Goodbye to California, pt. 1

Shortly after my acquiescent post on the constant rejection one faces applying for full-time ESL jobs, I got an email curiously positive in nature and free of formulaic boilerplate. I had gotten so used to rejection that I almost didn’t comprehend it at first – but it was an invitation to interview, something I had gotten just a few times in the years since my MA. And after that first interview on Skype, I got another such email from the same place, inviting me for a campus visit. When the date came in late May, after I made sure my grading for the weekend was already done, I boarded a plane at John Wayne Airport at 4 AM and spent the whole day in a state besides the one that I have lived in since returning to the US in 2016.

Now, I was breathing such rarefied air at this point that I felt zero pressure to succeed, happy to plant my flag at the “second interview” stage before what I assumed would be a quick descent back down to solid adjunct ground. This was a Monday. I had classes again at my usual schools on Tuesday and plenty of proctoring and grading to do after that to help push the entire episode into the past tense – I was already imagining the conversations I would have in the break room at all the same schools next semester about the time I came this close to getting a full-time position.

But as a call a few days later informed me, I did get it, and very soon after this post goes up, I’ll be starting my first classes there.

By crazy when-it-rains-it-pours coincidence, this was the 2nd full-time job offer I took this year – although the first was a contract only for the summer. That job, which just ended, has given me a bit of a sneak preview of my life as a full-time teacher in a context other than Californian community colleges. I thought I would share a bit of my reflections here, both as a document of my thoughts for myself and as a guide for other adjuncts hoping to do something similar.

Adjunct Goodbyes and Full-time Goodbyes

I’m excited about my new job, but I do have a few regrets about leaving the colleges where I teach now. One of those regrets is that I did many things for the last time at my main schools without realizing they were the last times. I had my last norming meeting (and I enjoy those), my last walk with a student between the classroom and the lab to show them where it is, and my last unexpectedly long pause while the projector warms up, all without knowing that I would never do those things there again. I saw a bunch of people in passing in a hallway or copy room and said some simple words of greeting or an inside joke not realizing that those were the last times I’d be doing that with those people. Not to strike too melodramatic a tone, but for the most part these were the first workplace acquaintances I made in California, and they witnessed my whole process of getting my feet wet, asking silly or obvious questions really politely (“Sorry if this is obvious to everyone here but me, but what is an SLO?”). I will probably like my new coworkers – teachers are usually nice – but they won’t be my first coworkers in the US. I have a lot of words of thanks to go around, but I won’t be specific here. If we spent more than one microwave’s cooking time together, I appreciated it.

There are a few students who had let me know that they wanted to sign up for my fall classes with whom I’m not holding up my end of the bargain. This makes me feel a bit guilty, as does the fact that I won’t be able to wave or chat to former students that I see around campus, but both of these are a bit of an unnatural extension of the teacher-student relationship, which formally has a lifespan of one semester. The same goes for quite a few “single-serving friends” I made in break and copy rooms, for whom the loss isn’t of a deep friendship but just the potential for a longer one of whatever quality it was for 30 minutes a week while we both ate Amy’s frozen burritos. I got some kind words from my now-former coworkers, but of course the definition of an “adjunct” is something inessential to the major workings of whatever it’s part of. At any school with adjuncts, some portion of instructors and students will have the experience of suddenly not having a colleague or teacher on campus anymore every semester. I suppose part of my newbieness that never wore off was expecting to know when that time was coming for me.

(OK, I will single out for thanks 4 people whose initials are G.P., R.B., C.C., and B.W. who saw me at my most newbieish and imparted some very important and well-timed advice. Shucks, also my most frequent collaborators H.L. and D.P.. Also all my SIs.)

On the other hand, at my full-time summer job, we all knew pretty well from at least mid-June that I would be gone, and the program exists solely so that students matriculate out of it and into another program. The goodbyes here had pomp and ritual and lots of tears. People act differently when they know things are ending, and the entire last day of work was dedicated to ceremonial closing of the program, complete with thank-you cards being exchanged, speeches, skits, musical performances by every combination of students and teachers, and a lovely banquet to top it off. It was the best way to conclude a summer program and my time in California, with some really excellent people.

