El Bloombito

A good question in the comments on this post by someone named Bernard:

I often wonder why the faculty to imitate an accent (≈ speak phonetically correctly) and to speak a language morphologically / syntactically / semantically / idiomatically /… correctly seem to be so independent – and why the latter has so little impact on people's judgement.

(This case may be a bit different, as anything beyond the phonetics is probably not Bloomberg's anyway.)

In other words, why can you learn to speak a language correctly, except for the phonetics and prosody, and still sound like a fool. Why can learners acquire all the rest of it, grammar, vocabulary, etc... without acquiring the phonetics? Why do phonetics enter in so strongly into our perception of speakers, so that, for example, a person with a relatively slight foreign accent (to my ears) and impeccable grammar will be told sh/e can't speak English at all?

Why am I tolerant of people speaking English in a wide variety of accents, but relatively intolerant of accents of non-Hispanophones trying to speak Spanish? (Well, maybe because I'm a Spanish teacher, duh.)

Descriptive and Prescriptive

There is a lot of confusion about what "descriptive" and "prescriptive" grammar mean. I'm here to straighten you out. I'm not a linguist, but often I have to play one in the classroom. This is what I've learned, mostly from reading Language Log:

All linguistics is descriptive, in the sense that it tries to describe what the grammar of a language actually is, to discover the inner laws of a language. A descriptive grammarian does, in fact, think that there are ungrammatical sentences. For example, people in English say "By no means do I agree." They don't say *"By no means I agree." Grammar is largely unconscious, because nobody pulls aside a 4-year old and teaches her this rule: After an expression like "by no means," invert the subject and the verb. In fact, I do not even know, myself, the set of circumstances the require this inversion. I could figure it out perhaps, but then I would be doing linguistics.* Speakers of the language don't need to know this information to perform this inversion. I do it perfectly every time.

When faced with a prescription, or a recommendation of usage, the descriptive linguist tries to see whether it is a real grammatical rule or a zombie rule. For example, my second sentence in this post ends with a preposition. It is a perfectly good grammatical sentence in English, right? You can't say "*I'm here out you to straighten" or *"I'm here to straighten out you." So probably the idea of not ending a sentence with a preposition is a fake rule that doesn't have anything to do with English grammar. Linguists would also look to the writing of great and / or prestigious writers to see what they actually do, rather than deriving grammatical rules from principles of logic or from their own prejudices. If all the great writers in French use the language in a certain way, this cannot be wrong, because there is no grammar god to overrule the norm established by the language in its actual use, the norma loquendi. Grammar is actually evidence based, in this sense.

I wouldn't write "I'm here to straighten you out" in an academic paper. It's too informal. The descriptive grammarian knows that there are differences in register and dialect, but never confuses these differences with grammar per se. A dialect of English, even a stigmatized one, is going to have its own grammar, or its own rules, that the linguist might be interested in studying. A dialect considered substandard is still governed by unconscious rules. The prescriptivist is too intent on stigmatizing and peeving to even notice that there might be something interesting going on in a different dialect of a language.

The ordinary person uses the word grammar to refer to a wide range of issues: spelling and punctuation, usage and dialect, register, even pronunciation. A person like this often only perceives "grammar" when there is a violation, usually a violation of a rule that isn't even a rule in the first place. The linguist tends to reserve the word grammar for syntactical relationships.

***


*Possibly the rule is "When the first word of a sentence is a negative adverbial type thing, invert the subject and verb." To see if I am right, my next step would be to see if these conditions apply. I know that I would say "Never have I heard of such a thing" but not "*Always do I go to bed at one." I am getting somewhere, very slowly.

El cante cante

I was listening to Flamenco podcast and someone referred to "el cante cante," using a classic contrastive focus reduplication.. (I love techinical terms like this.) Cante means "singing," basically, but it is not the same word as "canto" or "canción." The word cante is specific to the Flamenco ambience, in fact. A "cantaor" is not the same thing as a mere "cantante" or singer. A bailaor is not a bailarín either. So the person talking about "cante cante" meant real Flamenco song, unmixed with anything else. In fact he said, it wasn't "cante fusión," but "cante cante." I think the complete sentence was something like "El cante era el cante cante, no el cante fusión sino el cante cante."

Another quiz

What do support poles, staff positions, battery terminals, army encampments, blog articles, earring stems, trading stations, and snail mail have in common with billboard advertising, accounts recording, making bail, and assigning diplomats?

