Grice on 'solecism'

Not that he USED the word -- because he KNEW.

I am pretty offended by people, like Donal McEvoy when they say I commit the occasional solecism.

He thinks that people don't speak like I do. That my allways, sic, his-self, goed, etc, are 'features of your illiterate status as a native speaker of the lingo'. "I don't blame you," he adds, "I commit the same solecisms when I go to Hungary".

But I protested.

Thales of Mileto, the founder of our discipline, was a solecist.

His papa was from Athens. His mama was from the Outskirts of Athens, but close enough (no cigar, though). Little Thales was however brought up in

"Soloi"

-- the Greeks are pretentious enough to pluralise the places they live in -- cfr. AthenS, Athenai).

Surely enough, Thales soon forgot the 'colloqualisms' of his native Athens, and started to 'corrupt' his way with words.

And the result was, abra ca dabra. A solecism.

I.e. a feature of a once lifelong native of a place when transferred to another. I know the feeling.

In the Argentine, everybody speaks of the 'camp'. ("I'm going to the camp over the weekend"). They mean, 'campo', i.e. countryside. It's a transfer. It's supposed to be _bad_ English, solecism. Camp is a military thing in standard English. But Anglo-Argentine English is NOT standard English. Not sub-standard, either, mind. But no hyper-standard, either.

They ARE said to articulate as if they have 'a plum in the mouth', but that's neither here nor there, and of course they FEEL and KNOW they are more English than the English!

But wasn't I delighted when I was reading a survey of English as spoken (as she is spoke, really) by the Kelpers in the F*ckland Islands. And they do say 'camp'. So how sub-standard can this be, how solecistic, when lifelong natives use it?

When my mother heard the gardener use some dialect ('espolon' for 'polon' referring to a body part of the lapwing) she was offended. My idea that the gardener's solecism was not such did not really convince her, but that's mothers for you. Hardly Gricean in nature.

When Beatrix Lavandera, the founder of Linguistics in Argentina, went to Labov in Washington, to write her PhD she focused on

LOW-CLASS districts
of Buenos Aires

vs. HIGH-CLASS
districts,
as LaRecoleta, where
I have my town-house, course! :)

She noted that in the choice of the verbal form in the apodosis of the conditional, the low-classers haven't got the faintest idea -- I protested: they do have the faintest idea --. They use the potential mode, when the subjunctive is what the Royal Academy of Spain recommends,

If I were a woman I would be a bitch.

They say, 'solecistically'

If I was a woman, I would be a bitch.

Of course,

"If you WERE the only girl in the world
and I "WAS" the only boy"

is the way Sir Noel Coward, in his ultimate act of inverted snobbery, has it in "The Compleat Noel Coward".

A solecism is not a solecism is not a solecism.