The lesson here, I guess, is to know as much as possible when you’re heading into a round of goodbyes.

More to come later.

Theistic Performatives

I spent some time talking about performativity with a content-based class this summer, in both the linguistic “I now pronounce you man and wife” sense and the Butlerian “gender is created through its performance” sense. I didn’t anticipate to find the principle illustrated in the responses to two mass shootings in the days after our class ended, in the usual round of “thoughts and prayers” (sometimes in those words exactly and sometimes in other words as the original phrasing has become a bit of a cliché) being offered for the victims.

To be precise, he describes “thoughts and prayers” as a feigned interaction rather than as a performative utterance.

(To be clear, although this post is about language, I think the news and the banal responses are horrifying. This is a topic for a separate post, but you can always count on an ESL teacher not to buy arguments based on national exceptionalism – they seem more ridiculous the more of them you encounter.)

Taking steps in class

I mean this literally. I got a Fitbit last year, and during the spring semester, I tracked how many steps I took during an average of 5 class sessions of each of the 3 courses that I taught.

My classes were a content-based IEP class with 13 students, a mixed-skills intermediate-level credit community college ESL class with 21 students, and an advanced ESL writing class with 25 students.

Across 5 class sessions, the average number of steps total for each class was:

• Content-based IEP: 236
• Intermediate CC: 626
• Adv. writing CC: 440

Of course, since the class sessions were of different lengths, it makes sense to divide the number of steps by the number of minutes in which I had to take them.

Steps per minute of class time, including breaks:

• Content-based IEP: 2.63 steps per minute
• Intermediate CC: 2.78 steps per minute
• Adv. writing CC: 1.96 steps per minute

Last, because higher numbers of students might feasibly require the teacher to move more and farther around the classroom, here are the steps per minute further divided by the numbers of enrolled students:

• Content-based IEP: 0.20 steps per minute per enrolled student
• Intermediate CC: 0.13 steps per minute per enrolled student
• Adv. writing CC: 0.08 steps per minute per enrolled student

What does this tell me?

I tended to walk around more, all other things being equal, in the content-based class. I attribute this to the type of work they typically did – small group discussions in which I would move from group to group and either guide the discussion, participate as an equal, or just listen. The other two classes, at community college, usually involved at least some “lecturing”, standing relatively still or sitting at the computer and typing notes projected onto a screen.

I think my classes could benefit from structuring more lessons around small group work rather than lectures to begin with. As it turns out, a further benefit might be that it helps me reach my fitness goals.

Lecture disincentivization tool. (source)

Unfactives

As with the same class last semester, and as happens to me often, I have been spurred to blog by an unusual utterance by a student, or should I say an utterance which in its non-target-likeness highlights an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

Some verbs, like “know”, say something about the mind of the subject of the sentence as well as the mind of the sentence’s speaker. That is, if Kim says, “Eva knows that 3 students will fail the class”, not only Eva but also Kim believes that the proposition “3 students will fail the class” is true. If Kim believes that Eva is wrong about those 3 students, she will probably choose a different verb, like “believe” or “think”, because if Kim says “Eva thinks that 3 students will fail the class”, she avoids giving the impression that she agrees with Eva.

(It’s an interesting question how many clauses deep these verbs have to be before the speaker is no longer presumed to agree with the proposition. For example, if Laura thinks that Kim believes that Eva knows that 3 students will fail the class, is it implied that Laura agrees? Does the factivity of “know” leap out of its clause and infect every person in the sentence, or does one non-factive verb break the chain? I tend to think that if Laura heard a sentence like “Eva knows that 3 students will fail”, but thinks she’s wrong, she’ll change the verb to a non-factive one in relaying that information to someone else.)

