Trial and Failure

Re: "Linguist Explains Why 'Correcting' Grammar Is Problematic" by WoodyLing

YouTuber WoodyLing published a video entitled Linguist Explains Why "Correcting" Grammar Is Problematic, which discusses what he sees as the shortcomings of linguistic prescriptivism in the form of responses to comments on some other video of his. I do not find his arguments to be terribly convincing. They are, in fact, an example of the vexing phenomenon in which someone with the potential to form very salient points stumbles into making it seem like they can't counter even the most transparently abhorrent and flimsy arguments. As we will see, Woody spends the video waffling between a series of mutually exclusive positions, then introduces the important topic of institutional racism before failing to give it the care and attention it deserves.

First, though, I ought to disclose that when drawing quotations from Woody's video, I am pulling from the transcript, which, from what I could tell, was generated by YouTube using AI. True to form, there were a handful of mistakes which I corrected while watching the video in full. If this application of AI is one that you find troublesome, a perspective that is by no means unreasonable, I would recommend not reading any further. Bear in mind that Woody's video itself appeared completely untouched by AI, as is the entirety of this article aside from the quotations.

If you've ever corrected someone's pronunciation or grammar, you are upholding racism, sexism, or some kind of bigotry, and I'm going to prove it.

The thumbnail for this video, when I originally came across it, was simply the word "BIGOTRY." Likewise, this is the first statement Woody makes. It is a bold claim, and he puts in work to demonstrate his justification for making it, but I find it troublesome at the outset that the specific charge is left so fuzzy. "Racism, sexism, or some kind of bigotry" is remarkably unspecific, and, as it turns out, not actually an accurate summary of his arguments. The video will go on to discuss racism and bigotry based on ethnicity and class, but sexism does not come up.

So, the main point I want to drive home is policing the grammar of native speakers is bigotry.

One may notice the immediate narrowing of the terms at play, from "ever correcting someone's grammar" to "policing the grammar of native speakers." Woody will return to the apparent exception he has carved for the correction of grammar of nonnative speakers or people learning another language, but it will not be an exception that does his overall thesis any favors. It will, in fact, present a pretty notable weakness that I will discuss in time.

[...] I normally do this kind of stuff in shorts and TikToks, but I got so many dumbass comments that I just thought it would be better to respond to them all at once, and it all traces back to this video:

Nothing, and I mean nothing, annoys me more than when people say "we was" instead of "we were."

So, what I said in my video response to that was that you don't get to tell other people how to speak.

This is an accusation that Woody will make several times, but his indignation is misplaced. The woman in the video he cited does not appear to be attempting to "tell other people how to speak." Merely posting your perspective online does not constitute imposing that perspective onto other people. This is a line of reasoning I have addressed elsewhere:

To offer criticism, even harsh and scathing criticism, is by no means an attempt to impose one's preferences upon other people.

In terms of the present example: Offering a critique of how other people speak, even a critique that is culturally insensitive, is by no means an attempt to impose a new manner of speaking upon other people. Anyone who stumbles across her video is free to ignore it and scroll away, or block her completely. If posting a video online constitutes a forceful attempt to "tell other people how to" do something, then Woody's video itself ought to be condemned for telling other people how to think. But this is transparently absurd; Woody has merely collected his thoughts and published them, not somehow forced his perspective upon anyone. So, too, with the video he is criticizing.

Saying "we was" is acceptable, or "you was" is acceptable. Also saying "I were" is acceptable. For example, one of her fellow Brits.

But so I knew I were going to get me head chopped off. You know, it were a really nice shop you 'cause it were — it were harsh and it were rough and but it were a good laugh.

I personally really like that. It's just cleaner to have all the verb conjugations the same for all the pronouns. Unlike Spanish where they drop the pronoun because every conjugation is different, because only some conjugations are different in English, we always still need to include the pronoun. So it literally does not make a difference to your understanding if you say "we was" or "I were" because you still have the pronoun there. You can still understand who they're talking about.

This is also a point that Woody will return to multiple times: So-called grammatical "errors" are pointless to police in part because they don't actually have an adverse effect on the intelligibility of the language. A later argument, however, will reveal that Woody doesn't seem to actually believe this.

