enough to get me to commit to all the rules of language every time I express myself.

Juxtaposing Terror

Juxtaposition.  As a part of the analysis of the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, the author (and many others before him) compares this attack to other acts of cruelty and violence in US history.  As Pearl Harbor is the only other attack on continental United States since the War of 1812, the differences between these two attacks are juxtaposed using text, images, and positioning in the space of the comic.

First, it is important to note that while Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both organized efforts to destroy and kill, the people behind the attacks had very different levels of education, resources and access to aid.  Furthermore, while the US military in 1941 was equipped with some means of protection from aerial attacks, Pearl Harbor was very hard to stop once the attack had began.  On the other hand, as The 9/11 Report exposes the systematical errors that plagued the governmental response on September 11^th. It seems that 9/11 and Pearl Harbor can only be juxtaposed from a graphical point of view, not a historical one. Having said this, the author is very clear in his interpretation of the comparison of both events. He writes “imagination” over what he describes as the Pearl Harbor Attacks, but he doesn’t fret over the vivid interpretation of a Russian tank burning at the bottom of the page. Because he allows 9/11 to be revealed through the eyes of an investigative committee, he can focus on the illustrations and let the facts speak for themselves.  On the other hand, we don’t know where he got the information about Pearl Harbor; maybe it was purely “imaginative.”