As you see from my aside, these verbs are called factive. In short, they imply that the content of noun clause that follows is factual. “Know” is one of these, as are “understand”, “realize”, “prove”, and “remember”.

The error that I saw that inspired this post was the opposite: a verb being used to imply that the content of the noun clause was false, as in “deny”, “disbelieve”, and “doubt”, which all mean that the subject believes or says that the proposition that follows is false. These words, unlike factive verbs, don’t presuppose that the speaker agrees. When the newspaper says, “Dems doubt that Trump will leave willingly”, the newspaper isn’t taking the position that they are right about him. The newspaper is simply relaying the Dems’ state of mind.

(Confusingly for Japanese learners of English, “doubt”, 疑う utagau in Japanese implies that the subject has a sneaking suspicion that the proposition is true, rather than false as it is in English. Another strike against grammar-translation.)

The error that I saw used a factive verb with a negative prefix and was followed by a noun clause that the writer intended to say was false. It was something like “Many people misunderstand that the earth is flat”. The writer, as I understood it, was trying to say that many people believe that the earth is flat, but they are wrong. This left me sitting and re-reading the sentence for a few minutes as I tried to figure out just what seemed so strange about it. I did my customary COCA search and found a relative lack of noun clauses after “misunderstand” compared to “understand”, validating some of my intuition, but it didn’t give me an answer as to why.

One factor that occurred to me is that “deny”, “disbelieve”, and “doubt” still leave the proposition standing on its own two feet epistemologically. They don’t bring up the proposition and in the same breath invalidate it – they just say that the subject disagrees with it. It is still free to exist as a proposition and be believed by other subjects. It seemed perverse to me that “misunderstand” would have a noun clause following it that was presupposed even by the speaker to be false.

As I was typing this though, I remembered “disprove”, which shares with “misunderstand” a factive root and a negative prefix. To my understanding, “disprove” is a true unfactive – if I say “Einstein disproved that matter and energy are distinct”, I am also stating my agreement with Einstein. If we accept the premise that some propositions are true and others are false, the above sentence can only be true if the proposition contained in it (“matter and energy are distinct”) is false. Therefore, the combination of negative suffix with factive verb to mean “the noun clause following this verb is definitely not true” cannot be the source of the strangeness of “misunderstand that…”

Another factor may be that unlike “deny”, “disbelieve”, and “doubt”, and even “disprove”, the speaker’s and the subject’s opinions of the truth of the proposition in “misunderstand” are different. When “Trump disbelieves that” his approval ratings are low, Trump believes that the proposition is false, and the speaker doesn’t take a position on it. When “Einstein disproves that” matter and energy are distinct, Einstein and the speaker agree. However, in my student’s usage of “misunderstand”, the speaker and the subject definitely disagree. “Trump misunderstands that millions of illegals voted”, in my student’s usage, means that Trump believes it, but he is wrong. In my limited exploration of this issue, this is the only case where the speaker uses a verb to imply both that the speaker believes the proposition and that the proposition is false.

Perhaps for an unfactive verb to make sense, as “disprove” does, it has to say not only that the proposition is false, but that the subject is right that the proposition is false. Anything else is uncromulent.

Bonanza of Correlations, Spring 2019 Edition, part 2

Lower Intermediate Mixed Skills

This course is a bit of a chimera – ostensibly a pre-requisite for transfer-level writing, but in practice very similar to free adult education courses. Students are quite open about this, and the extraneousness of the course in light of the growing AESL program is part of the reason that it will no longer be offered in the fall (in addition to a law passed in CA mandating that community colleges move ESL students up to transfer level writing within 3 years). On the other hand, it’s the course that I’ve taught in at this school the longest, and I have a sentimental attachment to it. In light of that, it might not be all that useful to be combing over my curriculum for areas of potential improvement, but I still want to see what I did right and what I did wrong.

