They do things differently there.

Personally, I think it matters not a jot whether Birmingham City Council uses apostrophes or not, in the same way as it is unimportant whether ‘St’ needs a stop after it or not. I can see the pro-apostrophe campaigners enjoying themselves hugely, though, and am all in favour of a bit of fun, even at the expense of a few otherwise innocent councillors whose only crime is to have regional accents.

But where were the punctuation purists when banks and high-street shops and other businesses decided to drop apostrophes? Barclays (and all the other banks), Selfridges (and all the other chains), and so on. Who gave them permission? And who then decided that just because ‘they’ wanted to stop using their apostrophes, we had to respect their decision?

If you are interested in the great Wikipedia battle, you’ll find the original posts and comment threads at I Said, Get Mitty, Wikipediaphilia, Crisis of authority and McIntyre is having a cow about Wikipedia. I won’t describe the arguments in detail, but John McIntyre has added a summary, which he gives the title Wiki-wacky. He structures it as a dialogue between the (True) Believers and the Skeptics. The Believers expound their silly circular arguments which the Skeptics refute soundly, or what would be definitively to anyone sensible, i.e., with the same opinions as Mr McIntyre. He calls it light-hearted. I call it snide. And please note at this stage that JM’s list of the threads involved excludes the one on Crisis of authority.

The whole thing was triggered by an everyday gripe by Mr McIntyre (first post), that Wikipedia contained errors, lots of them. Nothing really surprising about that, but it provoked some comments, mostly along the lines of “Yes, but…” In his second post, John began to get testy (he enjoys describing himself as ‘curmudgeonly,’ it goes with the tweed jacket image he likes to project), apparently seeing the whole Wikipedia concept as an attack on his life’s work as an editor, if not all editors. I dropped a couple of comments in at that stage, to the effect that the Wikpedia entry about JM himself looked believable, that Wikipedia was not a traditional encyclopedia and shouldn’t be judged as if it were, and that however imperfect it might be it was jolly useful.

Escalation came with John’s post on Crisis of authority, in which he really lost his rag. We were treated to declamations like “The very idea of authority is being challenged,” “there are gunslingers walking the streets at will,” and “the Internet: political subversion, religious controversy, all conducted with vicious personal attacks on one’s opponents. No copyright — anyone could steal anything.” You get the idea. As I say, JM has chosen to forget that this thread was part of the discussion. I think it’s the most important part.

For his penultimate post on the subject, JM chose to relax and take a more sardonic tone, dropping the references to authority or lack of it, making a joke comparing Wikipedia with sewage (is this what passes for urbane humour in Baltimore?), and inventing the term “Wikipediaphiliac” to describe the Wikipedia defenders (as I have pointed out over there, I think there is something disparaging about the suffix chosen, and “Wikipediaphile” would have been a better choice. But, hey, John’s the editor, he knows what he wants to say and how).

Now, I’m not a True Believer in Wikipedia, however much easier JM finds it to deal with me if I am, but I do think that, on the whole, the world is a better place with Wikipedia than it was without it, and would be if Wikipedia were in some way “regulated.” Your thoughts on the matter are most welcome.

*I run the You Don’t Say feed, because it is intelligent and entertaining and because it is declaredly prescriptivist, and the descriptivists might otherwise be over-represented on the Language Stuff page.

- “Watching topic to keep abreast of developments”

- “I’ll ask my teat-cher”

- “I think you’ve managed to milk this subject for all it’s worth.”

- “Now that we have all gotten that off our chest…”

My favourite so far:

- “Apparently it only tends to afflict people who play from mammary.”

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• My kind of serendipity – from cleavage to nipples (robertg69.wordpress.com)

There’s a thread going about the recently disclosed cello scrotum hoax which I don’t want to hijack. But the doubt is raised. by none other than Baroness Murphy herself, who must be a most remarkable person. According to her widely reported confession, Doctor (as she then was) Murphy invented the condition cello scrotum in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1974, inspired by “reports in the BMJ about the alleged condition guitar nipple, caused by irritation when the guitar was pressed against the chest,” says Reuters, which adds that Doctor Murphy “also said she suspected “guitar nipple” had been a joke.”

The Reuters story is more or less the same as that given by the BBC news site (you’ll find it in the Cello Scrotum thread) and other online press. The only exception I have noticed is the version from FoxNews, which reads like something from a different planet altogether and maintains that Doctor Murphy and her husband had also invented guitar nipple as a hoax. But I think this account is probably the result of drug or alcohol abuse by the journalist responsible and that we can safely disregard it altogether.

Now, the cello scrotum story being recent and amusing, it’s quite difficult to find references on the Net to “guitar nipple” which are not related to it. But I have seen the odd thing, and it seems that until now “guitar nipple” has been taken more or less seriously as a more or less real complaint. Not a particularly serious one, and not a mysterious one either, just a typical occupational inflammation. There’s a Telegraph article here, and an abstract of a study of the literature here.