For now, though, it will suffice to point out that it is very possible that substituting "were" for "was" may result in a loss of clarity, depending on the context. "I were" and "I was" fulfill very different functions, grammatically speaking, and there would be an unavoidable loss of precision if "were" were to sunsetted. That this particular example Woody cites remains decently cogent regardless is not a compelling argument for a universal shift in how the grammatical constructs are understood.

Furthermore, Woody has begun constructing a trap around himself. If a member of his audience were to watch the clip with the British guy and observe that they actually have significant difficulty parsing his sentences, he faces an awkward double-bind: Either he declares that the clip is objectively clear enough, and this audience member's difficulty is their own problem, in which case his argument holds at the expense of invalidating someone's lived experience, or he acknowledges that intelligibility is not an intrinsic quality in a sentence, but varies based on who is listening, in which case he is forced to concede the point that grammar and intelligibility are intertwined. If the former, he is obliged to explain why he and he alone acts as the arbiter of which grammatical constructs are needless. If the latter, he must abandon the notion that grammatical rules serve no useful function, and exist instead as relics of linguistic colonialism and oppression. As I alluded to above, however, he will spend the video vacillating between these two mutually exclusive options.

Before we move on, it is necessary to pin Woody's argument down. He insists that grammatical rules are arbitrary and unnecessary to facilitate clarity. To substantiate this, I will cite multiple quotes from his video, including points we haven't reached yet:

So it literally does not make a difference to your understanding if you say "we was" or "I were" because you still have the pronoun there. You can still understand who they're talking about.

And the only reason these languages exist is because one group of their speakers made "mistakes," and those "mistakes" became the rules because today's mistakes are tomorrow's rules. And that is literally the only reason we have any of our modern languages in the world today is because people in the past made those "mistakes" that eventually became so common, they became the rules. It's all just a part of language evolution, a totally natural process. And every single thing we say today is a result of that same process.

But it [making a grammatical "mistake"] actually does [mean the "mistake" is correct] because if that is how the language is actually spoken, then that is literally how the language is spoken. If it wasn't spoken that way, then that would not be the language.

We don't tell people how they should speak. We observe how they actually speak and describe rules based on what is actually being spoken. Again, if that is how people actually speak the language, that is how the language is spoken. If they didn't speak that way, it wouldn't be spoken like that.

The standard is just a dialect based on one group of people. Not everybody speaks that way and that's okay.

The standard is not some magic divine grammatically correct form. There's not something passed down by God that is the only way to be grammatically correct in a given language. It's just whatever dialect happens to be associated with the ruling class.

Besides the way you feel about it [pronouncing "espresso" as "expresso"] in your head, what is the actual problem? It's not causing any problems with communication. It's totally understandable. You know exactly what they mean. It does its job.

These are only a few examples, but the message is clear: Grammatical "mistakes" are deemed so because of prescriptivists arbitrarily imposing their preferred method of communication on other people. There is no such thing as inherently erroneous grammar. Additionally, adherence to a standard of grammar is not necessary even to facilitate clear communication between people, because grammatical "mistakes" do the job well enough.

It is very important to keep in mind that Woody insists upon these ideas.

One of the most basic responses I get to saying stuff like this is comments like this.

What's the point of having grammar rules if we just accept everything? It gets to a point where we are being a little ridiculous.

We're not being ridiculous because we're not accepting everything. We still have grammar rules. For example, this. "I'm gonna the park" versus "I'm going to go to the park" or "I'm going to the park." "Gonna" is a contracted form of "going to." So why can't we say "I'm gonna the park" even though we can say "I'm going to the park"? Because those things still have rules. Even though "gonna" is a contraction of "going to," it's only used for future actions, not the prepositional phrase. So saying "I'm going to go to the park" is me talking in the future tense. Whereas saying "I'm going to the park" could be the present tense. "I'm gonna the park" can't express present tense. That's why we don't say it.

Woody's tune has completely changed, and now he makes an argument that cannot coexist with what we'd seen before. Suddenly, he posits the existence of grammatical rules which are neither open to haphazard flouting nor pointless for communication. The necessary semantic distinction between "I'm going to the park" and "I'm gonna the park" is not dismissed as a relic of an oppressive ruling class. It is not clear, however, why this scenario is different than the one above. By all accounts, the grammatical rules proscribing "I'm gonna the park" are no different in kind than the rules proscribing "she were at the park." If someone tells me, "I'm gonna the park," I can figure out, after a moment's pause, that they must be erroneously telling me that they are going to the park. "I'm gonna the park" has done its job. Likewise, if someone tells me, "she were at the park," I can figure out, after a moment's pause, that they must be erroneously telling me that she was at the park. "She were at the park" has done its job. Both of these examples demonstrate an equal propensity for clouding, or not, the language, but only one is dismissed as needless pedantry.