Bonanza of Correlations, Spring 2019 Edition, part 1

Advanced Academic Writing

This class is one level below transfer, which is kind of a big deal within ESL – students who pass this class are supposed to be able to hang with native-speaking teenagers in English 100 (Writing 1, English 1A, Humanities 101, or whatever your university calls it). This is the first time I’ve taught this class, and in doing my usual round of end-of-the-semester spreadsheets I’m mostly interested in what kinds of homework assignments predict overall grades, which in turn are (presumably) a good measure of English reading and writing ability. This will help me to choose assignments that are really worth doing to assign in the coming semesters and weight them appropriately.

It’s no surprise that in a writing class, writing assignments end up composing a large part of the final grade. But which writing assignments are the best predictors of the scores of all the others? To figure this out, I normalized each score (0 to 1, so some assignments don’t end up more predictive just because they were worth a lot of points), added them all up, and compared how much each individual one correlated with the total. The highest correlation is the assignment with the most predictive power for writing scores overall. This assignment turned out to be……….

Things language teachers know #3 – competence =/= performance =/= intelligence

(For part 1 or part 2 of this series, scroll waaaaay down to 2016.)

We had something of a popularity contest in the US in 2016 between a very comfortable public speaker and a slightly stiff one. Depending on one’s prior feelings or biases, the former may have looked either charismatic or puffed up, and the latter may have looked duplicitous or booksmart.

For a casual viewer, it could sometimes seem that the comfortable speaker simply knew his stuff better, which resulted in his greater comfort communicating that knowledge to large numbers of people. He projected confidence, which encouraged trust. For people not actually listening to the words he used, it was easy and tempting to consider the self-assured speaker a more experienced, able leader, who had earned his confidence through ability and experience. He didn’t choose his words carefully, but his ease on stage seemed as if it might have come from years of being tested and winning. The careful speaker always seemed to have to work a little too hard to find words that sounded right, and therefore felt dishonest – or worse, scheming – to many.

For people who were listening to (or reading) the content of the message rather than the delivery, it was practically irresistable to come to the opposite conclusion; that the stiff, careful speaker chose her words to reflect her nuanced, well-informed thoughts, which naturally didn’t come pouring forth like a river but in precisely measured portions. Meanwhile, the confident speaker’s spell was thoroughly broken on the page. Instead of a freewheeling and charming salesman, his words seemed like those of a buggy machine translator working with Nike slogans in Armenian.

Throughout the campaign and to the present day, it has been a constant joke that President Trump’s speech patterns reflect a lazy and uneducated mind. And while it may be true that he is lazy and uneducated (as opposed to unschooled), the evidence for this is not to be found in his basic speech patterns. As language teachers (and everyone reading this is probably a language teacher), we shouldn’t condone criticism of him or anyone else that is based on the premise that verbal performance is a reliable measure of intellect.

Source. It’s probably true that Obama picked up some good public speaking skills as a result of his education – but not everyone educated learns to speak in public. Do we really want to preclude from the Presidency anyone who didn’t take Debate in school?

It is a truth that is especially evident to language teachers that the sophistication of one’s thoughts and the sophistication of one’s verbal ability can differ widely. There are people who have chunks of academic circumlocution constantly at the ready to bring to bear on topics that they have no particular expertise in. There are also people whose words never quite build a substantial enough bridge for their weighty ideas to cross. Our entire occupation is based on mismatch between our students’ intellects and their communication abilities. If one reliably predicted the other, we wouldn’t need language as a separate subject at all. This is particularly true in ELT (my field), but all language teachers from speech pathologists to teachers of creative writing courses in college know that sophisticated thoughts are no guarantee of sophisticated expressive ability.

