Is ‘Weird Al’ overreacting?

It’s not often we get to ask a linguist what she thinks of a YouTube video by Weird Al Yankovic, but as it turns out, Anna Moro thinks it’s pretty cool – even if it goes a little too far.

The linguist and associate dean of Humanities is one of more than 5 million people who have watched the singer’s latest video, posted to YouTube July 15.

The song, a parody of the pop hit “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, highlights a wide array of “Word Crimes.”

The grammatical and spelling errors Yankovic sings about are often attributed to young people who have grown up with the habit of typing out short sentences for text messages, tweets and other online posts.

Moro says that while Baby Boomers might think today’s youth have dropped the ball when it comes to the English language, the reality is that language is constantly changing.

“We’ve known that for a very long time,” she says. “When you have a highly codified language like English, there’s always tension between whatever’s changing in the language and people’s views that change is necessarily bad.

“It’s been going on for generations. Older people will always say younger people don’t know how to say or write anything. People don’t like change.”

The evolution of the word ‘silly’

For a simple, five-letter adjective, the word ‘silly’ has had more than its share of meanings over the years.

In the 1200s, ‘silly’ was used to mean ‘blessed.’ It later meant ‘harmless,’ then ‘weak’ or ‘ignorant.’

It wasn’t until the 1500s that the word took on its current meaning: ‘foolish.’

Moro says problems often arise because spoken English evolves much more quickly than written English. In fact, she says today’s written English actually reflects how we spoke about 500 years ago.

She points to the writing of “night” as “nite” as an example of a change that irks many, but for no real reason.

“We haven’t pronounced the “gh” in night in hundreds of years, and nobody questions that,” she says. “But when it comes to the written form of the word, nobody likes to see “nite.”

Moro says many of the so-called errors highlighted in Yankovic’s video are simply phonetic spellings, meant to be short and informal and widely accepted when used online or in text messages.

“Trust me, I’d correct all of the things in his video if I found them in an academic paper,” she says. “But written, formal, academic English is just one type of English we use in our lives.”

So if informal language and slang don’t bother the linguist in Moro, what does?

“Hypercorrection,” she says. “One of the most interesting things for me as a linguist is observing all of the times that people overcompensate.”

She cites the use of “I” vs. “me” as a common example of how people actually make a mistake when trying to sound like they’re using “proper” English.

“We’re taught from kindergarten on that you almost never say ‘me,’” she says. “But saying ‘Between you and I’ is actually grammatically incorrect. You should say ‘me,’ but people try so hard to sound proper they end up making mistakes.”

Another shocker: two negatives don’t actually make a positive. In fact, English used to require two negatives (think: “I don’t need nothing”), and most languages around the world still use two.

“You’re not going to say ‘I ain’t got no money’ in a formal setting, but in an informal setting no one is going to misunderstand you – you don’t have any money. It’s not wrong, it’s just non-standard.”

So if we look down our noses at informal, non-standard English, is formal English somehow better?

“Languages can’t get worse or get better. All they can do is live and die. There are no scientific criteria to determine which languages are better than others,” says Moro. “When people talk about young people and their ‘terrible’ use of language, I just wish they’d remember that today we have the most literate society that has ever existed.”