degradation of language

[bnhpct]

Elders' despairing comments on the debasement of language are preserved in
literature from ancient times and through every generation down to the
present. They obviously cannot be cumulatively true, or we would have had
only incomprehensible gibberish at our disposal when we ourselves first
learned to speak as children. The exercise of skill and the wherewithal for
that exercise are two things. Where distinctions need to be made, new means
for making them are found. Images from experience replace metaphors whose
once literal meanings have become too remote.

Emphases shift. "Honing in" has a sense of persistent bearing down,
grinding away, gradually achieving a point. It is quite different in its
associations from the almost ESP-ish "homing in". It really is a different
phrase, and its historical origin as doubtless a mistake is irrelevant,
though we might regret the loss of the earlier phrase with its distinct web
of connotations.

"Fly United" is an advertiser's pun and not indicative of general usage. I
don't hear passengers say "I'm going to fly flight 260 to O'Hare." "Very
close veins" makes a bit of Latinate medical jargon at least descriptive,
and is hardly imprecise, yet we laughingly reject it. Usage is littered
with fossils. "Til death do us part" is a corruption of "til death us
depart" because "to depart x and y" no longer has the meaning "to separate
x and y." Behavior can be uncouth but not couth, and so on, a loss of
vocabulary that some elders of yore surely lamented in their day. And how
long ago is yore, anyway?

But I still insist on saying "an email message" rather than "an email."
Just an old fuddy-duddy. I can't seem to help having these attitudes about
the ways in which people use words, even though I know better.

  Bruce

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (980320.1059 MST)]

Bruce N:

Elders' despairing comments on the debasement of language are preserved in
literature from ancient times and through every generation down to the
present. They obviously cannot be cumulatively true, or we would have had
only incomprehensible gibberish at our disposal when we ourselves first
learned to speak as children. The exercise of skill and the wherewithal for
that exercise are two things. Where distinctions need to be made, new means
for making them are found. Images from experience replace metaphors whose
once literal meanings have become too remote.

Yes, that's the good news. The bad news is that in times when knowledge and
science are unrespected and ignorance is admired, useful distinctions and
valid understandings are lost along with the words used to express them, so
later generations will have to go through the whole tedious process of
rediscovering them.

Emphases shift. "Honing in" has a sense of persistent bearing down,
grinding away, gradually achieving a point. It is quite different in its
associations from the almost ESP-ish "homing in". It really is a different
phrase, and its historical origin as doubtless a mistake is irrelevant,
though we might regret the loss of the earlier phrase with its distinct web
of connotations.

Hmm, this sounds like one of those rationalizations I was mentioning. You
seem to have worked out from context your own meaning for "honing in," not
realizing that you had misheard it and that the phrase originally meant, as
it still means to those who use it professionally, something different.
Airports still use homing beacons, and aircraft still carry apparatus to
help the pilot, or the autopilot, fly toward home base (which is what
"homing in" refers to: "zeroing in" on a target, which is another term from
the same context, referring here to keeping the VOR crosshairs centered in
the display). This term is by no means dated or obsolete; what it refers to
is a process that is still currently going on every time the weather gets bad.

I think you are inadvertently illustrating the very process of language
change (if not deterioration) to which I was referring. People do not learn
a great deal of language by reading dictionary definitions. They hear other
people using unfamiliar words, or read unfamiliar words in news reports and
stories, and try to guess from context what they mean. I think that's a
major source of drift, because the meanings that people guess at can come
only from their own experience. If their experience and knowledge are
limited, they can easily guess wrong.

I repeat my father's best example of this: all his life, until he was 60,
he pronounced "misled" as "missile'd" instead of "mis - led". When I
finally asked him what it meant, he explained that when someone is
missiled, it means being thrown off the track like a missile or projectile
flying off course. A very good guess, you have to admit, that makes sense
in almost every situation where a person might use the word. But it's not
what other people mean by it. And some of the meaning, "deceived," is lost.

My father's reaction to being told the dictionary meaning (and
pronunciation) of misled is also enlightening. He was embarrassed and
furious with me. He had to go away and check the dictionary where I
couldn't see him, and it took several days before he finally admitted that
his meaning was simply wrong. He was truly upset and angry with me for
being a smart-ass. Once people decide that they know something, they do not
take kindly to finding out they were mistaken. My father, perhaps, took to
such things even less kindly than most people would, especially when the
messenger was me.