The problem for Woody's thesis is clear. Grammatical rules are oppressive, arbitrary, and useless... except when they're not. How do we know when they're not? He offers no explanation.

It really cannot be understated how bizarre this video becomes in light of this contradiction. Rules are oppressive one moment, but necessary for communication the next. A counter to this charge might be that he is drawing a distinction between rules that are purely aesthetic ("he were" is just fine) and rules that actually have a concrete function ("I'm gonna the park" is not fine), but, as stated, there is no explanation offered for how this distinction is made, and how to know which rules Woody thinks are necessary.

He goes a step further, though, and declares that not only are grammatical rules a feature of the dominant, oppressive standard, they are a feature of the dialects which have been oppressed:

African-American Vernacular or Black American English makes a lot of interesting uses of the verb to be. For example, habitual be or zero copula. So, to help explain that, I brought in some help from some friends.

Habitual be is a rule-governed grammatical feature of Black English that shows that an action happens repeatedly or over a long period of time rather than just once. So, I could say, "Woody be making videos" to show that it happens habitually. However, I cannot say, "I be making a video right now." because the right now contradicts the be in the sentence. Dr. Janice Jackson at University of Massachusetts Amherst performed a study showing children a picture of Elmo eating a cookie besides Cookie Monster who's sick in bed and asked students the question, "Who be eating cookies?" The black students all answered Cookie Monster because that's what Cookie Monster does. He be eating cookies. Whereas the white students mostly answered Elmo because in that picture he's eating a cookie. This shows there are rules to this grammar structure and it's not just randomly putting be instead of the verb is. There's rules to this.

These are some of the most famous examples where people will say those are just breaking the rules of English, but they're not. They're still following rules, they're just not the same as your rules. And when people do break those rules, people who speak that dialect can tell.

There are rules, in other words, that govern the correct usage of "Black English," as Woody's guest calls it, just as there are rules that govern the correct usage of "standard English." Are these rules also oppressive? On what grounds is standard English oppressive for imposing rules on speakers while Black English is not for doing the same thing? Would it not be invalidating and oppressive to tell a speaker of Black English that "Elmo be eating cookies" is the wrong answer? Can "Elmo be eating cookies" not just be how that person speaks? After all, prescriptivism is oppressive, according to Woody, and the only thing that matters is to understand how the language is actually used. Why cannot another perfectly valid dialect arise which ignores this habitual be rule? Who is Woody, a white man, to tell a black person that they are speaking their own dialect incorrectly?

And this observation, that "people who speak that dialect can tell" when you are breaking its rules, is not even not the complete picture. Of course it isn't, and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Rare indeed is the person who speaks their language and/or dialect with perfect grammatical precision at all times, as if this is necessary to legitimize it in the first place. If, as Woody says, rules are not necessary to grant legitimacy to a dialect, what, then, is the purpose of pointing out that Black English has rules? Are these rules legitimate while the rules of standard English are not? It is incoherent to assert that correcting someone's grammar is intrinsically oppressive and that Black English is valid only because it has rules for its grammar. The existence of rules necessarily indicates that contravening them is incorrect. Woody cannot both insist that no application of language is incorrect and that Black English has rules too. These assertions are incompatible.

There is but one escape from this contradiction: Woody may reply that the "rules" of Black English are merely descriptive rules. They are not intended to bind its speakers, but are only patterns of speech observed by linguists. Therefore, no oppression or invalidation occurs when we point them out, and no speaker of Black English who flouts them is actually speaking "incorrectly." The issue then arises that it is unclear why this same deference is not offered to the rules of standard English. Why cannot they be considered merely descriptive? Why is it oppressive to declare "she were at the park" incorrect, yet not oppressive to declare so for "Elmo be eating cookies"? If Black English can have rules that are oppression-free, why not standard English? One may answer that this distinction stems from the oppressive history through which standard English became the standard, but this history of oppression does not assert itself at every application; one does not inflict centuries' worth of violence upon others by correcting their grammar, not least because an attempt to correct someone's grammar can be harmlessly rebuffed. The woman expressing irritation at grammar she has deemed incorrect on TikTok does not have the full force of institutional subjugation at her control; she is just saying something on the Internet, and while the historical context of her opinion may be sordid, her expression as an individual does not carry its weight. There is, in other words, absolutely no coercion involved, and no consequence for ignoring her or telling her to screw off. At the point of contact, a speaker of standard English correcting someone and a speaker of Black English correcting someone are committing the same degree of oppression: none.

