Acquisition of prescriptivism

Last night Nora (3) was jumping on her bed screaming "I don't want to wear nothing!" as I attempted to get her pajamas on. From his bed, Max (6) pipes up, "Sissy, saying you don't want to wear nothing means you want to wear something. Right dad?" Applying the poverty of the stimulus argument it appears that prescriptivism is innate. I know he didn't get it from me.

Lately I'm just feeling bad

While I am usually ignorant of my own mistakes, I am one of those people who, for some reason, are tuned into others mistakes. I never used this power for evil, the way some people do. But, I did once naivly tell a baker at an outdoor market that he had mispelled 'foccacia' on his sign. Fortunately, he was baker and not a butcher.

There's a guy in my neighborhood who seems to have a pretty good dj business going on. He's got a shiny white van with tinted windows, his name and phone number printed on them. He goes by the name "Khaleel the Enertainer" and every time I see his van parked on the street I feel sad--not for the English language, not for the decline of standards, or the end of the world as we know it, but for him. Not only did poor Khaleel misspell the most important part of his name, but he did it so publicly, with his phone number right below. I can just imagine how many calls he gets from self-appointed grammar police and other assorted assholes judging him.

I'm feeling defensive

I feel the need to defend things. So, you know what doesn't bother me? His or her. Seriously. I think it has a nice rythm to it. Here's an example from Krugman in the NY Times.

if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake.

What does everybody have against it? Oh, "It's clumsy and intrusive." So it adds 2 extra words to a sentence. BFD. That whole brevity thing is overrated. It's bad enough we're all drinking espresso in to go cups. (And by all, I mean "all of us urban elites.")

I, for one, embrace our new conjoined pronoun overlords. And I'm totally going to pad my sentences with extra morphemes.

The most hated dialect

I'm not sure, but I think Philadelphia, in addition to being the home of self-loathing sports fans, is also the home of America's most self-loathing dialect speakers.

just hearing the long gravelly ignorant snore that passes for speech among
our native (mostly Northeast and DelCo) population is enough to make steam
come
out of your ears, grab the speaker by the collar, and shoutspit into
their
faces, “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW FUCKING STUPID YOU SOUND?”

WTF has Labov been doing here for the last 50 years?!? You'd think a town that is home to the most important socio-linguist in the world would have a little more pride in it's dialect. And what about Language Log who's plaza is nestled along the banks of the Schuykill? Oh they'rr too busy moderating comments and reposting Zippy the Pinhead cartoons. (I think they've lost their way.)

At least Monica Weymouth at the City Paper comes to the defense of her fellow Philadelphians.

Since when did tense vowels have anything to do with intelligence? And to be honest Philebrity, you bore me. But I do happen to know Sweeney is from Fishtown, so I can't quite figure out how you get off acting like you're any better than the Northeast — or the Applebee's waitress, or Marnie Hall.

Well, mybe a little short on the phonetic facts, but her heart is in the right place.

And/or redux

Geoff Pullum has been posting a bit about and/or.

So my guess would be that and/or is a way of underlining the point that the or is to be understood in its inclusive sense rather than its exclusive sense. Sometimes you want to explicitly indicate “or more than one of the above”, and and/or does that.

I posted about this a while ago. In my original post I think I confused my exclusives and inclusives.

Anyway, one of the arguments I tried out on them was that no language has a lexical distinction between inclusive or and exlusive or. One of my bosses immediately responded, "English does, or is exclusive and and/or is inclusive." My response was that and/or isn't a word. We left it at that.But I thought to myself, I bet and/or ends up being just like or by taking on an exclusive meaning.
I was vindicated last night. I was sitting on the can reading What to Expect When You're Expecting (It's good bathroom literature!) when I came across the following in a recipe for oatmeal cookies on p. 94:

"add ground cinnamon and/or salt to taste (both optional) when you add the milk."

