In the category of smug, self-important morally concerned besserwissers, the amateur-psychologist linguist is one of the worst — well, probably not, but it’s one of the types I dislike the most, since they’re generally pontificating on stuff that I care about. This is the kind of person who brings unsupported amateur psychology to bear on the way people speak, in the process misunderstanding both language and human psychology. In a highly condescending manner, these people will note some fact about how some group of people, generally younger generations, speak, and then proceed to contort us through the prism of their prejudices, and when we emerge on the other side, we’re supposed to have learned something both about what some particular way of speaking means (not what it actually means, but what it means in some grand scheme) and about the mental state of the people who speak this way. Usually, these idiots misunderstood both the speech pattern, the psychology of the people involved, and their relationship. Yet they still manage to deliver their “insights” from a position of authority, always condescending to anyone who would deign to take the speech pattern in their mouths.
At this point examples are probably appropriate. One: the analysis of “uptalk” (rising intonation at the end of sentences) in terms of youthful insecurity. The argument runs: rising intonation indicates a question, so uptalk must be a way of putting everything you say as a question, as if you didn’t dare actually assert anything. People who are always questioning and never dare take a stand must be insecure, right? No one has the courage to sincerely stand for anything any more!
The first error is in analyzing a new phenomenon in terms of old ones. Instead of considering the possibility that when people habitually uptalk, rising intonation doesn’t always indicate a question, doesn’t occur to the amateur-psychologist linguist. Language is static and every new phenomenon is an old one in disguise for these people. Further, even if every statement was phrased as a question, would that automatically mean that the amateur psychology explanation, insecurity as Freudian grammar slip, is true? Couldn’t it be that asking questions means something else? Can you tell that I am, in fact, explicitly putting question marks at the end of every sentence I write, but actually, I’m completely certain that what I’m asking is true? Does a ? from you — ortographic or vocal — always mean that you’re insecure about what you’re saying and seeking the approval of your peers? Thought not.
But I’m not really interested in uptalk here. That was just to get the ball rolling. What annoyed me this time was this: “it’s a matter of all reality turning into cable television. Everybody acting as if they’re acting.” What is this “it”? Turns out, it’s, like, like. This person makes a lot of sweeping generalizations about culture, language and psychology, all from his armchair theorizing about “like” in constructions like “I was like, wow” (and not in constructions like “in constructions like…”). Listen:
Saying “like” was a symptom of the television age, indeed could not be possible without an entire generation sharing a series of stock images they could cite to each other knowingly, with the full confidence of being understood.
Let’s do an amateur-psychological linguistic deconstruction — I wish there was an easier way to say that — of Melik Kaylan. This is clearly a man out of his time. His clumsy attempt to make his rant temporally relevant, “[t]he warm weather seems to bring out in the young a tendency to natter away loudly about themselves” — as if people, young and old, didn’t have a general tendency to natter away loudly about themselves, all year long — belies his feelings of inadequacy and his fear of falling by the generational wayside. His description of a speech pattern as a “virus” — no mention of memes — suggests the moral decay that comes more clearly to the surface when he says that he’s on a mission to “neutralize its noisome irritant effect by diagnosing the underlying synaptic clot that triggers it.” It’s very clear that this is the moral decay of the youth we’re talking about, whose synapses are too clotted to fight this “irritant”, this “tick” that a whole generation has “caught”. Then he asks a question: “Why has an entire generation of kids caught this tick?” Questions, as we all know, indicate insecurity. This fits nicely with Kaylan’s poorly hidden fear of becoming irrelevant, a fear that every older generation experiences when younger generations grow up and start developing cultures of their own that the older generation is excluded from.
I could go on. Is the above valid? As I said, it’s pure amateur psychology, and bad linguistics to boot. It gets even worse when you start generalizing from one person to many, and start characterizing the psychology of whole groups — as if any age bracket had a monolithic hivemind where everyone is insecure or confident or happy or sad at the same time — from flimsy linguistic “evidence”. By injecting prejudices, amateur psychology, and unsupported speculation about a kind of speech you don’t understand (or maybe you even use it but won’t admit it, and so must act as if you don’t understand it), moral panic ensues. The result of this kind of “analysis” is always the following: when someone says X, X means something other than X; this indicates psychological disposition Y; Y is a clear sign of moral decay; therefore, the world is going to pieces and it’s the fault of the out-group (usually young people, but could also be black people, people who speak rare dialects, and so on).
I wish people would learn a thing or two before they started writing about language. Clearly, knowing a language and even being able to write well in it isn’t a good indicator of linguistic insight. Just because you’re a Very Serious Writer doesn’t mean your opinions on language are worth anything.