After this, Woody makes a point that strains one's ability to remain assured that he is making these points in good faith.

For example, you might have seen this girl before.

Hombre.

Now when people asked her to say certain things to see if she was faking it or not, one of the things she said was this.

Aaron earned an iron urn.

And that gives her away because she also said this.

I've lived in Georgia for a decade.

But growing up in Atlanta wouldn't lead someone to speak like that. That feature is famous for Baltimore accents.

So you can tell that she's not a native speaker of that dialect because she's violating the rules of her dialect because Atlanta people don't say that.

In case it isn't clear from seeing this exchange written out, Woody is asserting that a woman on social media is lying about where she lives and how she speaks because her accent doesn't match what you would expect from someone with such background. Put another way, the man who fails at several points in the video to contain his rage while describing how grammatical rules are oppressive because they invalidate the lived experience of minorities is calling a woman a liar because her accent defies the majority. Remember this line from earlier?

So, what I said in my video response to that was that you don't get to tell other people how to speak.

Apparently that "you" is not inclusive of Woody himself, who retains full privilege to tell other people when their manners of speaking are invalid. It should scarcely require elaboration to clarify how this is monstrously hypocritical. Notably, it remains hypocritical even if it is revealed that she is lying, because it is the phenomenon (i.e., someone has an accent that doesn't match where they live) that he is objecting to and presenting as evidence of malfeasance, not this particular case individually.

Before moving on, it must be pointed out that, once again, he has substantively changed someone's argument when responding to it. He replies by saying that she must be lying because she doesn't sound like one would after "growing up" in Georgia, but she only said she'd lived there "for a decade." Even if Woody is correct that growing up in Georgia would inevitably make you sound like everyone else in your community, surely it is reasonable that having only lived somewhere for ten years wouldn't completely alter an accent you'd gained elsewhere.

I suppose we must conclude that his propensity for misrepresenting other people's words is unintentional, otherwise his decision to include them, and completely enough to demonstrate that he has misrepresented them, would be difficult to account for.

The English language has rules.

Yes, I just explained some of those rules.

We learned those rules in grade school. No matter your class, we all learned those rules.

Okay? Which class taught you you can't say I'm gonna the park? Right? We all learned that. We all learned every rule of the entire English language for all dialects. Really? Okay. What order do adjectives go in? Right? Before the noun. Yes. But when you have multiple adjectives, which order do they go in? Why do you say big red car and not red big car? Right? When you have eight adjectives, which order do you put the adjectives in? Because I guarantee a native speaker will put it in pretty much the same order every single time, no matter who they are. Those are the rules that you were never explained in school. Okay? American high school or British school English classes are not teaching you how to speak English. They're literature classes, which are great classes that have their own value, but they're not teaching you how to speak language. They're not teaching you linguistics or the actual rules of the language.

This is incorrect. As an American, I can tell you from personal experience that high school English classes do, in fact, teach you about grammar and how to speak English. It should be pointed out that this retort (i.e., "high school English classes are not teaching you how to speak English") is what he offers in response to a very different claim (i.e., "we learned those rules in grade school"). It is, of course, up for debate whether this was an innocent mistake or an attempt to subtly reframe the claim into a version that he (erroneously) assumed would be easier to defeat.

Additionally, this seems like a sly move on his part, as the phenomenon that native speakers tend to order adjectives in a particular way is not, as far as I know, a rule of English in the same sense that matching pronouns and verb conjugations is a rule. "Red big car" is not incorrect, it just sounds strange. Regardless, this whole section appears misplaced. The fact that there may be rules of English that are not explicitly taught in school has nothing to do with the video's overall argument, and, in fact, seems like yet one more contradiction, given that he is saying here that rules, which he says are oppressive, absolutely do exist, and with such potency that they need not even be taught.