"Fly United" is an advertiser's pun and not indicative of general usage. I
don't hear passengers say "I'm going to fly flight 260 to O'Hare." "Very
close veins" makes a bit of Latinate medical jargon at least descriptive,
and is hardly imprecise, yet we laughingly reject it. Usage is littered
with fossils. "Til death do us part" is a corruption of "til death us
depart" because "to depart x and y" no longer has the meaning "to separate
x and y." Behavior can be uncouth but not couth, and so on, a loss of
vocabulary that some elders of yore surely lamented in their day. And how
long ago is yore, anyway?

But I still insist on saying "an email message" rather than "an email."
Just an old fuddy-duddy. I can't seem to help having these attitudes about
the ways in which people use words, even though I know better.

Do you also say "transistor radio?" "Cassette player?" "Video tape
recording?" "Radio receiver?"

I think the criterion should be whether we are losing our abilities to
refer to specific experiences, and whether we are starting to confuse
meanings that are really different. In the case of "fly United" people do,
contrary to your claim, use the phrase outside the context of advertising.
Perhaps they want people to mistake them for pilots. And "til death do us
part" preserves the meaning you give of "til death us depart", so is
inconsequential. Not all language drift is bad; I consider "far out" to be
one of the all-time great inventions. But when people no longer understand
the difference between such terms as implying and inferring, or refuting
and denying, they are losing the ability to think clearly, or to say
clearly what they mean. At best, it means that we have to use long
cirumlocutions to get across meanings we previously could communicate with
a single word. At worst, it means that people have lost part of their
mental competence. Do people really think that simply denying something is
the same thing as proving it false?

Best,

Bill P.

[Bruce_Gregory]

[From Bruce Gregory (980320.1525 EST)]

Bill Powers (980320.1059 MST)

I think you are inadvertently illustrating the very process of language
change (if not deterioration) to which I was referring. People do not learn
a great deal of language by reading dictionary definitions. They hear other
people using unfamiliar words, or read unfamiliar words in news reports and
stories, and try to guess from context what they mean. I think that's a
major source of drift, because the meanings that people guess at can come
only from their own experience. If their experience and knowledge are
limited, they can easily guess wrong.

One of my favorite examples is the expression, "That is
the exception that proves the rule." This statement makes _no_
sense whatsoever unless you understand the "proves" means
"tests" as in 100 proof alcohol. My guess is that fewer than one
person in a hundred understands this, but the phrase is happily
used (and misinterpreted) all the time.

Bruce

[bnhpct]

[From Bruce Nevin (980320.1629 EST)]

Bill Powers (980320.1059 MST)--

Yes, I know what "home in" means and I use that phrase rather than "hone
in", but I also observe that "hone in" is used in different contexts and
with different intended implications than those of "home in".

Etymology is irrelevant to people's word choices today, as you have
emphasized several times. The etymology of "hone in" as an error is
irrelevant, these now are different words with similar but different
meanings. We try to perceive them as the same because they are in
complementary distribution (more on this below). Users of one word assume
that their word is what users of the other word really intend.

You're claiming that some versions of language are more rational or more
true to original correlations of words with perceptions than others. This
is an odd stance for one who believes that the whole business of language
and its correlation (or not) with non-language perceptions is an emergent
phenomenon, arising from happenstance interactions of autonomous control
systems.
..........................

You're making generalizations about how language changes through time.
There's a lot of evidence about that that you haven't looked at.

Here are two speculations about the future of these words. A good
likelihood is that "home in" will be retained as a technical term in
specialized environments, that the metaphorical extension of that usage to
other environments will atrophy, and that "hone in" will be used in
non-technical contexts with no metaphorical relationship to the technical
term, only a similarity of pronunciation. Already, we hear "Man, he just
kept honing on that" with a meaning similar to "he kept harping on
it"--that in turn a phrase whose reference to itinerant musicians is
perhaps centuries gone. I don't think that adherents of "home in" will
succeed in stigmatizing "hone in" as an error, but if they do it might
become yet another shibboleth, a token by which people identify themselves
and one another as members of one social class or another.

These are speculations, but at least they are based on what has actually
happened in similar situations in the past. These speculations reflect the
distribution of the words. "Home in" occurs in technical environments,
"hone in" never there. This is one basis of the first speculation. With
perhaps a few exceptions, "Home" speakers don't say "hone" and "hone"
speakers don't say "home". This is one basis of the second speculation. In
the future, with "hone" well established (let us suppose), a "hone" speaker
might get training in aeronautics or missile guidance systems and learn
"home in" as a technical term, never connecting it with the similar "hone
in" (perhaps now extended to "honing on and on" or some such).
..........................

