Rebuttal to: "Why Being a Fuddy-Duddy Isn't All Bad"

by Hobbes

While the overall aim of Mr. Maciel's piece is admirable, at least to some extent, both his premise and his presentation contain some major flaws. The main idea of his rant is that those whose typing, spelling, or grammar is imperfect are somehow showing themselves to be inferior to the rest of the human race. This in itself is wrong. It is just as wrong as an employer turning down an applicant after spotting a single typo on a resume. If that applicant is the most qualified person for the job, then a single mis-typed word does not take anything away from that. Those sorts of errors occur in the best of publications. Every Chief Executive Officer and every Human Resources Director has done the same thing at some point. While a case could be made that a typo indicates carelessness on the part of the applicant, it is a weak case in face of the fact that, not only do such things occur, as has been noted, in the best of professional publications, but they do not detract from the quality of the publications, and no one would think of firing an established editor for one such mistake.

Moreover, even if a typo can keep someone from working at a powerful company, whether it should or not, it does not follow that a few mistakes in an editorial about video games should or even can be taken nearly as seriously. To elevate an editorial to such lofty status implies flawed reasoning, at best. In fact, it shows a lack of understanding of the way grammar works. Mr. Maciel states that a resume should be perfect, but he does not elaborate about why it should be so. The answer is simple: social convention. If it were taken for granted in society that resumes were to be sloppily thrown together using a green crayon and construction paper, then scribbling on construction paper would be the proper way of writing a resume. However, at certain times society dictates that people make an effort to adhere to certain standards, which are by and large standards of writing. English professors will expect their students to format their papers a certain way and use citation in a certain way. Notes passed to other students in class are not expected to conform to any such standards. Neither is "better" written English than the other. Rather, each one accomplishes its purpose, which is to communicate certain ideas in a way that is both expected and understandable to the audience. A bibliography would look silly on a note a boy passes to the cute girl sitting two rows ahead of him, while the professor would flunk a student who scribbles his thoughts onto scrap paper, labels it his essay, and hands it in. Editorials submitted to RPGamer or elsewhere are likewise expected to follow certain conventions, and nothing more. An editorial should be able to get its point across; no one familiar with editorials can reasonably expect them to stand up to the same scrutiny to which one would subject a loftier project, such as a doctoral thesis. People expect the odd grammatical error, misspelled word, and typo, and thus the universe will not end if and when they come about. People do not and should not care about their RPGamer editorial in the same way they care about their papers for school or their job, if only because no one else does, either.

What is more, in his presentation of his mistaken point, Mr. Maciel makes some false assumptions about dialect and prescriptive grammar. As has been stated, language is a tool with which one accomplishes a purpose, which is usually but not always to communicate some idea to another party. Prescriptivists claim that there is an objective standard to which all English should be held. However, when pressed to name this standard, its source, or from where the source derives its authority to impose its will upon the rest of the English-speaking world, most of them will mumble something about England, completely ignoring the fact that the language in England has changed through time, just as it and every other language will continue to do until the end of time. British English is no more correct than that spoken in New Zealand, Singapore, India, or Massachusetts. People who say it is cannot give a good answer to the question of why it should be so. That is, of course, because it is not; the differences between the English spoken in the different parts of Britain, Singapore, and the American South are due to the change that naturally occurs when speakers are geographically and culturally separated. Thus there is no single standard to which all English can be held. If an editorial gets its idea across, it can be said to be composed of "good" English. A few mistakes will not affect the validity of an argument; to criticize a view on the basis that the person stating it spoke differently from the way one would expect is to commit a logical fallacy. One should not be dismayed at those who can bring such a charge and no other against one's reasoning.

The worst offense Mr. Macial commits is in the final two paragraphs of his editorial. In them, he charges that enough errors can make one appear to be a "hick" from Mississippi, which apparently implies that one is dumb and therefore unqualified to make an argument. This is wrong on more than one level. In fact, it can easily be stricken down by two maxims every beginning student of linguistics recieves in his or her introductory course. The first maxim is this: "One's views on the way another talks is a direct reflection of one's prejudices toward that person." Mr. Maciel seems to believe, whether consciously or subconsciously, that certain people he has never met are dumb simply because they use a certain dialect. Of course, this view does not take into account that intelligent people are born all over the world, not just in New England, and so the fact that someone happens to be from Mississippi does not mean that said person is any less or more intelligent than someone from Boston. In fact, much racism in society rests on the belief that the speech of many blacks is somehow inferior, when in fact it reflects only natural language change and the influence of certain African languages. The second maxim, which fits well with the first, is this: "One can tell nothing about another's intelligence by the way the other person talks." The language, written or spoken, used by someone from Mississippi does not reflect that person's intelligence; it reflects the dialect that happened to be spoken around that person while he or she was growing up. Therefore, one should not bother charging an editorial writer with being dumb simply on the basis of the writer's grammar. What is more, even if the writer happens to be dumb, it is another logical fallacy to reject his or her argument on that basis. An idea is an idea. It is not any better or worse if someone smarter or dumber expresses it. If Mr. Maciel does not like some editorials, he should either disagree with their content or go read material that is held to standards he more enjoys.

Original Editorial: Why Being a Fuddy-Duddy Isn't All Bad