His video's thesis is becoming more confused, contradictory, and fragmented the longer he goes. In fact, only a few seconds later he contradicts his own contradiction:

The point is you probably learned a few rules that were real. You learned some rules that were made up or based on Latin, which English is not even descended from, or you just didn't learn the rules.

So he encountered the claim that people learn the rules of English in grade school, retorted that nobody learns the rules of English in high school, and then concedes that you learn some rules of English in an unspecified phase of school. At this point, if you were to ask me whether I believe that Woody believes that you learn the rules of English in school, I would have less of a clue than before I even knew who he was.

Furthermore, he has introduced some subdivisions into the rules of English that he really ought to expand upon. "Rules that were real"? "Rules that were made up"? Earlier, he declared that all grammatical rules are made up:

But it [making a grammatical "mistake"] actually does [mean the "mistake" is correct] because if that is how the language is actually spoken, then that is literally how the language is spoken. If it wasn't spoken that way, then that would not be the language.

Is this distinction between "real rules" and "made-up rules" the origin of his concession that "I'm gonna the park" is incorrect? If so, does that mean he believes the rules of grammar can be divided into those which are oppressive and those which are not? On what grounds? Which ones? If the important part about language is just nonjudgementally observing how people speak, how can there be "real rules," and why would it matter which of those are based on Latin?

A lot of people see this, language changes over time, but "I don't like the way it changed for you because it's not the same way it changed for me." Literally, everything you say is a result of language changing and evolving. Nothing you say today would have existed the way it is now if language didn't change. Right? If you go back to Shakespeare's time, I bet he would think every single dialect that is spoken today is incorrect compared to the standards of his time.

There is a substantive difference between long-term, population-level evolution of a language and an instance of someone making a grammatical mistake. The gradual phasing out of "thou" and "thy," for example, is not a sufficient defense for the present-day conflation of "your" and "you're," not least because that would grant undue legitimacy to absurd linguistic trolling: If it is not possible for someone's communication to be incorrect on the grounds that language evolves over time, there is no grounds on which a sentence comprising an assortment of random words could be considered semantically invalid. If I begin, in earnest or in jest, to use the word "refrigerator" as a substitute for any conjugation of "to be," Woody is obliged to defend me because the standards of which I am in violation do not truly exist. If that seems too absurd, suppose a community of several hundred people start doing it too. Is that a valid evolution of the language? What if several million start doing it too? The descriptivist cannot tell an individual fomenting this change on purpose for the lulz that they are wrong, because there is no such thing as wrong. The worst he could say is that my strange refrigerator dialect is perfectly valid but not comprehensible to anyone else, but this calls into question what this validity is even worth. If there cannot exist a manner of speaking which is not valid, then the trait of validity, in this context, is devoid of meaning.

Put simply, if knowledge that a dialect is "valid" tells you nothing about it because all dialects are valid by default, the motivation behind Woody's strenuous efforts to establish validity is unclear. It would be like if I declared that all dogs, immutably and without exception, have the quality of X-ness, and then became very upset when you told me that this isn't a useful construct.

A counter might be that Woody is using "valid" as a shorthand for "useful in practical contexts for communication," but this doesn't hold water because he doesn't mince words when declaring that dialects are valid purely by virtue of the fact that they are spoken (leading, consequently, to the conclusion that a completely manufactured one-person dialect is equally valid), but also because, as we will see shortly, he himself asserts that standard English is preferable for communication.

The obvious counterpoint is that the prescriptivist cannot draw a line in the sand and declare that a grammatical error has suddenly reached the proper level of proliferation to have become the new standard. This is a fair shortcoming of my perspective, and I don't have a great retort. But it seems to me more convincing than Woody's perspective, which is that grammatical rules occupy an odd superposition of valid and invalid, real and made up, oppressive and innocuous.

Why are we all being tested to a white person's standard and not to an African-American standard?

In other words, on what grounds is standard English deemed the standard against which other dialects are measured? Why don't we center Black English this way, and declare that neglecting to use the habitual be is what constitutes an error?

An answer to this objection will become more relevant shortly, so I will put a pin in it for now.

