On Errors in Language (2013)

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. (Bacon, 1677, Aphorism XLIII) Bosh! Stephen said rudely. man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. (Joyce, 1932, p. 196) The above quotes represent two opposed attitudes toward so-called errors in language. The examples cited below illustrate both Bacon's insistence on clarity of expression and Joyce's liberal, if not inspirational, conception (even though he limited his observation to men of genius). Neither of these luminaries stands alone: Consider, for example, Wustmann's (1908) prescriptivistic volume, aptly titled Allerhand Sprachdummheiten (all kinds of language stupidities) and Bloom's (1997) concept of creative misprision, respectively. (1) I must confess that my fight against my own prescriptivistic tendencies has not had total success. Although split infinitives and dangling prepositions give me no trouble, I notice when who takes the place of whom, still wince when I hear someone say Why don't you lay or when they substitute past simple for present perfect. I do not consider, however, the following gripes as based on prescriptivistic grounds: Some of them appear to contravene basic rules of language, others confuse readers/listeners by conveying the opposite of the source's intention, while few come close to Joycean discovery. the following, I distinguish between two major types of errors: factual ones and those related to un-critical thinking. Factual Errors Let me start with few simple, yet interesting cases of getting one's facts wrong, famously lampooned by the Victorian English novelist Anthony Trollope: The poor fictionist frequently finds himself to have been wrong in his description of things in general He is moved to tell of things of which he omits to learn the nature before he tells of them--as should be done by strictly honest fictionist. He catches salmon in October; or shoots his partridges in March. His dahlias bloom in June, and his birds sing in the autumn. He opens the opera-houses before Easter, and makes Parliament sit on Wednesday evening no critic short of Cabinet Minister himself can convict the narrator of error. (Trollope, 1869/1973, vol. 1, pp. 267-268) contemporary example of such factual error appears in short story by Weldon (1981, p. 70): A crack of thunder splits the air; one second, two seconds, three seconds--and there's the lightning, double-forked, streaking down to the oak-blurred ridge of hills in front of the House. Fictionists share this difficulty with their nonfictionist brethren. Thus, Scott Johnson (1996), family therapist, admitted to not having recognized (in previous paper he published) reference in Woody Allen film to foxes and hedgehogs as coming from Isaiah Berlin.2 He misinterpreted this allusion by one of the film's female characters as juvenile, a protection developed in childhood as psychic shield against unavoidable sexual assault. Another example of factual error, this time miscalculation, appears in historical work by Armstrong (1993, p. 323), regarding the Great Awakening in New England during the 1730s: In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes there would be as many as five week. (Five week equal about 130 in six month, far less than 300.) Misprints in manuscripts occasionally lie behind different, yet still factual, error. Having come on the image of soiled fish in Melville's White Jacket, the literary scholar Matthiessen (1941, p. 392) wrote with much admiration that its unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness (water) with filth (soiled) could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep ... (p. 392). However, as Mailloux (1999, pp. …