This one, also from Pullum, becomes easier simply because of the sheer number of elements.

More Idioms

What is an idiom, anyway? Obviously any common use of language is idiomatic (as opposed to being non-idiomatic). A phrase like "common use" is idiomatic because it sounds natural, but it is not an idiom.

An idiom might be defined by being

(1) More than one word?

(2) Unpredictable in meaning from the primary dictionary definitions of the component words?

(3) Metaphorical or figurative in some way?

I put question marks here because I am not sure. For example, the idiom "begging the question" is not metaphorical. Nor is "echar de menos..." (missing something). Echar mean toss or throw, but missing someone does not involve throwing in the metaphorical sense. Buying the farm is a metaphor, but not all idioms are of this type.

Can an idiom be only one word? Idiomatic uses of words as exclamations or greetings might fall into that category. "¡hombre!" in Spanish can mean "of course what you're saying is true, but.... " or "what the hell" any number of other things. Calling someone "m'hijo" when they are not your son is idiomatic too, right? Or using the word "cielo" as a term of endearment.

Are one word idioms different than fixed phrases? Or are they fixed phrases that just happen to have one word in them? Like "Vaya..." meaning "would you look at that, it's pretty ridiculous."

So what we've discovered so far is that idioms are phrases whose meaning is not determined by the primary lexical definitions of the component words, which may or may not be metaphorical, which are can be words or phrases. Idiomatic words tend to be terms of endearment, exclamations, greetings, or possibly one-word metaphors. They have to be familiar parts of the language. I can say I'm under the weather but not "I'm off my garlic." That would be a perfectly acceptable idiom, but it's not because I just invented it on the spot.

Semantic Prosody

More thought about the idiom principle.

The British linguist John Sinclair developed the term "semantic prosody.' This is not really prosody at all, but the connotational pattern in which a word is found. For example, the word "budge" might have a pattern for being used in situations of recalcitrant resistance. Sinclair says that the word "happen" has a semantic prosody of negative events. In other words, the word happen is more likely to be found connected to words like "accident."

What makes this kind of linguistics possible are the existence of huge corpora of language use. You don't simply ask a native speaker for her intuitions about the word budge, but instead you look at a huge corpus of authentic material and see what actually happens. Sinclair's motto was "trust the text."

I'm finding Sinclair's book Trust the Text to be very stimulating reading. My idea is to give a course for advanced language students (the highest level language course we have for undergraduates graduating with a major in Spanish) on idioms and proverbs. Students will learn idioms, increasingly their fluency, and also explore some the concepts developed by linguists like Sinclair. I think certain words in Spanish proverbs have a certain "semantic prosody." Think of the word pan or bread. The meaning of this word is its semantic prosody, its tendency to co-occur with other words or concepts. A refranero of sufficient size would then constitute a corpus in which to analyze the "co-text" of certain words.

As Barthes wrote of LaRochefoucauld, you can look at an aphorism for its individual meaning, or structurally. We can learn the meaning of dozens of individual idioms (a valuable thing to do) or we can look for patterns, the semantic prosody of idioms.

The word santo occurs in several idioms. "No es santo de mi devoción." (He is not saint to which I am particularly devoted.) Or "a santo de qué" (what the hell gives you the right?). One thing we could do, then, is look for the semantic prosody of idiomatic uses of this word.

My hypothesis is that the proverb is the idiom at the level of the sentence. You could use part of a proverb in another sentence, citing it fragmentarily or paraphrasing it. Then that part of the proverb would be an idiom or modismo.

Linguistics

I had a graduate student once, in a course on literary theory. In the course I had been explaining some basic background relating to Saussure and structuralism. We covered some Chomsky in this course: his idea of universal grammar. I am not a linguist, but I thought it would be useful to explore some of this background to see where some key concepts of modern literary theory came from. We explored the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which most people are interested in debating. Almost everyone has an opinion about whether language influences the thoughts we have, or not. This was just basic material I thought every educated literary critic ought to know about. So this student in my office one day says "i hate linguistics." Nothing in the course had been of interest to him so far.