And even then, there are things that are generally considered breaking grammatical or semantic rules that we still use all the time that people don't complain about. For example, monkey see, monkey do. In any other context, that wouldn't be considered grammatical. Long time no see. How often do people get corrected for that even though it doesn't make grammatical sense. What about this one? The proof is in the pudding. Grammatically, that's okay. The words are in their correct places, but semantically, it doesn't make sense. What do you mean the proof is in the pudding? Right? Is this Is this the answer to some murder case and the weapon is literally inside a pudding? Right? If it's not something like that, then semantically, it doesn't make any sense. Pudding doesn't have proof for anything except what's actually inside it.

This is very weak. The existence of figurative language has no bearing on whether grammatical rules are valid or not.

I'm not saying people should walk around correcting strangers in casual conversations. That's usually unnecessary.

That's exactly what I'm talking about, dog! That's what she did in the video.

To clarify, he is now referring again to the woman who posted a video complaining about people saying "we was."

Okay, she wasn't talking about, "Oh, I'm a teacher and my students are writing their academic essays saying 'we was.'" She didn't say, "oh, I'm teaching an American actor how to mimic my dialect and they keep saying 'we was' instead of 'we were.'" That's not what she's talking about. She's talking about people in casual conversation talking to their friends and family. People could be halfway around the freaking world. She said "I hate when people say 'we was.'" They could be talking about anyone. They could be talking about other people in the UK. They could be talking about people in America, freaking New Zealand, South Africa, all over the world. There's some people who talk like that. They can talk like that to their friends and families in casual conversations. You don't have the right to tell them that they can't. You don't have authority over their language.

The woman published a video declaring that "we was" is incorrect. Therefore, she is attempting to defy the right of other people to speak freely, and is asserting a false sense of "authority over their language."

Woody published a video declaring that speakers of Black English who eschew the habitual be are incorrect, and that people whose accents do not conform to where they claim to have grown up are liars. However, he is not attempting to defy the right of other people to speak freely, and is not asserting a false sense of "authority over their language."

As the video's title says, to "correct" someone's grammar is problematic... unless you are Woody.

And now we arrive at the moment when he gives the game away:

And I'm not saying there's a problem with learning these so-called standard forms, okay? They function as a lingua franca. They have a lot of uses that are useful to a lot of people.

Later on, he restates this idea:

Again, if you're writing a formal paper in an academic setting, there's a standard for that because it needs to be clearly understood by people who could read this research from all over the world.

He also states it in the context of nonnative speakers learning English:

[...] I'm not saying there's a problem with learning these so-called standard forms, okay? They function as a lingua franca. They have a lot of uses that are useful to a lot of people.

Like a flimsy house of cards, the last remaining vestige of a good point that Woody could salvage from this video collapses. Why should we accept standard English as the standard, as opposed to any other dialect? Woody spells it out: because that is the form of English that "functions as the lingua franca" and is intelligible "all over the world." There can scarcely be a more practical argument in favor of recognizing a standard, and it is endorsed by the man who created this video ostensibly to demonstrate why recognition of a grammatical standard is problematic.

This also lays completely bare the disingenuous comments he'd made earlier about how adherence to grammatical rules is pointless because grammatical errors still "do the job" and have no adverse effects on communication. By now it is beyond clear that Woody doesn't have a coherent thesis, let alone a set of cogent arguments to employ in its favor. All of the following are arguments that Woody has made:

This rhetorical whiplash is truly baffling, but in time we arrive at information that seems to inform why Woody is so impassioned about all of this:

And even then, because the standard is associated with one particular demographic, that creates real-world problems. For example, this first study. Non-standard accents are proven to be hired less, to be seen as less hireable by jobs, and it specifically says, "Not because of their comprehensibility, not because of a failure to be understood by the customers or clients." Just because they don't speak the standard. Nothing to do with their intelligence or their competence at the actual job. Ah, that's just one study, right? Look at this one. They show a consistent bias against working class. What about this one? Hispanic and female voices judged more negatively, consistently. This one shows that opinions aren't based on the actual truth of grammar, one being correct or the other. The opinions are always based on the perception of the speakers of those dialects. The opinions of Black American English being wrong are negative because the opinions of Black Americans are negative. It's not just in English, either. Regional German accents have been proven to be viewed as less hireable. Accents and dialects that are closer to the standard are typically strongly viewed as more attractive. And a lot of urban dialects, which also happen to typically be multi-ethnic, are systematically downgraded. This research found that accents are actually more important for judging someone's someone's ethnicity than looks. Our opinions of these accents are so pervasive that children are affected by them. This study showed that children with a northern accent from Illinois would rather make friends with children with other northern accents from Illinois than children with southern accents from Tennessee. While the children with southern accents showed no preference either way. Those children were as young as five and six years old. Children 9 and 10 years old viewed the northern accent as being smarter and in charge, while the southern accent was viewed as nicer or kinder, going in line with the southern hospitality stereotype. John Baugh is a linguist who coined the term "linguistic profiling," which he's been studying for decades, finding that people who don't speak the standard typically get denied housing opportunities more than other people.