Many people have been misled by "misled". For me it was "my-sld". Quite a
few friends who I've told this to over the years have confessed that for
them it was "my-zld". It wasn't until around puberty that I put the
complementary distribution together, the fact that I never saw anything
other than the past tense or past participle of this verb, that I never
heard it spoken, that I never read the past tense or past participle of
"mislead". It may have been having to spell the past tense of "mislead"
that clued me in, I don't remember.

  Bruce Nevin

[Bruce_Abbott]

[From Bruce Abbott (980320.1545 EST)]

Bill Powers (980320.1059 MST) --

Do people really think that simply denying something is
the same thing as proving it false?

Speaking of proving, people repeat the saying, "the exception proves the
rule," taking it to mean that in some strange way, the exception shows the
rule to be correct. But the phrase is an old one, dating from the time when
the verb "to prove" meant "to test." The exception _tests_ the rule. We
still use the term this way at the "proving" grounds.

Regards,

Bruce

[CCHERPAS]

[From Chris Cherpas (980320.2200 PT)]

I could care less.

Regards,
cc

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (980221.0314 MST)]

Bruce Nevin (980320.1629 EST)--

Yes, I know what "home in" means and I use that phrase rather than "hone
in", but I also observe that "hone in" is used in different contexts and
with different intended implications than those of "home in".

I'm sure you're right. I'm just offering an explanation for the origin of
"hone in," which as a literal phrase would make little sense. I don't think
this is a case of parallel evolution.

Etymology is irrelevant to people's word choices today, as you have
emphasized several times. The etymology of "hone in" as an error is
irrelevant, these now are different words with similar but different
meanings.

It's not irrelevant as one explanation of how language drifts, is it?

We try to perceive them as the same because they are in
complementary distribution (more on this below). Users of one word assume
that their word is what users of the other word really intend.

Sometimes, perhaps, correctly, and sometimes not. The users of "hone in"
assume that the meaning they have deduced is the meaning used by speakers
who are heard as saying "hone in" but are really saying "home in." I don't
believe that someone sat down and invented "hone in" _de novo_.

You're claiming that some versions of language are more rational or more
true to original correlations of words with perceptions than others.

Yes. Some versions.

This
is an odd stance for one who believes that the whole business of language
and its correlation (or not) with non-language perceptions is an emergent
phenomenon, arising from happenstance interactions of autonomous control
systems.

On the contrary, I'm trying to show one way in which new forms of language
emerge from underlying mechanisms -- in this case, the mechanisms by which
we try to assign meanings to words we read and hear. What we try to do, as
you say, is deduce the meaning that another user of a word intends. But we
can do that only in terms of our own experiences. If we have not had
experiences sufficiently similar to those of the speaker or writer, the
meaning we assign will be different from the other's, and, unintentionally
and in fact contrary to what we want to be doing, we will have invented a
new usage. Whether this usage survives will depend on what happens when we
start employing the new usage in conversations with others. Most of the
time, we will quickly see that our understanding diverges greatly from
theirs, and alter our meaning for the term. This is how we converge to
meanings that minimize misunderstandings -- we do it by experiencing
misunderstandings. But this process is not infallible, as shown by my
father's meaning for "missile'd", which survived for many decades before
finally running into a snag.

You're making generalizations about how language changes through time.
There's a lot of evidence about that that you haven't looked at.

No generalization intended. Just one possible explanation for how the
meanings of some words change. I'm sure there are other phenomena, too.

Here are two speculations about the future of these words. A good
likelihood is that "home in" will be retained as a technical term in
specialized environments, that the metaphorical extension of that usage to
other environments will atrophy, and that "hone in" will be used in
non-technical contexts with no metaphorical relationship to the technical
term, only a similarity of pronunciation. Already, we hear "Man, he just
kept honing on that" with a meaning similar to "he kept harping on
it"--that in turn a phrase whose reference to itinerant musicians is
perhaps centuries gone. I don't think that adherents of "home in" will
succeed in stigmatizing "hone in" as an error, but if they do it might
become yet another shibboleth, a token by which people identify themselves
and one another as members of one social class or another.

"Honing on" I see as a definite improvement over "honing in." Honing means
sharpening with something like a whetstone, and the act of honing means
working on something to sharpen it. When you keep honing on something, you
can get it only so sharp, and after that you're just obsessing, like
someone who keeps harping and harping until you're sick of the sound.