It’s also important to keep in mind that abstract linguistic competence doesn’t always manifest in perfect form in real-world situations. There can be quite a bit of “noise” between the language that exists in a person’s head and what escapes from their mouth in a high-pressure situation like an interview on 60 Minutes or an address that will be heard by millions. The presence of a threat, the need to present oneself a particular way to particular people, a time limit, or conversely, great self-confidence can disrupt or enhance linguistic performance. As language teachers, we have workarounds or accommodations to the phenomenon of performances not always matching competence – reducing the number of observers, trying to gather a sample for evaluation unobtrusively, allowing students with anxiety disorders to skip certain portions of the test, etc. It should be no surprise to us to that a politician’s verbal performance isn’t a reliable measure of their linguistic competence, or of course that their linguistic competence isn’t a reliable measure of their intelligence.

Some criticisms (that is, almost all criticisms) of the current President are valid and if anything understated. But we should know better than to attack him for his way of talking. Obviously, this goes 10x for his wife, who seems to be, like him, far too small a person for their historical moment, but is also unfairly criticized for just sounding strange.

Source.

Again – there is plenty of other evidence that Trump is incurious and ignorant. There’s no need to insult most of our students by implication just to make that point.

Corpus Family Feud

Since I started teaching community college ESL, I’ve set aside at least one class period in all my writing classes to teach students how to use COCA and the other BYU corpora, but I struggled for a long time to incorporate it in an intuitive way into my intermediate multi-skill classes. I think its utility is clear, but the interface (computer literacy can be a problem) and baseline metalinguistic knowledge necessary just to use it have thus far stopped me from making it a regular feature. I do, however, have one activity that uses corpora (either COCA or iWeb) that is reliably entertaining and useful for classes of any level. I call it Corpus Family Feud.

Like the real Family Feud (a TV game show, for those of you outside the US and non-fans of SNL), the point is for participants to guess the most common answers to a survey question. Unlike the real Family Feud, the questions are specifically concerned with language use, and the “survey” is of corpus data rather than 100 people randomly by phone.

Also like the real Family Feud, it’s the studio’s (i.e., the teacher’s) job to prepare the questions and collate the survey answers beforehand, and then reveal them to the participants after they have made guesses.

The basic steps are:

1. Before class, prepare sentences with one or more blanks, and then find the most common words that fill those blanks according to corpus data. 3-5 total sentences for one session seems to be a good rule of thumb to keep interest high throughout the activity.
2. Also before class, prepare a slideshow (I use Google Slides) that features the sentence with blanks, directions for what kinds of words go in the blanks, and the answers in list form. The answers should be set to be invisible when the slide loads and appear on subsequent clicks.
3. During class time, announce that you are playing a game, and display the slide with the first sentence. Tell explicitly what kinds of words can be used to fill in the blank, and tell in general terms that you found the top 5 words that people actually use to fill in that blank in their real communication in the real world.
4. Have students write down the top 5 words that they think fill that blank in the real world. Announce that they will get 1 point for each of their answers that is actually in the top 5. Tell them also that it doesn’t matter which order they put them in; they get 1 point for any answer that was in the top 5.
5. After a few minutes, announce that you will start displaying the answers. Drum roll and display the first answer. Students will probably applaud, shriek, or say, “ohhhhh”. Remind them to keep track of how many points they have as you continue drum rolling and displaying the answers in sequence.
6. After you’ve displayed every answer, ask the students who has 3 points, 4 points, or 5 points until you figure out who the winner is. Give the winner a piece of candy or some other gold star-equivalent. Repeat with the next sentence.

As a variation, you can choose 5 words in advance, display them when you display the sentence, and ask the students to put them in order. This allows you to choose words other than the true top 5 according to corpora (which are often boring words that nobody ever thinks of, like “be” or “doing”), but requires you to give points only for correct order of words rather than giving points for any word that appears in the actual list.

For example, let’s say your intermediate multi-skill class is covering gerunds (I mean “covering” as in it came up for one reason or another, whether as a front-loaded chapter of a synthetic syllabus or as focus on form after a task). You might decide on a few chunks where gerunds are commonly used, like “I enjoy ___” or “____ is important”. These would be the questions for your game. Your slides might look like this:

I really ought to make this look more game show-like…

I display the frequencies, but this is probably unnecessary. In the variation where you supply the words, it might look like this:

Where only the ranking and frequency numbers appear on click and the words are displayed from the beginning.