It is astonishing to me that Woody buries this information eight pages deep, electing instead to portray a smattering of randos on TikTok as proof-positive of linguistic bigotry. This is the information that should be front-and-center. In fact, this information should be the focus of the entire video. Why, in the midst of so much heinous and consequential bigotry, does he portray correcting people's grammar as the problem? Posting a video about how people saying "we was" irritates you is of such infinitesimal consequence when compared to this mountain of studies showing that people are actually suffering. Why is so much of his ire directed at people with no institutional power merely for having opinions he thinks are distasteful while the critique of bigots actually ruining people's lives doesn't even get a mention until near the end?

A counter to this might be that he is presenting correcting people's grammar as of the same mindset as denying housing to people with thick accents, or viewing someone as less intelligent because they sound southern. But this is transparently ludicrous. There is no reason to believe that most people who value adherence to standard English would approve of such inhumane treatment, nor that an inclination to prescriptivism predisposes someone to feel contempt for those who don't adhere to the standard. It is not a difference in magnitude, but in kind, and that is why these cannot reasonably be portrayed as two examples of the same phenomenon which differ only in severity. Lest we forget, Woody himself states in this video that standard English is preferable when your goal is maximally intelligible communication. That is a drink directly from the same well as "I don't like it when people say 'we was,'" and in neither case can we credibly accuse someone of endorsing such egregious discrimination. If one insists that merely the attitude begets discrimination, then Woody has happily offered himself as an example of someone to be condemned for it.

Really, this tenuous and implied connection between preferring standard English and perpetuating discrimination should have been what he spent the video discussing. The link between them is not self-evident, and though one may find an aesthetic bias against other dialects distasteful, it bears demonstration of how this results in oppression. By no means am I declaring that it cannot be the case, only that he has not done the work to provide the evidence. Absent that evidence, I find it distasteful that Woody presents these people as of the same breed as those guilty of denying housing or jobs to minorities. Those who perpetuate discrimination are a common enemy to good-natured people, including those who find themselves chafed at nonstandard English. At this point, the video begins to reek of the familiar black-and-white, us-versus-them Culture War mentality: either you agree with Woody about grammar, or you are complicit in the oppression of minorities.

Even when presented with a commenter who declares something abhorrent, he still constructs a strawman in its place:

It's called "Speak the formal dialect that is the current standard which should be spoken if somebody wants to be treated seriously.

If you speak Black American English, if you don't speak the way I want you to speak, you do not deserve to be taken seriously. You deserve to be denied housing opportunities. You deserve to be denied jobs, no matter how good your performance at those things are. You deserve to be denied it because you don't speak the way I want you to speak.

Somebody saying "speak the formal dialect if you want to be treated seriously" is already demonstrating an abhorrent mindset. The roots to racism there are much clearer. Why, then, does Woody put words into this person's mouth by baselessly assuming they approve of housing and job discrimination? Was the commenter's argument not trivial to counter as is? It did not require this dishonest embellishment to defeat! It would not be a difficult affair to formulate a counter against the comment as stated, but he just cannot help himself. Allowing oneself to be bested by an argument so flimsy and racist is an embarrassing showing for one's rhetorical skill.

Prior to this comment, he addresses another that is even more inflammatory, and I think it is telling the way he responds (or, more accurately, how he does not):

One's presentation to the outside world informs those who pay attention to who you really are, unless you've studied to deceive. To say something is different does not exclude it from also being totally wrong and inaccurate. Sorry for your feelings, but sometimes wrong is just plain wrong. Not a different way to say it, not an accent, but flat out wrong. Ebonics seems to fit your weird criteria for situational correctness. And yet it is a form of illiteracy clear to all who have eyes to see and ears with which to hear.