I was thinking or was inclusive and and/or was exclusive. My boss was thinking the other way around, but I wasn't paying attention. (Maybe that's why she's not my boss anymore.) Anyway, I now understand that and/or is inclusive, which I think is what the cookie recipe shows.

Obligatory prescriptivist rant

Yesterday Leonard Lopate had Patricia T. O'Connor on for a regular language discussion, this time on pronunciation errors. I caught the tail end of the show and was predictably incensed. You can listen to the show here.

I posted some comments on the discussion board. It's moderated, so I don't know if they will make it on there (update: that was quick!). Here they are:

As a phonologist, I'm pretty disappointed by the lack of expertise of your expert, Ms. O'Conner. Especially when it comes to basic phonetics, phonology, and American dialect differences. Many of the questions listeners brought up have been studied extensively by American dialectologists and linguists. I suggest she look into that work before the next scheduled appearance. A good place to start is the American Dialect Society (on the web at www.americandialect.org).
In response to Jim's question above: the pronunciation of [or] as [ar] in NY (and other parts of the mid Atlantic] happens when the the [r] starts a new syllable in the word. You get it in 'sorry' but not 'for'. That said, all Americans pretty much have the [ar] in 'sorry' (unlike Canadians) but only some dialects extend it to other words like 'orange', 'Florida', or 'moral'. And many people have some idiosyncratic uses. For example, I (a native of SE Pennsylvania) have it in most of these words except 'moral'.
Some Brits may also have this pronunciation, although the only evidence I have for that claim is Roger Daltry's pronunciation of 'moral' in "Won't get fooled again". He clearly sings 'The m[ar]als that we worshipped were all gone.' I don't know if that is him affecting an American pronunciation or his native one.

On the show a caller asked about [shtreet] for [street]. This is also a common phonological variation in American speech. It appears to be anticipatory assimilation of the [s] to the place of articulation of the [r]. A similar rule is found in Swedish where an [s] following an [r] is pronounced as [sh], for example [morshan] meaning "Mother".

Survey offensive language

Cognitive Daily is surveying people on their attitudes towards the following offensive words: dick, penis, cunt, vagina, bitch, ho, nigger, suck, fag, gay, and another word I can't remember. Check it out.

Bad Linguistics

Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog engages in some bad linguistics.

But I bring this up, because the narrator, who was also the host, kept saying "nuke you lur".

The first time I heard it, I thought I was mistaken. By the fifth time, I realized it was the producers who were mistaken. They let a guy narrate a documentary who couldn’t pronounce a word? And not just any word, but the word, the one the whole show was about?

C'mon, we all know that characterizing "nuke you lur" as a "mispronunciation" is wrong. Doesn't anyone listen to NPR anymore?

Even more dispiriting is the long list of language pet peeves this post triggers in the comments.

You CAN get a job

Despite the hububhub-bub* this week about language rage at Language Log, Sally Tomlinson Tomason has stepped out to declare herself a prescriptivist (more here).

it means that some people who read what you write will judge you negatively if you use prescriptively-frowned-on things like singular they, and---all other things being equal---this could conceivably tip the balance in favor of another candidate for a job or for a place in a selective graduate program, or in favor of a competitor's product.

I don't necessarily buy the whole, "how are you going to get a job speaking like that" argument. Let's face it, grammar proficiency is a requirement for very few jobs. Yes, if you want to get a job in communications, especially as an editor, you'd better not have these kind of things on your resume. But otherwise, the chances a potential employer is going to throw out your resume because of singular they are pretty slim.
I think the reason this argument gets floated is because it comes from people who are in the types of careers where grammar is important.


*I'm not sure what was behind the hubub. I did get a call from young Eric earlier in the week. It was a little hard to understand, what with the Drone Man remix blasting in the background and his slurred speach (you know how beligerent belligerent Eric gets when he's drunk). I did manage to understand something about Pullum's new drink, El Kabong--tequila, red bull, and pop rocks. I can only speculate about the connection.

