Blog conversations and pop linguistics

A few days ago, I talked about some language podcasts. One of the Word Nerds commented on that post, and I replied.

That whole “conversation” got me thinking about blogs, the internet, and connectivity in general. It amazed me that I was able to write about something, and the creator of that particular something was able to find what I wrote, comment on it, and hear my thoughts on his comment. I’m not sure how Dave found my blog (Technorati, maybe?), but I was almost shocking. When I wrote that post, I felt like I was “telling” people something - I didn’t expect it to become a full-blown conversation. When I saw Dave’s comment, it really struck me that the web is a two-way medium - not that I didn’t know that before, but having a personal example was very instructive.

One of the things that conversations do is they force you to think about things from a different perspective. Reviewing what I wrote about The Word Nerds, I was struck by the though that what I want from a language podcast isn’t something that’s more descriptive, but rather somethign that’s more technical (NB: I *do* want something more descriptive than A Way With Words). What I want is a Language Log-type podcast. And as the Internet has a habit of doing, thinking about Language Log reminded me of a set of posts there about the popularization (or not) of linguistics.

Mark Liberman points out that however annoying mis-/under-informed discussions of language may be to a trained linguist, at least the discussions are happening:

I’m very much in favor of better linguistics education in the general curriculum. More linguistic knowledge and more analytic skills and more practice in analysis and argumentation would surely be a good thing. But the pay-off, in my opinion, would be public discussion of language that is as vigorous, rational and well-informed as (say) public discussion of automobiles, computers, investments or court cases. And the way to get there is probably to encourage broader discussion — and therefore more nonsense — rather than less.

In a follow-up post, he invokes what he calls an inverse Gresham’s law“:

[O]pen intellectual communities intrinsically tend to generate a virtuous cycle: if there were an order of magnitude more science writing in blogs, there’d be less than an order of magnitude more crap, and more than an order of magnitude more good stuff

So maybe I should be happy that language podcasts exist at all (and I am). But I’m still allowed to wish there were a few more programs out there that delved into the theory a bit deeper than would be understood by an untrained language enthusiast.

Posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 2:47 pm. Categories: Linguistics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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