And with this, the wizard awarded the scarecrow a diploma conferring on him the degree of Th.D. (Doctor of Thinkology), upon receipt of which he immediately recited the Pythagorean theorem, thus demonstrating that he now had brains. Trudgill, in emphasizing formal credentials rather than the ability to which they presumably testify, is in danger of joining the scarecrow. What matters is not whether a critic is self- or other-appointed, but whether he really has expertise, as shown by cogent reasoning, lucid exposition, and a command of the facts — the relevant facts. As it is, his casual insult is just an unnecessary reminder that I am not an academically trained linguist; a repetition, in effect, of his unfounded claim that academic linguists are experts in language usage; and an example of the fallacy of begging the question.

When in his rebuttal he enters on a discussion of the imply–infer issue, and the grievous ignorance I display in discussing it in my critique, his prose becomes somewhat clotted, and the details of his argument are not as clear as could be wished. But the general meaning seems plain enough: he begins by telling me, in tones of triumph, that the two words are converse terms — that is, if one party implies something, the other infers it, just as when one party lends, the other borrows, and if one party teaches, the other learns. But his notion that these three pairs are semantically parallel is wrong: if I lend someone something, then he indeed borrows it; but if I imply something, my interlocutor does not necessarily infer it — first, because inference stands for a process too formal, explicit, and technical to be the appropriate label for the way we immediately and effortlessly understand, when someone says "It's not raining today," that he means "as contrasted to some other day." But even if one insists that the process by which we reach that understanding is rightly called inference, the imply–infer pair differs from the lend–borrow pair in that its second member does not necessarily follow, given the first — I may imply all I like, without making my interlocutor infer anything. In this, at least, imply–infer differs from lend–borrow, where the second necessarily takes place if the first does, since the terms simply describe the same transaction, seen from two different standpoints. As for teach–learn, does any teacher need to be told that you can teach your heart out, but not make anyone learn? Some might dispute this, arguing that if no learning has taken place, no teaching has been done, but this quibble merely shows that teach–learn differs from both the other pairs, making Trudgill's treating them all alike even more misleading.

But all these are side issues; the main wonder is that Trudgill thinks that in classifying the imply–infer pair as "converse terms," he has illuminated the issue at hand, since such terms "normally therefore occur in different and mutually exclusive grammatical contexts." What his somewhat opaque prose apparently means is that since lend is normally used in such a context as "I will lend you a bicycle," then if borrow occurs in that same context, giving us "I will borrow you a bicycle," we will understand from the context that what the speaker means is that he will lend us a bicycle, despite his having used the wrong word. To which the answer is, Up to a point, Lord Copper; it might mean "I will borrow a bicycle for you." But even if it were always possible to understand what the speaker of such a sentence meant, why should we excuse, much less welcome, such usage?

Trudgill continues in the same vein:

This allows for the possibility that different languages and different dialects may distinguish between these different meanings lexically or not; and for the possibility that at different periods in their histories languages and dialects may lose or acquire such lexical distinctions.

What I suppose Trudgill means by this difficult sentence is that if a language does not provide two distinct words for the two distinct aspects of a borrowing–lending transaction, that language, or perhaps the culture of which it is part, will supply some alternative means of differentiating the two where necessary. This is true, and a truth that I discussed in my critique, although Trudgill clearly has not benefited from that discussion. If a language already possesses two distinct words for the two aspects, as English does, why should we permit one of them to be lost, simply because we know that eventually, somehow, some sort of replacement will be found for what's been lost? If a man has the misfortune to lose a leg, he will try to compensate for the loss with a crutch, pegleg, or modern prosthetic device, as his resources allow — but the availability of such partial compensation does not suggest to me that losing a leg is something to be taken in stride. The penultimate sentence of this paragraph of Trudgill's is, for the connoisseur of black humor, a gem: "Confusion does not occur."

That unwitting joke is followed by this parenthetical remark: "(It is significant that Halpern does not provide, as any professional would, examples illustrating the potential confusions he is so worried about.)" Trudgill is wrong again, on every point. First, I do provide an example, as Trudgill knows, because he quotes and discusses it — more on this later. Second, it would not be in the least significant if I had provided none at all, since it is common knowledge that ambiguous wording can cause confusion, sometimes dangerous confusion; I no more felt I needed to provide examples of this than I would of the fact that driving under the influence can cause accidents. But if any reader nevertheless would like to see examples of ambiguity and consequent confusion, I refer him to those writings of Peter Trudgill that are under examination here.

Trudgill then offers us a medley of contrived sentences in which words are misused, but whose meanings are not in real doubt, and says, in effect, quod erat demonstrandum. Again, he is proving, or trying to prove, something irrelevant; I never said that every misuse of words, or use of ambiguous words, must prove confusing — indeed, most do not. Since humans usually produce, especially when speaking, sentences that are less than perfect, we have developed or preserved a number of ways to understand each other's utterances even when they fail to achieve perfection in diction, logic, and syntax. Chief among them, probably, is redundancy; we seldom say anything just once or in just one way, unless we're in a great hurry. And we have other resources at our disposal for purposes of avoiding or resolving ambiguity, such as gesture, tone of voice, and facial expression. These reinforcements, correctives, and safety nets succeed in the great majority of cases in compensating for our formal linguistic defects. In addition, much of what we say is strictly unnecessary, because the situation that occasions our utterance is directly observable, and our words are simply decorative ("Here comes Harry"); and finally, a great many of our utterances fall under the heading of phatic communion, so that for purposes of conveying information, it simply doesn't matter whether they are understood or not ("What a gorgeous sunset!").