They are just wrong

OK, we all know the story on singular they. Those evil grammar nazis are trying to force everyone to write their sentences with his or her and not use they to refer to words like everyone, noone, etc. But fearless descriptivists stand up to this nonsense shouting' "let my people be!"

Did you know that using they to refer to singular antecedents is, like 400 years old. Man, if it's good enough for Shakespeare then it's good enough for everyone. Whoo-hoo let's get the language party started!

Except, I don't really like that narrative. The whole prescriptivist argument is based on the claim that a pronoun must, MUST I TELL YOU, agree with it's antecedent.

A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number and gender. If the antecedent is singular, the pronoun must be singular; if the antecedent is plural, the pronoun must be plural. If the antecedent is masculine, the pronoun must be masculine; if the antecedent is feminine, the pronoun must be feminine.

So it sounds like the descriptivists are just tossing the rules out the window. The real question is, is it really true that pronouns must agree with antecedents? Is it true for all pronouns in all languages or just the English ones? Or what? And what does it mean if it's not true?

Hey I know, let's take a different language at random, like, um how about Swedish? Must Swedish pronouns agree with their antecedents?

Turns out only sometimes. Here's what you need to know--in Swedish, nouns are marked for both number (singular and plural) and grammatical gender. There two grammatical genders in Swedish--common and neuter. (I know, shouldn't that be masculine and feminine? Apparently not.)

Also in Swedish, if the antecedent is a subject of a sentence and the pronoun is within that sentence, then there is a special pronoun you have to use, sig. Sig doesn't change form for different antecedents. It's the same whether the noun is common, neuter, or plural.

Examples
Peter slog sig i huvudet.
'Peter hit himself in the head.'

Lotta slog sig i huvudet.
'Lotta hit herself in the head.'

Barnen slog sig i huvudet.
'The children hit themselves in the head.'

But, sig comes in many cases, including a genitive (possesive) case which does change form based on the gender or number, sin/sitt/sina, for common, neuter, and plural nouns respectively. But, the funny thing is, it doesn't agree with the antecedent. It agrees with the noun that it is the possessor of!

Examples

Max älsker sin mamma.
'Max loves his mother.'

Nora sover i sitt rum.
'Nora is sleeping in her room.'

Martin läser sina böcker.
'Martin is reading his books.'

So there you have it. Pronouns don't ALWAYS agree with their antecedents. At least not in every language. So it' not crazy to think the same may be true in English.

But clearly, sometimes they do. I mean "Mary loves himself" is not English. And that is why I don't like the normal narrative of freewheelin' descriptivism versus dour prescriptivism. Because there is something interesting to learn about pronouns, antecedents, and agreement in the world's languages and English in particular that just gets papered over if we just kick back and get the language party started.

N-word under attack in NYC

More in the continuing saga of the word nigger.

A Queens city councilman is on a mission to abolish the N-word.
Democrat Leroy Comrie is so disgusted by the rampant use of the racial epithet that he has submitted a resolution to the Council calling for the "symbolic moratorium on the use of the N-word in New York City."

"Stop using the N-word," Comrie (D-Jamaica) demanded yesterday. "It's racist, it's negative, it's demeaning. It boils my blood, the usage, even in a personal tone between people."

Comrie said the resolution will be formally introduced to the Council Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month.

"The timing is right," he said. "Monday is Martin Luther King's birthday. February is Black History Month."

French hope for peace in grammar wars

Ok here's another wacky idea from the French.

Knowledge of grammatical rules is not a constraint. It's an instrument for mastering language. So it is an instrument of freedom.

That's not what I heard.

To underscore how un-American grammar really is, Spellings reminded her audience that when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in a recent United Nations speech protesting American Middle East policy, the very next day the 1965 grammar book shot to the top of the charts at Amazon.com. “Those grammarians hate freedom,” she concluded.