Thanks a lot. It really helped me to know that you were an idiot right from the beginning. Why would you think your emotions about linguistics were interesting to me? Your dislike for the discipline is a fact about you, not a fact about linguistics. It shows you are lacking in intellectual curiosity, for one thing. Some things are going to be more interesting to you than others, but I don't really care. Please keep it to yourself because nobody else is going to really going to take your opinion seriously.

You complained that nobody else cared about the one issue of importance to you. But when you wrote about this issue, you turned in a piece of crap to me. So I guess you didn't care either.

Beginning

Spanish students often invent the word "la empieza" for "the beginning," unaware that other Spanish students have already invented this word countless times in the past. The correct word that they are looking for is "el comienzo" or "el inicio."

It's kind of interesting, actually. Empezar, iniciar, and comenzar all mean "to begin." So the student is deriving a noun from a verb her subconscious, grammar-making mind. The only mistakes he is making are choosing the wrong verb and choosing the wrong gender for the noun. The fact that many students make the exact same mistake indicates that this is a natural path for the grammar-making mind to make. It is not cause by interference from English (which causes students to write "explanación" for "explicación) but an internal to Spanish morphological operation. They are producing a Spanish word they have never seen in an authentic text.

I still wish they wouldn't do it though.

***

BS will be on hiatus until January 1. Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate that holiday.

Scholarly or academic writing has its own specific pragmatics. By this I mean its strategies for engaging in certain speech acts like promising, reprimanding, acknowledging, apologizing; its rhetorical strategies of politeness (hedging, qualifying, professing modesty in order to earn good will, emphasizing agreement with others); its choices of particular registers and information structures that fulfill a pragmatic function; its direct engagements with potential readers through appeals to these readers' interests, prejudices, complicity, and previous knowledge; the use of humor; the judicious employment of objective and subjective modes of discourse, etc... Those are the main points that come to mind, though I'm sure if I sat here longer there would be more dimensions of this pragmatics.

These strategies are never taught explicitly as such. We absorb them from scholarship itself, or learn them from corrections made to our writing. The ideal scholarly voice in our heads is confident and judicious without being arrogant or stuffy. If we write in a parody of the scholarly voice we have absorbed the outer forms of scholarly pragmatics but not its inner necessities.

Violating certain codes of scholarly pragmatics can be fun and risky. These violations should be deliberate acts, not accidental slips.

In politeness theory, there is an imperative to 'Minimize the expression of praise of self; maximize the expression of dispraise of self.' . In scholarly writing there is an imperative to state one's conclusions as knowledgeable and authoritative while at the same time fulfilling this modesty maxim. Where I find a pragmatic dilemma is in self-citation, for example. When I cite something I myself have published, I might compensate with a mildly self-deprecatory tone. Or I might cite someone else who has said the same thing rather than citing myself.

There is also the agreement maxim' which states 'Minimize the expression of disagreement between self and other; maximize the expression of agreement between self and other.' This shows up in scholarly efforts to emphasize areas agreement where actually the writer does not agree on a more basic level.

Of course, Gricean conversational maxims also come into play. They seem a bit obvious, but even for that they may be worth remembering. For example: "Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence."

What is the passive voice really about? We might say it's about agency. When the agent is unknown, implicit from the context, or de-emphasized, the passive voice might be preferable:

"He was arrested nine times before the age of twenty."

"I've been shot!"

"My house was destroyed by hurricane Katrina."

These sentences will usually be preferable to their active forms. "The police arrested him nine times..." "A bullet hit me..." "Hurricane Katrina destroyed my house."

We might also think of the passive voice as describing what happened to the subject. In other words, "I've been shot" answers the question, "what happened to me," whereas "the bullet hit me" seems to be an answer to the question "what did the bullet do?" So what the passive voice is really about is perspective. Peter Parker was bitten by a spider, because the story is about Peter Parker. A spider biting PP would make the story about the spider.

Note too that these sentences can be vivid: "I've been shot!" is the reactions of someone who's been shot. "Somebody shot me" sounds like a periphrasis. With effective uses of the passive, nobody will complain about a lack of immediacy.

Notice that the passive voice is not invariably vague or evasive about agency. It can even make agency emphatic. "Yes, you were bitten by a dog, but I was bitten by a hyena." With the "He was arrested..." example, anyone would understand that it was the police, so there is no real evasion there. If you recast a passive sentence in the active, and come up with a word like "people" or "somebody," you know the reason why it was put in the passive voice in the first place.