Metaphors really don't work unless there's some non-metaphorical meaning
behind them. Lots of people don't worry about them, apparently. They don't
even listen to themselves talking, at a higher level: as Mary says, they
just "groove on the sounds of the words." ("Grooving" I would guess comes
from playing records with a needle that has to settle into the groove to
get the sound. Your golf swing is "in the groove" when it follows the right
track as the needle follows the groove in the record. Grooving on the
sounds of words is letting yourself be carried along by their rhythm and
familiarity, without asking very closely what they're supposed to mean).

These are speculations, but at least they are based on what has actually
happened in similar situations in the past. These speculations reflect the
distribution of the words. "Home in" occurs in technical environments,
"hone in" never there. This is one basis of the first speculation. With
perhaps a few exceptions, "Home" speakers don't say "hone" and "hone"
speakers don't say "home".

Sure they do. I say "hone" when I mean, metaphorically, "putting a sharper
edge on it." A debater looking up reference materials is honing his
arguments, and "sharp" means "intelligent" as well as "cutting."

This is one basis of the second speculation. In
the future, with "hone" well established (let us suppose), a "hone" speaker
might get training in aeronautics or missile guidance systems and learn
"home in" as a technical term, never connecting it with the similar "hone
in" (perhaps now extended to "honing on and on" or some such).
..........................

You know as well as I do that "honing in" came, erroneously, from "homing
in." Other uses of "honing" came, independently, directly from sharpening
tools, and the appropriate "on" is used, or the "honing" is used alone as a
transitive verb. You probably didn't originate the "honing in" boo-boo, so
when you first heard or read "honing in," accurately, you probably used the
literal meanings of "honing" that you already knew to interpret the
metaphor. And, of course, so would a lot of people who were hearing that
phrase for the first time, provided they had a meaning for "honing" having
to do with sharpening things. That's how new usages spread. And I agree
with you that the strange "in" would probably revert, eventually, to "on"
or just be omitted, since it doesn't help the metaphor work. An athlete
hones his skills; I'm sure people were saying that before World War 2. And
I'll bet nobody ever said "honing in" before then.

Many people have been misled by "misled". For me it was "my-sld". Quite a
few friends who I've told this to over the years have confessed that for
them it was "my-zld". It wasn't until around puberty that I put the
complementary distribution together, the fact that I never saw anything
other than the past tense or past participle of this verb, that I never
heard it spoken, that I never read the past tense or past participle of
"mislead". It may have been having to spell the past tense of "mislead"
that clued me in, I don't remember.

That's the kind of analysis I like. It sounds real. Fortunately for you,
you didn't assign a strange meaning to the term; you just gave it a funny
pronunciation. My dad invented a meaning of his own that made perfect sense
in every context in which he had read or heard the word used; he took the
term to be a metaphor when it wasn't one (or at least not as extreme a
one). In particular, what I like about your analysis is the obvious role
played by the individual's own attempts to understand and make sense of
language. Language doesn't just happen; it's made by people trying to
communicate their experiences to others, and to know what others are
experiencing.

Best,

Bill P.

[Bruce_Gregory]

[From Bruce Gregory 9980321.0830 EST)]

Chris Cherpas (980320.2200 PT)

I could care less.

Nice example.

Bruce

[bnhpct]

[From Bruce Nevin (980321.0856 EST)]

Bill Powers (980221.0314 MST)--

We're in pretty good agreement about all this now. I was twitting you,
tongue in cheek, about your complaint that young people nowadays aren't
using English the way it's really supposed to be. The inconsistency seemed
humorous to me. And I confessed the same inconsistency "even though I know
better" about e.g. "an email" as well as about "hone in".

Etymology is irrelevant to people's word choices today, as you have
emphasized several times. The etymology of "hone in" as an error is
irrelevant, these now are different words with similar but different
meanings.

It's not irrelevant as one explanation of how language drifts, is it?

Not at all. But that's a different topic. How language drifts and shifts
through time is an accidental byproduct of the tandem control that I
sketched, one system of control by which we use language, and a second
system of control by which we learn, continuously recalibrate, and
occasionally readjust references for the first system in respect to
perceptions of behavioral outputs and generalizations about them, including
perhaps "stories" about them as Avery likes to say. Perceptions of people's
behavioral outputs and stories about them can be mistaken. But if "people
like me" agree in that account of things, it takes on a life of its own
(metaphorically speaking, of course).

"Honing on" I see as a definite improvement over "honing in." Honing means
sharpening with something like a whetstone, and the act of honing means
working on something to sharpen it. When you keep honing on something, you
can get it only so sharp, and after that you're just obsessing, like
someone who keeps harping and harping until you're sick of the sound.