Another round of Lingie nominations

We are constantly awash in faddish cliches and the latest buzz phrases. And, even though I'm no prescriptivist, the end of the year can be a good time to take out the trash. In that spirit, I introduce a new Lingie category, The Most Overused Sentence of 2006.
Here are my nominations:

1. This is your first warning.
2. Stop hitting your sister.
3. Do you have to go potty?
4. You can't have lemonade right before bedtime.

Pretty much every one on this list is a potential winner. I, for one, will be glad to say godd riddance to all of these overused sentences. So I know it's a hard decision, but vote now for your favorite Most Overused Sentence of 2006!

WSJ butters up RH Fiske, but why?

Joseph Epstein writes a loving article on Robert Hartwell Fiske of the Vocabula Review.
Oh, what's this?

Coming in the December issue of The Vocabula Review:
"Cleaning Up My Act" by Joseph Epstein

What the?

Of course Epstein completely mess up the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide.

The Vocabula Review is run on the prescriptivist principle that there are correct and incorrect uses of words; the descriptivists hold that any language used by the majority is automatically acceptable English. "Whatever!" might be the descriptivists' motto; "Not in my house you don't" that of the prescriptivists.

Um no. No.

Behind Mr. Fiske's continuing project is the idea that without careful language there can be no clear thought. Politicians, advertising copywriters, swindlers of differing styles and ambitions know this well and put it to their own devious uses. The rest of us too easily tend to forget this central truth. All words and phrases, to fall back on what I hope isn't a plebeian sentiment, are guilty until proved innocent.

Oh god, language-thought crap. This is where I check out.
Anyway, I'm glad we have these windbags around to keep us from using worn out cliches. Not!

Nora Raum can't take it anymore, but I can

Another language rant appears on Sunday's Weekend Edition (NPR).
Yes, Pop culture is hard on people who love words or grammar!
Hmm, I love words and grammar. Should I be upset? Not really.
I think pop culture is a great source of language data. I can hear all sorts of dialects and idosyncrasies . Stuff I can't hear just around my friends and family. It's a wonderful natural laboratory.
But, according to Nora this linguistics diversity is wrong for you and wrong for America.

It's important that people try to use language more carefully.

Why Nora, why?

Well it's important, that's why.

Oh.
Of course while complaining she also manages to mischaracterize the descriptive approach to language. (Is that a strawman Nora?)

Our language is an ever-changing thing. As long as we can communicate, so what?

No. No. No. You couldn't be more wrong.
Descriptivism isn't about feeling good about our language. It's not a self esteem exercise for non-standard speakers. It's about the scientific method.
Descriptivism asks questions about language--Why do we speak? How do kids learn language? Why do dialects differ? etc. And looks to answer those questions with naturalistic explanations.
Compare, for example, how the field of Astronomy handled the odd behaviour of Mars. Unlike all the other planets, Mars doesn't cut a nice West to East arc across the night sky when tracked from night to night. Instead it goes East for a little bit and then lurches back West and then heads back on it's arc eastward.
magine if astonomers decided that Mars is simply wrong. That it was the one recalcitrant, stupid planet that could never learn the proper way to move across the night sky. We'd really have advanced our knowledge of the solar system that way.
But astronomers didn't do that. Instead, they adjusted their theories about the planets (slowly, but they did adjust). And so we end up with the more correct heliocentric theory of the solar system. This theory not only describes the path of Mars, but explains why it makes this funny loop.
People like Nora Raum want to constrain our knowledge of language. They don't want us to ask questions about it. They don't want us to rethink anything. They don't want us to say, "why would someone confuse lie and lay?" Their theory of language already tells them why--these people are stupid. And questions about data can only lead to questions about their theory. So the only option left is to try to force everyone to conform to the behavior that their theory predicts. To eliminate the contradictory data.
Well, as my father-in-law used to say, "screw on you lady." I'd rather listen to people talk and hear data, then than listen to people talk and hear mistakes.

What I did in grad school

Last week I picked up Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. It’s an old one, but a good one. In it, he talks a little about how mathematicians are partially to blame for innumeracy.