Composition classes aim to enable students to write in an academic style and those succeed in college. These same classes often discourage the passive voice; yet academics themselves, especially social scientists and real scientists, love to use the passive voice. Students who write with a lot of passive verbs do so because they are emulating academic writing. They may be doing so ineptly, but that is what they are doing. The answer is not to discourage the passive voice, but to demonstrate its multiple uses.

I'm somewhat manic as you might have noticed. One solution that hasn't been working out too well is to have a few beers with dinner to slow myself down a bit in the p.m. It does *work*--but maybe a little bit too well. Anyway, since I didn't have those beers tonight, a little Spanish lesson.

Compare the words:

hembra / femenino

hijo / filial

maestro / magisterio, magistral

hierro / férreo

hacer / satisfacer

maduro / prematuro

fragua / fábrica

dueño, domar / dominar, dominio

Spanish evolved from Latin, and underwent certain phonetic changes. The first term in each pairing is the "evolved" form of the word (hembra from femina). The second, a cognate word or derivative adopted into Spanish at a later date, directly from the Latin, a cultismo, without the normal phonetic changes that the word should have undergone. The evolved words are similar to what we think of in English as "Anglo-Saxon" words, belonging fully to the vernacular. So "hierro," iron, is more colloquial than "férreo" (an adjective meaning iron-like). So phonology effects register: a more elevated vocabulary will be closer to Latin. If you study for a degree in "magisterio" you are studying to be a teacher, a maestra or maestro.

I'm trying to get a reading knowledge of Basque. The case system doesn't seem too intimidating. It has an ergative case, which means that the subject of a transitive verb has a separate case, and there's a dative for indirect objects. Direct objects and subjects of intransitive verb are in an absolutive, unmarked case.

The verbs are a little more complex. Most of the time there are two verbs, a participle form + an auxiliary form of to be or to have. The usual morphological markings for tense, aspect, person. Euskara is agglutinative and attaches determiners the the end of the noun phrase.

The lexicon will be more of a challenge, the only help being loan words from Spanish and Latin derivatives. My goal is to be able to read with a dictionary, kind of like I could do with German. I know enough German grammar to know which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc... but have to look up too many words.

Of the "four skills," reading is the easiest and also the most rewarding. For example, I can read Italian more or less, but couldn't speak it, write it, or understand very much orally. My goal is to have reading knowledge of all Romance languages. That covers all of the Iberian peninsula, except for Basque, so my new goal is to have knowledge of all Iberian + Romance languages. Romanian will be a bit of a challenge; I'll have to wait until I know Italian a bit better to make that jump.

I heard on an NPR newscast yesterday: "HIllary Clinton released tax returns for she and former president Clinton."

The classic hypercorrection. Nominative pronouns sound more formal. We are taught not to write "Him and me don't get along so good." So "for she" sounds more correct than the more natural (and grammatical) "for her." To avoid a grammatical mistake you make a grammatical mistake, since the correct form sounds too informal, somehow. People who go around saying "it is I" don't trust their own grammatical instincts as native speakers. Imagine you're looking at a police line up. You identify the subject. What do you say: "That's him" or "*That is he"? Only a misguided urge to be more "correct" leads to the second option.

But for some reason in compound nounphrases there is more tolerance either way. "For my father and I,... " That sounds almost ok. Nobody says "For I..." in place of "for me." Nobody says "Me went to the store," even though almost everyone says "Me and my dad went to the store."

"My family and I live in..." that sounds good. But not "*I and my family..." "*I and you have to talk" = ungrammatical. It has to be "You and I" or, colloquially, "Me and you."

So the hypercorrection "For she and the president" is the mirror image of the use of me, him, her, them, as nominative pronouns in longer noun phrases in colloquial speech.

From Garrison Keillor's column

"Should I accept financial advice from someone who uses Me as a subject?" she asked me.

No.

And now I am wondering if the upheaval in finance may not be the result of the raging epidemic of poor spelling we see all around us. .

The field of language seems particularly prone to a kind of "magical thinking." If we only knew how to SPELL then society would be on a proper footing. Yes. I'm sure all the wall street geniuses who gave us the sub-prime mortgage crisis did so because of misspellings. If people didn't say "aint" they woudln't spit on the floor either. Of course, Keillor is a humorist so I'm sure he doesn't mean this idiocy to be taken literally. It's a very literal-minded approach, though.