For those who say "honing in," the phrase is just an extension of "honing"
and "honing on," and for them "home" cannot be a verb, it can only be a
noun. The phrase "homing in" is not available to them; for them, it is a
mistake to use "home" as a verb. If the preposition "in" seems to have its
literal meaning stretched, it is no more arbitrary than many another idiom.
I think of my Gloucester neighbors who insisted with some vehemence that
"would've" is "would of".

There is a phrase "to harp upon one string" about something (with citations
in the OED from the 1500s), whence somewhat later in the 1500s and e.g. in
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ (1603) "to harp on" something. This has every
appearance of someone's witty phrase that gained currency in Elizabeth's
court and then was shortened in use. Lacking harpers about us we retain
only the words without a vivid image imagined on the basis of experience.

With

perhaps a few exceptions, "Home" speakers don't say "hone" and "hone"
speakers don't say "home".

Sure they do.

Oh fribblewhisket! No wonder these posts get so long and tedious. I meant
people who say "honing in" don't say "homing in on" and vice versa. Both
have a verb "to hone". Those who say "honing in" do not have a verb "to
home".

the obvious role
played by the individual's own attempts to understand and make sense of
language. Language doesn't just happen; it's made by people trying to
communicate their experiences to others, and to know what others are
experiencing.

Yes. And success in communicating with peers is more important than
etymological fidelity, however much the current generation of fuddy-duddies
shake their (our) fingers like King Canute bidding the waves retreat.

  Bruce Nevin

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (980321.1034 MST)]

Bruce Nevin (980321.0856 EST)--

Oh fribblewhisket! No wonder these posts get so long and tedious. I meant
people who say "honing in" don't say "homing in on" and vice versa. Both
have a verb "to hone". Those who say "honing in" do not have a verb "to
home".

Expletive appreciated.

Language doesn't just happen; it's made by people trying to
communicate their experiences to others, and to know what others are
experiencing.

Yes. And success in communicating with peers is more important than
etymological fidelity, however much the current generation of fuddy-duddies
shake their (our) fingers like King Canute bidding the waves retreat.

That depends a lot on whom you're talking about. People who depend on
clarity and precision of communication care a lot about making language
internally consistent and stable. Others for whom language is simply a way
of achieving togetherness and who never try to say anything important can
ignore such problems. I could care less about language, but I don't.

Best,

Bill P.

[Martin_Taylor4]

[Martin Taylor 980405 13:10]

Bruce Nevin (980320.1629 EST)

(Trying to catch up, and falling further behind:-(

Many people have been misled by "misled". For me it was "my-sld". Quite a
few friends who I've told this to over the years have confessed that for
them it was "my-zld". It wasn't until around puberty that I put the
complementary distribution together, the fact that I never saw anything
other than the past tense or past participle of this verb, that I never
heard it spoken, that I never read the past tense or past participle of
"mislead". It may have been having to spell the past tense of "mislead"
that clued me in, I don't remember.

In my family, there existed a full set of verb forms from "to mizzle."
I don't think it carried the sense of intention that "to mislead" carries.
In retrospect, I think it had a sense of directed confusion. But I never
heard "to mizzle" used outside the family.

New word forms, or new usages for old forms, spread like an infection. Some
become a plague, some die out. I guess our family could have infected
friends and neighbours, and a new verb might have entered the language
after a generation or so. But it didn't, and I haven't heard that form for
several decades now.

As for "honing in," I was surprised to hear the suggested derivation from
"homing in." I always thought was a perfectly ordinary use of honing to
mean sharpening, as in improving the sharpness of focus or understanding.
The "in" particle may come from analogy with "homing in," I guess, but
does the use of "honing" itself? Perhaps so--"I'm honing my understanding
of the problem and homing in on a solution" seems to me to be a proper
use of the two words, whereas "I'm honing in on my understanding" does not.

Martin

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (980406.0901 MST)]

Martin Taylor 980405 13:10--

In my family, there existed a full set of verb forms from "to mizzle."
I don't think it carried the sense of intention that "to mislead" carries.
In retrospect, I think it had a sense of directed confusion. But I never
heard "to mizzle" used outside the family.

New word forms, or new usages for old forms, spread like an infection.

Yea, verily. I have a couple more to contribute.

1. In a published paper: an idea that gives us "incite" into behavior (for
"insight"). I've seen this one a number of times. Also "cite" used for
site, and vice versa.

2. In our local newspaper: an explosive situation was "diffused" by tactful
police action (for "defused"). This one is quite prevalent.

Both of these, I suppose have some rationalization in the user's mind, the
second one being more obvious than the first.

A possible explanation: the decline of reading as a main way of getting
information.

Best,

Bill P.