WEIRD AL vs THE LINGUISTS

Dialects, linguistic goals, and calling Weird Al a dick a bunch of times

Please hit the ❤️ “Like” button at the top or bottom of this article if you enjoy it. It helps others find this article.

---

Fuck you, "Weird Al" Yankovic.

This is a direct quote I read from a friend’s Facebook post a decade ago.

A couple of my other friends piled on, saying in various colorful language how disgusted they were with Weird Al.

Weird Al. Come on. How can anyone be mad at the guy?

He's the most likable, wholesome guy ever.

Before we go on, let me be clear that this is not some post about Cancel Culture gone awry or commentary on the culture wars. Please shoot me if I ever start writing about that stuff.

This is about something much more important: Grammar.

My angry friends had listened to Yankovic's song, Word Crimes (a parody of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines). Blurred Lines itself was, to put it lightly, controversial. There were various parodies leaning into that controversy, punching up the rapey vibes.

Weird Al took it in another, seemingly innocent direction to talk about grammar.

So, what were my friends so mad about?

The angry friends were all linguists. Word Crimes is a song all about the "proper" way to use language:

Always say "to whom"

Don't ever say "to who"

and

You should know when

It's "less" or it's "fewer"

Like people who were

Never raised in a sewer

etc.

This is an explicitly prescriptivist way to talk about language. In this view, grammar is a set of rules prescribing how you use language. If you don't, you're using language incorrectly. 

The vast majority of linguists don't see language this way. They are instead descriptivists. Grammar describes how people use language, it does not prescribe how it should be used.

Why are linguists descriptivists? Because the rules of grammar aren't immutable. They change with time and context.

We know modern German has "gendered nouns"—nouns are assigned a gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Different versions of the German word for "the" are used depending on the gender: "der" for masculine, "die" for feminine (and “das” for neuter).

So "der Mann" is how you say "the man" while "die Frau" is "the woman".

The weird thing is, English used to have gendered nouns too. But over time, the grammatical rules changed. The words "the" and "that" (þe and þat at the time, we're talking Old English here) used to distinguish neuter from non-neuter nouns, but people gradually started using them differently, and the rules of grammar thus changed. Gendered nouns slowly faded out over the course of a few centuries, being pretty much gone by the end of the 14th century.

It isn't just that language changes over time—different cultural groups use distinct dialects with different grammatical rules.

For example, "African American Vernacular English" (AAVE) has different grammatical rules that linguists have studied.

One of the cool examples of where AAVE differs from what's called "Standard American English" is their use of the "habitual be":

She be singing.

This reads as ungrammatical to me and probably other Standard American English speakers. But for AAVE speakers, this carries meaning—and it isn't the same as "she is singing". It means she has a habit of singing, she does it regularly.

In an adorable illustration of this, one study showed children a video of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster watched. All children agreed "Elmo is eating cookies", but only Black children agreed "Cookie Monster be eating cookies", even though Cookie Monster wasn't actively eating cookies. Those kids know what's up with Cookie Monsters and cookies.

AAVE speakers speak a form of English that reads as ungrammatical to me, and presumably Weird Al. Why does that matter? I wouldn't get upset about someone using a different language than me. And the difference between a dialect and a language is notoriously arbitrary ("A language is a dialect with an army and navy").

Not following a particular grammar isn't a crime.

But Weird Al states such people should:

Go back to pre-school

Get out of the gene pool

Try your best to not drool

Trying to force everyone to speak the same way as you and saying if they don't they should "get out of the gene pool" seems, umm, not cool.

An unfortunate choice of album cover art by Weird Al given my point here.

Grammar use tends to tell you about the background someone was raised in or the context in which they are using language. Judging someone based on it is a bit like judging someone because of their accent (hence the fervor of my linguist friends, who are sensitive to these kinds of things). It's a dick thing to do.

Obviously Weird Al is joking and doesn't actually think anyone needs to get out of the gene pool, and the album art is part of the joke. I get it, I'm not saying "OMG WEIRD AL IS A NAZI CANCEL HIM"—I like Weird Al!

But this is a teaching moment that illustrates a point, and come on, the album art and lyrics make it too good to pass up the cheap shots.

Speaking of cheap shots, given it was linguists that got angry, these lyrics are a bit ironic:

Well, you should hire

Some cunning linguist

To help you distinguish

What is proper English

Perhaps Weird Al is the one who should hire a linguist. (Ooooh, buurrrn).

Communication goals and the Is-Ought Problem

Instead of judging language use based on a fixed set of rules, we can judge language use based on whether it is accomplishing the goal of the speaker.

If a speaker has a goal like "impress the person I'm speaking to in a job interview", and the interviewer is Weird Al, the speaker would want to follow the particular set of grammatical rules Weird Al likes because they heard he is a real dick about that stuff.

Imagine showing up to a job interview and seeing this

But speakers of African American Vernacular English are part of a community that presumably understands and uses the same dialect. Their goal is to communicate with that community, so their use of language can't be wrong because it is different from Standard American English.

Similarly, depending on context, we often "break" grammatical rules. We rarely use punctuation in text messages. We stopped capitalizing lol despite it being an acronym, and its meaning has evolved alongside internet culture. I had to write "WEIRD AL" all in caps for this article title to make sure people didn't read it as "Weird Artificial Intelligence". When we want to show we are being cheeky on social media, we'll often write in lowercase:

These are all creative uses of language, adopted because the distinction the traditional grammatical rules make doesn't help our communicative goals in our context (capitalizing in texts) or because breaking it gives us some new expressive power (concisely expressing cheekiness). That's cool, and we should embrace it instead of being dicks about it.

Of course, we can still make mistakes with language. We all fuck up language all the time. I forget the right word and say something vaguely similar to the word I mean, and that makes it harder for whoever is listening to me to understand.

We have English teachers teach grammar and spelling so that kids are better able to communicate in the standard way most people in their culture will understand, especially written communication since they get less practice with that unless explicitly practiced.

But making the judgment of if I am succeeding in my communication requires a much more nuanced understanding of my intended audience and communication goals, and should come with the acknowledgment we all have disfluencies in our use of language.

You can't just tell me I am doing it wrong because I'm not following the grammar of Standard American English.

There is a more general principle here articulated by David Hume: the is-ought problem. This idea is that you can't go from descriptive statements (something is the case) to prescriptive statements (you ought to do something). You need some intervening stuff.

So you can't go from:

These are the rules of Standard American English

To

You should follow these rules

You need some additional reasons since the "should" doesn't follow from the observation of grammatical rules. So you could add:

I want to impress Weird Al, and Weird Al won't be impressed if I don't follow these rules. 

Also, for the pedants:

I should take actions that get me what I want.

We had to put in a "should" to get a "should" out. We needed a goal or value to get us from observation about the world to a prescribed action.

That's it for now, but please keep everything above in mind as you read any of my writing. If you point out my typos, you are clearly a Nazi committing the is-ought logical fallacy (

Carrie Reid-Knox

please ignore that statement as you proofread).

---

Please hit the ❤️ “Like” button below if you enjoyed this post, it helps others find this article.

If you’re a Substack writer and have been enjoying Cognitive Wonderland, consider adding it to your recommendations. I really appreciate the support.