Pound was especially prone to this kind of magical thinking. He thought certain breakthroughs in usage of language could lead to a better society. We all saw where that led. Orwell too. Why if we just didn't use so much litotis, euphemism, and the passive voice, our political thinking would be cleared up.

Magical thinking, basically, is the idea that we can influence reality through the strict control of largely irrelevant minute particulars. A mistake in the performance of the ritual will make the gods angry. If nobody uses "disinterested" to mean "uniniterested" we will all think clearly ever after. If Bush had paid attention in philosophy class, we wouldn't be in Iraq. For some reason liberal, educated folk are more, not less prone to this kind of magical thinking, especially about language. I hear this kind of crap all the time from people who should know better.

For example, the idea that poets are anti-war because of their unique sensitivity to language and its political manipulation. Then why are the crappy poets anti-war too?

I'm even prone to it myself. I caught myself thinking: if Garrison Keillor had only read Creeley and Silliman instead of Bly and Collins, he wouldn't make that mistake!

I had to overcome it in my work on translation. I was thinking that if translation of Lorca had been better, we wouldn't have had all those cultural misunderstandings, as though a good enough translation would simply abolish the difference between cultures. I don't believe that any more.

English has no future.

As I undertand the point, (1) there are many uses of modal constructions with will, only some of which entail futurity.

(2) There are many ways to express futurity in English, only one of which is the modal construction with will.

So it is arbitrary to take the cases where (1) and (2) overlap and call those the "future tense" in English. You might as well call some other construction the future tense--the periphrastic "going to..." construction for example.

Compare to Spanish: there is a dedicated verbal form for the future. This form can also be used for other, non-futurity cases:

Tendrá sueño might mean "she is probably sleepy," rather than "she will be sleepy." It is also used as an imperative, as the English will is.

There are also a periphrastic form for future events: Te voy a matar, and other ways of expressing futurity which don't involve the dedicated verb form. So is there a future in Spanish? Is it arbitrary to call that verb form the future, when it can be used for other things, and other forms can be used in place of it? The fact that it is a morphologically distinct tense is the decisive factor here, I think.

I went to a barbecue and a stir-fry broke out.

Or something like that. My lame attempt at a joke based on on the boxing/hockey snow-clone.

What does "literal translation" really mean? Is it a translation of literal meaning, or a kind mirroring of syntactical structure? Take reflexive constructions in Spanish. They are used in various ways:

The "true reflexive," in which the subject of the verb also is the direct object or indirect object.

Simply to make a verb intranstiive. Pierdo las llaves (I lose the keys transitive) vs. Me pierdo (I get lost). Depierto a los niños (I wake the children vs. "Me despierto" = I wake up.

To express the fact that one is eating or consuming all of something. Me comí todas las galletas = ( I ate all the cookies up.)

For an impersonal construction. "Se dice que..." (It is said that.)

As part of the lexical meaning of a verb, but without any reflexive connotation. "Me voy" (I'm leaving)

Reciprocal: Se quieren mucho (they love each other a lot)

etc...

Now in English, the reflexive structure is used mostly if not exclusively for the "true reflexive." So most of the time a "literal" translation of one of these other kinds of reflexive verbs will not involve a reflexive in English. "I go myself" is not a "literal" translation of "Me voy." Nor is "Spanish speaks itself" a "literal" translation of "se habla español." The phrase doesn't mean that in Spanish. So "word-for-word" translation or "syntax mirroring" is not "literal."

A "literal" translation of "voy entendiendo que.. " is not "I go understanding" but "I'm coming to the realization that..." In other words, that is what that phrase actually means. An overliteralistic, word by word, parsing of the syntax doesn't result in accurate translation at all and doesn't even deserve to be called "literal." Put in another way, so-called literal translation may require paraphrase.

All aspects of language are relational in the same way that aspect in verbal tense is. (As David S. suggests to me in an email this morning.) Taking Jakobson's six dimensions of communication as a model, there is the relation of the speaker to all the other five dimensions, the relation of the addressee to the speaker and all the other linguistic functions. The poetic function is not just the focus on the "message" in its phonological dimension, but the self-conscious attention to all six communicative functions.

For example, the channel of communication, the "phatic" dimension in RJ's jargon (gotta love that word!), might seem like one of the least promising from a poetic point of view. But who more than poets are attuned to to the "grain de la voix" or the quality of paper a text is printed on? Even the pneumatique at the bank's drive-up window is charged with poetic resonance.

