So in the latest salvo in the grammar wars, Steven Pinker is taken to task by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker. I read the whole thing and it made my head swim. Here’s a taste:
This tendency to add complexity, ambiguity, and doubt is a troubling feature of Pinker’s rules. He fights pedantry with more pedantry. He doesn’t want to concede that the phrase “very unique” makes no sense (things are either unique or not), so he mounts an odd defense. Look at two snowflakes from far away, he says, and they no longer seem unique: “The concept ‘unique’ is meaningful only after you specify which qualities are of interest to you and which degree of resolution or grain size you’re applying.” If we did all that, we wouldn’t need the word.
You can read the rest at the link above if you dare (or care). I’m just an old dog with no motivation to learn new grammar tricks. So you can count on me firmly maintaining my position in the “descriptivism” school of grammar. I love the fact that there even is such a school. Warms the cockles of my libertarian heart.
Hat Tip to Althouse.
Yeah, I suspected a grammar-related post when I saw “very unique” in your title. I’d agree that the phrase makes no logical sense, which is why I avoid using it in my own writing (my prescriptivism), but I also bow to the fact that “very unique” is part of common usage (my descriptivism), so I don’t flinch when I hear it spoken.
No less an auspicious document than the US Constitution uses the phrase “in order to form a more perfect union.” “More perfect” makes no logical sense, either, since there are no degrees of “perfect,” but the unfortunate language is now, like it or not, enshrined in the anus of history. Annals, I mean.
Score one for descriptivism.
As for Dr. Pinker and his strange defenses: I have to side with Nathan Heller. Pinker has defended poor English on esoteric grounds before; Heller’s accusation that Pinker “fights pedantry with more pedantry” is on the money.
See, I had never considered the absurdity of a “more perfect” union. I guess I just assumed Mr. Madison(?) intended to convey the desire to strive for perfection, knowing that government perfection is an oxymoron.
I don’t recall ever covering this kind of detail in my English classes. We were just taught stuff like not ending sentences in a preposition, at least as far as I’m aware of.
Har har.