“It is almost always possible to present an intellectually honest and engaging account of any field, using a minimal of technical apparatus. This is seldom done, however, since most priesthoods (mathematicians included) are inclined to hide behind a wall of mystery and to commune only with their fellow priests.”

I don’t think jargon is necessarily a way to hide away from the outside world. It’s got a lot of uses, but not recognizing that it exists is a barrier to communication with non-initiates. Personally, though, I just find it very hard to explain things I know very well to people and part of the problem is thinking you need to start at the very beginning.

Now that I’m out of academics, I spend a great deal of time with normal people. When someone asks me what I wrote my dissertation on, I usually just mumble something about long consonants in the world’s languages and look embarrassed. I feel like without explaining the general assumptions of generative grammar and then how phonology fits in there and then how Optimality Theory works not to mention the representation of segmental length (moraic theory), my dissertation makes no sense. A lot of the advice I’ve seen on research say that the core idea of your research should be explainable to non-technical audience. I’ve never been able to get a hang of this skill.

Maybe I’m just slow, because lately I think I know what to say. Here’s my attempt.

There is good evidence that the brain uses very economical representations to store information about sounds in language. For example, in languages that have them, long consonants are basically twice as long as short ones—when someone says a word with a long consonant they hold the consonant twice as long as they would a short one. So, there are two possible ways the brain could represent them. They could be two short consonants put together or they one consonant that is marked “long.”

Suppose you use the symbol t to represent a short t sound. Then a long t sound could be made by two t’s in a row (tt) or one t that is somehow marked as being “long” (like t:).

All of the data from languages point to t: being the right representation. That is, human brains say, “don’t use two symbols to represent a sound when you can use one.”

How do we state this generalization in our model of how linguistics knowledge is stored in our brains? Some models just flat-out say, “don’t use two symbols when you can use one.” My dissertation showed that every component of the model has to be constructed so that none of them prefer two symbols to one. Which ends up being quite tricky. And we have to wonder if this is just a property of consonants.

I’d appreciate it if you could let me know if this is understandable or not. And if you want to read the gory details you can go here.

Rivers, creeks, and runs

I'm blogging from Pennsylvania right now. I'm visiting my brother in Pottstown. On the drive down I was reminded about one of the lexical differences between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania we have creeks. They're bigger than streams, but smaller than rivers. The only rivers I knew growing up were the Delaware and the Schuylkill. In New Jersey, they have "rivers" like the Saddle river, the Black river, and the Ramapo river that are no bigger than the creeks in Pennsylvania. And They have rivers like the Passaic, the Raritan, and the Hudson which are obviously bigger. They don't have no creeks. For really small bodies of moving water, they call them runs. Pennsylvanians might call them streams. I'm not sure what the lower size limit for creeks is.

Anyway, I guess that in the culture of Pennsylvanians movng water is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in New Jersey into several distinct classes. We see moving bodies of water differently than those poor lexically impoverished New Jerseyans with only rivers and runs.

More fun with "scare" quotes

The independent pharmacy in my town has a sign up reassuring customers that they do indeed have "Italian" Easter cards. I wonder if they keep them behind the counter.

Sarcasm discovered in 1967

A few years ago I started my first corporate job. I learned a lot of new things in switching from academia. For example, it was the first time I came into contact with corporate trainers. One of the training sessions I was in was something like “communication skills”. After filling out our Myers-Briggs horoscopes and being successfully pigeonholed, we moved on to the following exciting factoid:

“Did you know that 55% of communication is body language, 38% tone of voice and only 7% the content of the words you use?”

This communication myth is pervasive in corporate circles and on the web. I was surprised to find out that these numbers were not just made up on the spot, like 83% of all statistics. Instead, they come from two articles in psychology journals:

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S.R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31, 248-252.

Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 109-114.

So could this be true? Not quite.