Other variations I have used in the past look like this:

There is almost literally no end to the kinds of phrases or grammar you can use to play this game. Besides an excuse to use corpora in a mid-level class, this helps turn what could be an abstract grammar lesson into one that respects chunking and the conventions, rather than just the rules, of language. Have fun!

Virtue Signalling, feigned interactions, and In-N-Out

“Virtue signalling” has sort of become this generation’s “politically correct”, a term of abuse for supposedly vacuous public communication by the political left. Much like political correctness, it actually describes something universal across political groups, and use of the term is itself is an example of the phenonemon it describes (i.e., calling something out as “virtue signalling” is a way of virtue signalling to one’s peers, much like decrying “political correctness” is a literally politically correct thing to do in certain circles).

Certain kinds of virtue signalling consist of messages ostensibly sent to the out-group, actually meant for the in-group to see, where the appearance of communication with the out-group is an important part of the real message. The real act of communication seems to be, “Look at me, trying to talk to these savages! That’s how committed I am to our cause!” Unfortunately, a lot of political communication these days really consists of ostentatious displays of self-sacrifice to one’s own tribe, where the sacrifice lies in having to tolerate communication with members of the other tribe.

I’ve covered this ground before, but have a few new insights:

1. The proportion of apparent communication between tribes which is really feigned communication designed for consumption by members of one’s tribe may be increasing
2. Some communities place a higher value on communication with out-groups than others, perversely raising the likelihood that it is feigned

The first is just a result of the increasing siloing of discourse; communities have more opportunities for self-selection with cable news and social media than any other time in history. Few conservatives watch MSNBC, and fewer liberals watch Fox News. Odds are, when you see a commentator or guest that appears to be ideologically opposed to the main viewership of whichever cable news network you are watching, you are seeing a feigned communication in which the fact that the host is trying hard to “reach the other side” is the real message of value, and that message is solely intended for his or her own political tribe. Any bonafides that the heel commentator may possess only serve to increase the value and validity of the real message. This has been true of talk radio and conservative commentary since at least the days of Wally George, but the fact that any subculture can now have a facebook group or YouTube channel all its own makes the incentive for in-group signalling so much more valuable than genuine out-group communication that a high proportion of fake out-group communication is inevitable.

The second was brought to my attention by my wife, who asked me what the “Revelation 3:20” on the bottom of our In-N-Out burger wrapper meant. She had heard that In-N-Out food comes with Bible verses written discreetly somewhere on the packaging, but still couldn’t decode this apparent combination of TOEFL vocabulary and time of day. It hadn’t occurred to me that In-N-Out’s Bible verses could also be an example of feigned communication, but of course I grew up in a household that at least pretended to think that church was important and hadn’t thought of how opaque something like “Nahum 1:7” (on the bottom of a Double-Double) looks to someone raised without any exposure to the Bible. A straightforward interpretation of the presence of these phrases is that to Christians, this is like whispering a codeword, a message which shows insider knowledge and expertise, while to non-Christians, it is pretty much indistinguishable from “Xanthan Gum”. If that were the sum of its meanings to both groups, it would be either straightforward in-group communication or simply failed communication rather than feigned communication. However, I doubt the owners of In-N-Out, conservative Christians though they are, would waste ink telling fellow Christians something they already knew or giving non-Christians the equivalent of a Dewey Decimal number to look up. They might instead be communicating something to their fellow Christians besides literal Bible verses – they are communicating the fact that they are trying to reach non-Christians, a message with special currency among evangelical Christians. Seen this way, the use of Bible verses makes more sense – it is vastly more important to put the message in an emic form that Christians recognize, since they are the true recipients of the message, than in a form that non-Christians would, since they are only the feigned recipients. In a community where outreach is a core value, feigned communication with out-groups is an especially tempting form of in-group signalling, and although I haven’t been to church in many, many years, I suspect feigned communication with non-Christians is pretty common. I noticed feigned communication first in Japan, but clearly this type of feigned communication takes place in other groups with similar ways of defining themselves.