Attention to code, to the language as code, is a given. Lyric poetry focuses intense interest on the addressee, so that's a given as well. And lyric subjectivity, the definition of the speaker's self, is in fact the main subject matter of modern and contemporary poetry.

Where poetry seems the nakedest if not the thinnest is in context, or the "referential" function in Jakobson's terms. That is, poetry doesn't seem to be about anything. "Subject-matter" is minimal, in relation to the other five elements. This is because attention is diverted to the other five elements with great intensity, so that all aspects of communication are intensified, but at the expense of what normal people call "communication."

***

Despite this, I'm interested in a poem's "referential field," that is, in what gets mentioned and what is left out. For example, imagine a novel in which none of the characters are depicted as eating anything. Don Quixote has great troubles because he wants to live within a referential field, defined by certain chivalric romance novels, in which certain bodily functions are never mentioned. It bothers me in Henry James novels when the narrator wants to present a certain character as highly intelligent or sensitive, but never puts in an idea or observation of the character.

What would a theory of poetic reference look like? One way to look at it would be to compile a lexicon for a given poet. The lexicon would basically describe a referential circumference--not only the nouns but also the verbs and adjectives, even the prepositions and adverbs. Really what would be interesting is the limitation of the lexicon, that is, the words that do not appear. A large number of words would hold less interest, because there would be no exclusions: the referential horizon would be too large to be meaningful.

So maybe poetry does in fact focus attention on referentiality, but in a peculiar way, through a pattern of exclusions.

Here's my pet peeve: people who have pet peeves.

My biggest objection is to people who think they way they happen to say something is better than that of the speaker of some other dialect or regional variety of whatever language they speak.

I say "waiting for" someone not "waiting on" someone (unless in the context of a server in a restaurant.) When I moved to Ohio once upon a time I noticed that people there said "wait on." It did bug me at first, but then when I went other places, I noticed that people there used it too. I even heard it back in California, where I am from. I never heard it growing up, but now it seems like it's taken over most places.

Speaking of "over". My students will ask me what the paper is "over." It's not "over" anything, in my dialect; it may be on or about something, but never "over." (A test can be over something, but not a paper.) Yet ultimately what can you do? It's not one student who says this, but almost every single student, so I have to accept that as just something people say. My earlier hypthesis was that the students were mis-applying the concept of a test to the context of a paper. A test can encompass a certain amount of material, but an essay does not. Now I think it's just a preposition. Who cares what preposition someone uses?

It would be interesting to study folk beliefs about language, using people's complaints about phrases they don't like or think incorrect as the evidence.

1. Language is fundamentally logical, and phrases that can't be taken literally should not be used.

For example, on one of the sites in which people were complaining about phrases, several complained about the phrase "There you go," (a server says this when setting food down for you at a restaurant) on the grounds that no, "I am not going anywhere."

2. Labels are descriptions

A preposition must come before something because the prefix "pre" means before.

3. The true meaning of a word is its etymology.

4. What my English teacher taught me must be right.

5. The true meaning of a word is what it meant in my parents' (grandparents') generation.

6. Linguistic change is (almost always) for the worse.

7. My dialect is better than other people's.

8. A word should only be one part of speech.

If something is more noun than verb, you shouldn't use it as a verb.

9. It is possible to protect or improve a language "academically."

The motto of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language is "Limpia, pule, da esplendor."

10. Younger people speak worse than older ones.

(see also number 6 and number 5)

11. A word's correct pronunciation should reflect its morphology

Someone objected to the pronunciation "kil-Ometre" alleging that "there is no such thing as an 'Ometer.'" He preferred to pronunciation "KIlo-MEtre," which is his right. But there is no inherent reason why the word should break up phonetically into its morphemic structure.

12. Americans speak worse than Britons.

13. If at any time someone has proposed to distinguish between two words, like "continuous" and "continual" or "uninterested" and "distinterested," that distinction should hold for all time.

You still find people saying you can only "rear" children, never "raise" them.

14. The writing system of a language is an essential part of its structure.

15. Variant pronunciations of words are signs of ignorance; the letters of a word should always be pronounced in the order in which they appear in the word.

I'm sure there are more such "folk beliefs." These are just the ones that occur to me.