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I can’t make you dress like a grown-up.  If you don’t want to, don’t.  Just remember that if you don’t command respect, you won’t be respected.

The inimitable Jesse Thorn on how humans use dress as a form of communication.

This made me think of a disagreement I had with Jackie about linguistic prescriptivism — I was arguing that calling out people (specifically, um, me) for saying “less” instead of “fewer” was unnecessarily antagonistic, that saying “less” instead of “fewer” causes no additional ambiguity and is actually no less precise in meaning — when I say “there are less pigs in this field than there were before,” you know exactly what I mean, and you infer an identical picture as when I say “there are fewer pigs in this field than there were before.”

So. I’m no linguistic scholar, but it does bother me when people are picky about grammatical things. There is precise language, and then there is imprecise language — in all occasions, it makes little sense to me to aspire to technical correctness when aspiring to clarity is sufficient (and in some cases, not always the same).

That all being said, the Thorn piece, which I’d read earlier today, came back to me while I was sitting in math class (tangent point: it’s amazing the way unconnected ideas synthesize at the weirdest moments. I’ve done more cognitive work on my research while showering or making dinner than while, for example, sitting in class).

Thorn argues that dressing — specifically, “dressing like a grown-up” — is a form of tacit communication. It tells other parties, to some extent, how we view ourselves, how seriously we take our situation, how much we care about our impression. We judge each other implicitly based on our modes of dress the same way we judge each other based on adherence to social mores. Underdressing (or overdressing) is a faux pas, just like not holding a door or ignoring a proffered handshake.

This makes sense to me. I do draw conclusions based on the way people dress. It tells me if they are excited about their work, as opposed to apathetic and stagnant. It tells me if they woke up with purpose, or rolled out of bed five minutes before lecture. It tells me if they care what I think of them, or if they view me as an inferior, and the audience they’ve granted me as a favor.

I draw these conclusions because I have subconsciously used dress to convey these messages, without even realizing it. When I’m unhappy about the classes I’m taking, I not only roll in late and write sloppily on my problem sets, but I also don’t bother changing out of sweatpants and a hoodie. I will often keep the hood up. I’ll slouch. I’m basically putting on a big sandwich board that says “Fuck you guys, I don’t want to be here.”

So I started wondering if language is something similar. If I’m in a formal context, where I feel lucky to be there, when I’m on edge and excited and ambitious and bursting at the seams, is my grammar more prescriptivist? Would I remember to use “fewer” instead of “less” when, say, I’m presenting my research at the Academy meeting this September, in front of hundreds of physicians 20+ years my senior?

I think probably. And I think this is a natural thing — speaking with the same prescriptivist formality to friends as to mentors is like referring to your students as “sir” and “ma’am,” or like wearing a suit to your team’s fall kegger. It’s weird, and it’s interpreted variously as pretentious or “douchey.”

And then that got me to thinking — can we control this subconscious calibration? If we can make a determined effort to “dress for the job we want,” can we also “talk for the job we want”?

Do the prescriptivists have a point? Sure, I still think it’s not “technically incorrect” to say “less” when I mean “fewer,” but it’s not “technically incorrect” for my professor to wear pajama bottoms and a t-shirt to class — I would still judge him for it. The distinction between commonly-accepted lexicon and correctly-prescribed usage might not be a distinction between “right” and “wrong” language, but it might still not be a meaningless distinction. Perhaps the better phrasing is “formal” vs. “casual,” the way one might refer to a business’ dress-codes.

Thoughts?

I’ve made the analogy between writing style and uhh clothes-style before, so I think it’s sensible. Language has a social context, yes, and language use, like dress, is something we ratchet up and down according to formality and intimacy. I’d be willing to go a step further and say that there’s something performative about it, that dressing up in the clothes and talking the argot is about performing a role. You need those two things to play the part, right?

(It gets weird too. I remember Mary got an email about a party her office was throwing, and the dress was “casual” and there was a link to an image of people in “casual” clothes to explain what that meant. It’s like, wow, a casual dress code specified beforehand in an email memo titled “Attire”. That kind of premeditation strikes me as super performy, which is fine and probably necessary to nail the appropriate vibe.) 

I don’t think it’s correct to equate to a formal language register with prescriptivists. If you go by the clothing metaphor, staunch grammar-nazi types (coincidentally, strawpeople that do exist) would have us dress up in our Victorian best. Thinking about your conference talk example, something like the “less”/”fewer” distinction is a small and trivial detail compared to the rest of the linguistic persona you’re performing. To put it another way, can you turn a blog post into a graded college paper by passing Word’s style checker? No, there are also more important matters of format, organization, argument-style, and vocabulary.

I associate prescriptivists with pet peeves, pseudo-rules and antiquated ideals, unjustified and proscribed from authority on high. It’s pretty flimsy tradition-for-tradition’s stuff, and if you are going to do some published formal writing, you can fix those minor issues pretty quickly by skimming through a style guide. But it’s not really dressing for the job. Back to the academic example: Think of scientific Latin or citation style or the ways in which you are allowed to refer to yourself and the audience in your writing. That’s not your garden-variety pet-peeving or nit-picking. I mean, those things are prescribed and prescriptive, but it’s not “prescriptivist”. The specific, narrow context for those rules make them more like a uniform, and that is dressing for the job.

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