Source. Hard to believe this was ever questioned.

Not meaning what you mean

When a colleague in ESL or English answers “how are you?” With “I’m well”, I always think the substitution of “well” for “good” is a bit like pulling rank. It’s the linguistic equivalent of casually mentioning that you’d “been praying about something” or commenting on the gluten content of foods that your neighbor is eating – the invocation of a hierarchy that you know the you place yourself highly on, and everyone else lower. I do not accept the premise of that hierarchy (nor the others that I mentioned), but explaining that point is another long conversation that ends up making me look like the pedant.

Often, I find that in these conversations the core of the misunderstanding (from my perspective) is that there is a correct way to use words and that the speaker is showing off that he knows it.

There’s a switch in my mind that keeps flipping back and forth between annoyance and acquiescence at people’s tendency to talk about words this way – as if they had “true” or “original” meanings clear as day to prudent and thoughtful individuals (like the speaker), but which idiots (like you) are prone to getting wrong.

You see this most clearly nowadays in the Princess Bride meme, which always goes something like the following:

(can you believe Inigo Montoya and Saul Berenson on Homeland are the same actor?)

You might see this idea that words contain meanings which fluent speakers are capable of getting wrong (in its Princess Bride form or otherwise) deployed a variety of ways (here is one), but usually to condescend to someone and argue against their position ad hominem – the implication being that someone who is so slipshod with words must be mentally deficient in general. It also has a general-purpose use, outside of any particular argument, to serve as an in-group signifier. In these cases, the person complaining about other people’s poor language use is asserting his or her status as a “correct” language user. A knight of the old code, if you will, a defender of the faith.

The idea (that words contain true meanings which fluent speakers can be wrong about) behind this meme is clearly wrong, and no one who ever heard the words “social construction” as an undergrad should ever think otherwise. Words can only mean what speakers think they mean, and saying that someone doesn’t know what a word that they just used means usually is really a way of saying that usage is known but frowned upon (i.e., I am classier than you).

This is a transparent power play, often classist, chauvinist, or elitist. Certain words (I only know Japanese and English, but both languages have plenty) in languages are wedges used to distinguish members of groups, as in the story behind shibboleth. Two groups which seem to always exist in highly literate societies are “those whose language, culture, and customs are objectively correct” and “those whose are particular, local, and temporary”, and many words like “ain’t”, “a whole nother”, or the above memes, in addition to grammatical structures like “might could”, “to boldly go” or “It’s me”, serve as the stars on our proverbial Sneetch bellies. These usages aren’t really mistakes so much as an open flank for pedants to attack and claim the position of “correct language user” as outlined above. They have a negative sociolinguistic meaning, not an incorrect literal meaning.

Some pedants claim that such overcorrection is necessary, because languages need standards to maintain intelligibility. But intelligibility is never the issue. I’ve seen people point out the supposed illogic of a double negative in sentences like “I ain’t never”, but have never seen anyone actually act on the mistaken belief that the two negatives cancel each other out –  the supposed confusion is always feigned and exaggerated. If a pedant has ever legitimately been confused by “literally”, I’ve never seen it. The claim that by correcting misuse pedants are defending standards is doubly false – first because the violation is really an opportunity for them to play referee, and second because the standard doesn’t exist, or at least not as described.

Now, there are reasons as language teachers to treat words as objects of study in themselves, and use the metaphor of words “having” meaning, although as trained linguists we know that this can only be in the sense that an electromagnetic frequency “has” color or a country “has” borders. But grammar pedants are not all language teachers, and a conversation in the break room is not (generally) a language lesson. Turning lunch into a site of linguistic one-upsmanship literally decimates the mood of the break room, and is fulsomely ironic because as an otherwise full-time pedant you should be on a break.