Spotted on Tumblr

If y'all aren't on Tumblr, by the way, you are missing out. It's the internet the way it was meant to be.

ANYWAY.

A German Tumblrist asks why Americans are so obsessed over "whether something is a word." Why are we like this, they want to know. They're talking about how certain speakers of American English get angry when a dictionary includes words like 'ain't' or 'irregardless.' Why? Why? they demand. Those aren't real words!

As a professor of the language, I have the answer to this question: It's because Americans love any excuse at all to be a bigot. 

I used to teach History of the English Language as well as English Grammar and one of the things I had to teach my students was that their "correct" English was a dialect of English, like any other dialect of English. It wasn't "better" than African American Vernacular English, or Bronx English, or Mississippi English, or working class East Coast English.

That is to say, Standard American English (what they counted as 'correct' English) does not communicate its meaning any better than, say, AAVE. In fact, in some ways, SAE communicates less well -- AAVE is really good at communicating aspect with its verbs, for example, which SAE mostly ignores. 

(I remember when I was first studying Greek. Greek verbs also pay a lot of attention to aspect, and my entire class could not wrap their heads about what this mean -- for us, 'perfect' was just another sort of  past tense, and what even was aorist? Raised speaking SAE, this was a concept we had real trouble grasping.)

Why then do so many people believe that SAE is "real" and everything else is 'slang' or ignorant or not even actually English? 

Because it lets them feel superior. It allows them to look down on some group -- to be bigoted in a way that feels approved of by their culture.

Let me tell you, I too used to wince when someone said something like, "I have already ate," or "Mom took Tim and I to the state fair last week." That was before I actually knew something about how language works. Now I find these regional difference -- like "Anymore you can't find eggs for less than ten dollars a dozen" -- fascinating.

Anyway! My point, and I do have one, is that anything which communicates meaning is language. For example, I love saying things like "irregardless" and "ain't" and "we might could finish this tomorrow," just to jar people a bit.

"Ain't?" they will exclaim. "Irregardless? Those aren't words!"

"But you know what it means," I point out. "If I say, I ain't eating no more pie, you know exactly what I mean, irregardless of what you claim."

And they do. So why does this upset them, someone with a PhD who says irregardless? 

It's cognitive dissonance. They know I'm educated, they know they can't treat me like trash, and what does that mean about this thing they have been counting on, that their ability to speak SAE means they're better than people who say things like "I seen her at Walmart"?

It's like people who think being an American makes them better than people in other places. When they find out that people in other places actually have good lives, and are good people, some of them better lives than many Americans in fact, cognitive dissonance. It was the one way they could feel superior. Now what do they have?

See also people who think that being a certain religion, or having a certain skin color, or being a certain gender makes them 'better.' When anyone suggests otherwise -- that tantrum they throw, that's cognitive dissonance. If they don't have this way of being superior to other people, then what do they have?

I mean, they could accept that being superior to other people isn't something they need, or even should want, but it takes a great deal more enlightenment than most of them will ever have to come to that realization.