This is racist. "It's clear to all who have eyes to see and ears with which to hear." Like it cannot get any more obvious. They're literally just saying the way black people speak is a form of illiteracy. Like do I have to freaking explain it anymore? And I really get a kick out of this part:

It's okay. Experts will tend to offend just as whatever you are will tend to placate to avoid offending, rendering your opinions tainted and moot. I sure hope you got other stuff besides these entertaining videos to keep you going.

I'm literally the expert in this. You are not. You're obviously the one getting offended, so uh whatever. Let's move on.

Woody does not even bother to offer a substantive response to this person. He says, "this is racist," "I'm an expert," and "lol no u," and moves on without further comment, and I cannot begin to fathom why. He is willing to dedicate minutes of his video arguing against someone for disliking "we was," but cannot even muster the effort to respond to someone who accuses people speaking other dialects of being illiterate? Someone who may or may not be faking their city of origin gets him riled up enough to call her a liar, but someone who implies that speaking Black English "informs" something sinister about "who they really are" barely gets a mention? Shouldn't this comment, which seems to drip in contempt for minorities, be the sort you pinpoint as connected to mindsets which give rise to housing discrimination? Why do you scrutinize a comment like this so much less zealously than someone merely talking about how improper grammar irritates them?

As the video wraps up, he leaves us with a couple more strawmen:

The point is let people talk to their friends and family in their native speech.

Absolutely nobody featured in this video, even the people who left the genuinely racially charged comments, indicated any desire to prevent people from doing this.

It's not wrong just because it's not white or not wealthy or not just like you.

And absolutely nobody who claimed that nonstandard English is incorrect said they believe so because it's "not white or wealthy or just like them." Even the commenter who went out of their way to use the term "Ebonics," probably knowing that it's liable to ruffle people's feathers, indicated not liking it because it's "wrong," not because it wasn't white. I find it immensely hard to believe that almost anyone who espouses a preference for standard English does so on the grounds that it's "white and wealthy and just like them." That may be why it came to occupy its status as the standard, which is certainly a topic worth reflecting on, but that doesn't mean preferring adherence to it must therefore be founded on a bias toward whiteness or wealth. Several of the comments he discusses in the video mention preferring standard English because it best facilitates communication (a position Woody himself explicitly agrees with) irrespective of the historical context of why it does so. To conflate this preference with implicit approval of historical oppression is plainly incorrect, in much the same way that I prefer wearing shoes to walking around barefoot without approving of the third-world slavery that probably led to my shoes' construction. One can perfectly well recognize and lament that standard English arrived at its position through centuries of racism, oppression, and the privation of minorities while still preferring that people communicate that way because, for better or worse, we have arrived in a world where it best facilitates communication. This is not racist nor problematic, and it does not have a clear link to truly discriminatory behavior. It is this behavior which ought to occupy our attention and effort, because this is what actually has consequences for people suffering from discrimination.

Though I do smile to imagine Woody shouting down a random TikToker and then marching proudly up to a man whose accent cost him his job before insisting that he's done his part to solve racism. The point is that this whole thing is farcical. Woody has become a scholar in linguistics, but either cannot or will not articulate any consistent, cogent arguments. He is well acquainted with the consequences of discrimination and bigotry, but spends most of the video, including its title and thumbnail, talking instead about how being irritated by nonstandard English is actually the root of our ills. Grammatical rules are fake; grammatical rules are real; you can't tell people they're speaking wrong; this woman and these black people are speaking wrong; standard English is no better for communication than any other dialect; standard English is the best choice for communication. Pick a topic, and Woody is liable to wholeheartedly espouse both mutually exclusive perspectives within the span of one video. But what he absolutely will not do is make an effort to criticize people who are legitimately racist, and who use their racism to inflict suffering upon innocent people. Much easier than working to solve our problems is drawing a line between you and other people who agree that the problem ought to be solved, because at least drawing that line makes you feel like you've done something.

Racism, institutional oppression, and the coercion of people who speak in other dialects to adhere to standard English instead are all very real and very important problems in our society. I think they deserve more attention than what Woody has decided to give them.

#culture #rationality