Wikipedia now refers to “guitar nipple” as a hoax, if only in its entry for “cello scrotum” (that’s not an invitation to more Wikipedia-bashing, please, it’s just a comment).

It seems to me that between us we really should be able to answer this question more or less definitively. We have a number of doctors on the forum – what’s the gen from them? Has anyone here actually been diagnosed as having guitar nipple, or does anyone know anyone who has?

You never know, we could get ourselves in the medical literature, here.

I have also learnt that there is a company (not clients of mine, but I won’t mention their name either) which produces an infra-red detector for this purpose, so there will be no point in your getting the kids to hide under the seat.

To begin, I’ll confess that I don’t get the title: “Orwell’s Liar.” Is this a reference to Orwell’s work (the expression “Stalin’s liar” seems to be his), is it directly calling Orwell a liar as other commentors have interpreted, or is it something you have to be a linguist to understand? Never mind, I expect I am being slow and I don’t think it is central in any way. The text of the post begins:

“Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law.”

The parallel between “language crime” and Orwell’s famous “thought crime” is clever, but Orwell’s essay pretends nothing of the sort. It is a complaint, one repeated thoroughout the ages by many cultured but less-than-young people, that things are worse than they used to be. The body of the essay, which Mr Beaver discusses only cursorily, is a discourse on what Orwell sees as vices in the use of English, with a few guidelines thrown in at the end to help writers avoid them.

“Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.”

Come on, David, is Orwell “laying down the law,” or giving feeble style suggestions? It is true that Orwell does not prove that things had been better before then, and I don’t really see why he should, for the examples he gives to illustrate his thesis would have been instantly recognizable to his readers of 1946 as a kind of modern-speak (an effect they may have lost). And Orwell does say in so many words that the English language is in decline. Or, I insist, was, in 1946. Mr Beaver does not agree, and while I am not a linguist and much less a linguistic historian, I would venture to suggest that the English language has had many ups and downs since then, and 1946 could well not have been a high point – the best young minds in the English-speaking world had been involved in the war for the preceding seven years or so, bureaucracy was ingrained, and so on. British English could well have been in especially poor condition, for one thing because its influence was contracting. The world had yet to come to the universal conclusion that English was the business langage of the future, the injection of dynamism that came with immigration and the expansion of English in the not-yet-former colonies had not happened, and the explosion of English that would come with rapid technological progress, television and the Internet was decades away.

“Customers who buy into Orwell’s shit also buy Strunk and White…”

Now this is objectionable in different ways, the least important of which is the scatology, though that alone was pretty well guaranteed (calculated?) to provoke a number of strong protests in the post’s comments. As a Brit, I had never heard of Strunk and White, looked them up and found that they and their work are poorly seen in circles of descriptivist linguistics (as opposed to the prescriptive kind, the sort that tells people how they should use language. Language Log is firmly in the descriptivist camp). Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style seems to have been the standard grammar book in the US for the last half-century and more, so I am not surprised that it is loathed by some. I won’t defend it, or any other grammar book (here), but I must point out that to say “Strunk and White stink, therefore so does Orwell” is nonsense.

And this is where David Beaver’s thesis is essentially wrong. His argument is not against Politics and the English Language so much as against rules about the use of language – prescriptivism. He targets Orwell’s essay in order to support his position – “Orwell is wrong, so I am right.” And to do so, he makes assumptions about Orwell’s thinking which are not supported by the text. Orwell does not says “these are rules English users must follow,” but “follow these rules to avoid using English in the ways I have described.”

David Beaver has managed to highlight the two basic flaws in the anti-prescriptivist case. The first is that it is obsolete, for the battles have been fought, won and lost and to be strictly descriptivist today is like a classically minded music school lecturer acknowledging that “There may be some merit in pop music” – it is redundant, no-one cares. The other (which may well be a contradiction of the first) is that people want rules. Not we’ll-send-you-to-the-headmaster-if-you-split-an-infinitive rules, but helpful rules, how-to rules. And they want them now as much as ever or more so. Running a Google search on “how to write” (complete with quotation marks) returns 18,500,000 results: how to write a novel, how to write an essay, an abstract, a resume, for the web, a dissertation, headlines, a scientific paper, plain English, and so on. Orwell’s essay could almost be retitled “How Not to Write Bad, Pretentious or Overtly Politically Manipulative English,” and there is no need to read into it a desire to dictate how people should use language. Instead, it points out how dreadful English can be when misused. Who could argue with that?

I recognize that not everyone can tune in instantly to Orwell’s wavelength, and it may be that David Beaver is simply (deliberately?) listening in on a different frequency (I take his posting with the tags “Peeving” and “Prescriptivist Poppycock” to indicate that we should not take him entirely seriously). I once explained Orwell’s admiration for what he termed the “decency” of the working classes to my convent-school educated mother. Entirely missing the point, she said, in her plummiest voice and with not a trace of irony, “How very condescending of Mr Orwell.”