Mehrabian & Weiner 1967
The goal of the study was to measure the subject’s perception of the attitude of a speaker towards her listener. They recruited two female speakers and recorded them each speaking 9 words under 3 different intonational conditions:

• Liking, high evaluation, or preference


• A neutral attitude, neither liking nor disliking


• An attitude of disliking, low evaluation, or lack of preference

The 9 words were brute, dear, don’t, honey, maybe, oh, really, terrible, and thanks. The researchers divided them into three classes, those that have a positive affect, neutral affect, and negative affect.

Positive: dear, honey, thanks

Neutral: maybe, really, oh

Negative: brute, don’t, terrible

The speakers were directed to “say the words, irrespective of contents, in such a way as to convey an attitude of respectively, towards the target person” (Mehrabian & Weiner 1967).

Subjects were asked to rate what they thought the attitude of the speaker toward her listener was using a 7-point scale ranging from -3 (most negative) to +3 (most positive). One group of subjects was directed to only pay attention to the content of the words. A second group was directed to only pay attention to how the words said (the tone). And a third group was directed to pay attention to all the available information.

Not surprisingly, in the “content only” condition, people rated the speaker’s attitude according to the affect of the word. So a negative affect word like don’t was significantly more likely to be perceived as showing a negative attitude. In the “tone only” condition there was also a significant effect of tone. However, in the “use all information” condition people tended to ignore the content of the word and judge the speaker by how they said it. So a positive word like honey would be perceived as giving a negative attitude if spoken in a negative tone.

Mehrabian & Ferris 1967
This was a similar study that was intended to measure the interaction of facial expressions and tone on perception of speaker attitude. The single “neutral” word maybe was used. Three speakers said the word with three different intended attitudes towards the listener. The researchers also took photos of the three speakers as they tried to show like, dislike or neutrality. The subjects then listened to the different examples of maybe crossed with the pictures. The subjects were asked to rate the attitude of the speaker towards the listener on the same 7 point scale as in the Mehrabian & Weiner study.

Again, not surprisingly, the analysis showed significant effects of both the facial expression and tone. Mehrabian and Ferris did a regression analysis to determine the relative contributions of these two components to the total measured attitude. Here’s the formula they came up with:

AT = 1.50AF + 1.03AV

In there discussion of the results they propose to combine them with the results in the Mehrabian & Weiner study. This is when they come up with the 7%, 38%, 5% stuff:

It is suggested that the combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal, and facial attitude communications is a weighted sum of their independent effects—with the coeeficients of .07, .38, and .55 respectively (page 252

Discussion
Clearly the two limited studies do not give us anything like the broad claim I heard form the corporate trainer. At best, they show that when it comes to how you are going to be perceived by someone, your tone of voice and facial expressions are important—that is, they discovered sarcasm.

To be fair, Mehrabian acknowledges the limitations on these results. See his web page:

Inconsistent communications -- the relative
importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. My findings on this topic have
received considerable attention in the literature and in the popular media.
"Silent Messages" contains a detailed discussion of my findings on inconsistent
messages of feelings and attitudes (and the relative importance of words vs.
nonverbal cues) on pages 75 to 80.
Total
Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking
Please note that this and other equations
regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from
experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e.,
like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or
attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

Wrathful Dispersion

From the ADS-L:

The Wrathful Dispersion controversy: A Canadian perspective

      Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether "Wrathful Dispersion Theory," as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics. It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum—a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.
  The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. When asked in court to speculate about the possible identity of the disperser, Michael Moringa, a prominent proponent of WD, demurred, saying that the theory makes no claims about the answer to that question, and that it certainly does not insist that the Disperser is the God of Genesis. Moringa has, however, elsewhere avowed a deep personal belief in the Christian God as the power responsible, as have other WD theorists. Indeed, there appear to be no atheists in the foxholes on the WD side of this war, and for that matter, no Jews or Muslims, either; the WD movement is composed almost exclusively of evangelical Protestants.
  Wrathful Dispersion appears to owe a great deal of its tenacity to its steadfast refusal to offer specific answers to just about any question. Unlike "young-tongue" Babelism, WD makes no claim as to precisely when the great dispersion took place; faced with evidence of distinct languages reaching back for several thousands of years, the proponents of WD simply say that, well, the dispersion must have occurred prior to that. In the early days of evolutionary linguistics, Babelists used to taunt French-speaking evolutionists with cries of "Your father was a Roman!" WD, by contrast, acknowledges that languages can indeed change over time, and some Wrathful Dispersionists even concede that modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and so on may actually have developed from Latin after all. The existence of Latin itself, however, and its mutual unintelligibility with, say, Old Church Slavonic or Proto-Bantu, could only have arisen through the wrath of the disperser. When asked to provide evidence for the existence of a single global language in pre-dispersion times, they reply that of course no such evidence can be found, because the disperser in his wrath was quite careful to obliterate all traces of it.
  In lieu of offering any evidence for their own proposal, most Wrathful Dispersionists prefer to devote their energy to attacking the evolutionary approach to historical linguistics, which they generally refer to as Grimmism. Much of their animus is directed against the lone figure of Jakob Grimm, whom they depict as having made up the idea of linguistic evolution off the top of his head, and they delight in pointing out novel "exceptions" to Grimm's Law, such as the fact that English has the word paternal where Grimm's Law obviously predicts fathernal. The evolutionists respond that paternal was a later borrowing into English from Latin, to which the Wrathful Dispersionists reply triumphantly, "So your trees and waves can't explain everything!"
  Perhaps paradoxically, proponents of WD have also been known, at times, to play up the religious aspect of their theory when it suits them. The suppression of their ideas about the origin of languages, they have been heard to complain, is tantamount to religious persecution, but at the same time they insist that the use of the public school systems to propagate those ideas would not in any way violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One cynical observer has likened WD to Scientology, which "is a religion for purposes of tax assessment, a science for purposes of propaganda, and a work of fiction for purposes of copyright."
  Wrathful Dispersionists are also fond of pointing out gaps in the written record, noting that there is no physical evidence of different languages dating back any earlier than five thousand years ago, a date which is suggestively close to the one commonly attributed to the Tower of Babel by biblical literalists. The bulk of their case against evolutionism, though, is based on the notion of irreducible perversity. For example, they argue that the sheer alienness of Basque—its apparent lack of any resemblance to any other living language—could only have come about by deliberate, wrathful (and, the Babelists would add, divine) intervention. Similarly, they claim that the notorious "ruki rule" in Sanskrit (/s/ becomes retroflex in the environment of /r/, /u/, /k/, or /i/—a "calculatedly chaotic conglomeration comprising two vowels, a rhotic, and a surd") is so arbitrary and so confusing that it must have been the conscious invention of someone who was absolutely determined that Sanskrit should be thoroughly incomprehensible to native speakers of any other language, such as Finnish.
  Most evolutionists have been reluctant to dignify WD by arguing
against it, although a few have pointed out that while evolutionary models make a few wrong predictions, WD makes no predictions whatsoever, and others have taken on the ruki rule question, pointing to the feature [+high] as a potential means of herding the offending segments into a natural class. Much of the public opposition to WD, however, has come in the form of parody. In particular, a satirical Web-based grassroots pseudo-cult has grown up around the theory that all modern languages were in fact "shat out of the arse of the Flying Stratificational Grammar Monster," with adherents claiming to have achieved enlightenment upon being "touched by His Boolean Appendage" or "washed in the blood of Sydney Lamb."
  From where I sit in the Great White North, the whole debate looks more than a little silly, but there is still a considerable measure of unease among Canadian linguists. The new year will bring to Canada an election and a new government, and there is a non-negligible chance that that government will be formed by the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, who has already shown himself not to be averse to reopening questions that many of us believed to have been closed for good. Will Canada, too, soon find itself debating the merits of Wrathful Dispersion, and asking its judges to map the boundary between religion and linguistic science? Only time will tell.