All this is true — but irrelevant for present purposes. The dangers I dwelt on in my examination of Trudgill's essay spring from those cases in which the safeguards I have just listed cannot help us; those in which, for example, the ambiguity occurs in writing, where none of the safeguards other than redundancy is available — and even that one is seldom used because if a writer realizes his wording or construction is ambiguous, his almost invariable reaction is not to add a second version, but to revise the first; redundancy in writing is something we're taught to avoid, and something hated by editors. And incorrigible ambiguity occurs not only in composed writing, but in very brief oral utterances, where no context is available to resolve it; and in voice mail and email messages; and in urgent warnings and cries for help, where training and convention must make up, if anything can, for the speaker's excitement and tendency to incoherence. So even if Trudgill's examples of harmless ambiguity were all valid, there would be plenty of cases that escape his net.

But in fact, even in at least one of Trudgill's contrived sentences, ambiguity occurs: he says, "If you are in possession of your bicycle, and I am not, there is no possibility of ambiguity if I say Can I lend your bike?" Even here, in a case fabricated by Trudgill to illustrate the harmlessness of bad usage, he trips up; it is easy enough to imagine situations in which that italicized statement would not mean, as Trudgill supposes it always would, Can I borrow your bike? Suppose the question were asked by me or some other horrible pedant — someone who usually uses words correctly, at least to the extent of not saying lend when borrow is meant. In that case, my friend with the bicycle might very well take my question as elliptical for May I lend your bike to someone else after I borrow it from you? Of course, Trudgill might protest that such a construal could be valid only if the questioner were the kind of linguistic pervert who regularly observes the difference between lend and borrow, and I daresay he would be correct.

And, as remarked earlier, I do give an example of a problem-causing ambiguity — not because I thought an example was needed to establish that ambiguity can cause problems, but simply because a concrete case makes it easier to focus on certain aspects of an argument. I spoke of the dangerous ambiguity that could result from a shout of "Fire!" in circumstances where it could mean either "The house is in flames; run!" or "The whites of the enemy's eyes are visible; discharge your muskets!" Trudgill finds in this example yet another proof of my incorrigible amateurishness and ignorance; why, he tells us, an acquaintance with suprasegmental phonology would have saved me from making such a fool of myself — "Fire!" would be uttered with different intonation patterns in the two cases, thus distinguishing between them, and my ignorance of this fact suggests to him that I do not live in the real world. This provides us with an interesting insight into Trudgill's "real world" — it is a world in which, with enemy troops closing in on our position, and with incoming incendiary rounds threatening to set fire to our outpost, we hear the single shouted word "Fire!" and immediately detect, from the intonation pattern with which some highly excited picket has shouted it, which of the two possible interpretations is intended. As Wellington said after Waterloo, it was a damned close run thing; it was only suprasegmental phonology that saved the day.

Still wondering, apparently, whether I live in the real world, Trudgill summons me sternly back to reality; "I remember," he tells us, "at least one comedy sketch that hinges on the ambiguity of Fire!, but can Halpern actually imagine a real-world situation where genuine and dangerous ambiguity can occur?" Yes, I can, and in fact described one just now; and not only can I imagine such situations, I have experienced them, during my years in the Army and my years in writing and editing technical documents.

Trudgill tells us that I betray my amateurishness again in my "approach to polysemy"; I apparently believe, he says, that there should be one word for every meaning, and one meaning for every word. His basis for saying this, so far as I can tell, is that I criticized him for defending potentially dangerous ambiguity — an inadequate basis for so sweeping a statement, to put it with perhaps excessive mildness. (Actually, for what it's worth, I think it desirable that when a word has more than one meaning, as most interesting words do, no two of its meanings should be plausible alternatives within any given context, which is what presents the possibility of dangerous ambiguity. For example, I think it unfortunate that presently should mean to some "right now" and to others "in a while," or that to "sanction" an action is sometimes to authorize it, sometimes to impose punishment for performing it; in contrast, the various meanings of articulate, for example — chiefly "made up of jointed parts" and "able to speak" — normally present no such difficulty.) But apart from the facts that the opinion he attributes to me is not mine, and that it ought to have been evident to him that it was not, there is a further fault in Trudgill's statement: even if that opinion were mine, and as mistaken as he thinks, it would be only a bad idea, not a "fallacy." As I said in a footnote in the essay that provoked Trudgill's rebuttal, he gets full marks for consistency: he not only preaches loose diction, he practices it.

He also thinks that you can defeat a stylistic judgment with an offhand reference to the OED; he informs me that if I open that work anywhere, I will find that many entries have as many as fifteen different, individually numbered meanings. Yes, this is true, as is surely known to everyone who has ever opened a dictionary of any size, let alone the OED; Trudgill drags that dictionary in simply to intimidate me with its supposed authority in questions of current usage, and to ridicule the campaign he thinks I'm on to impose a one-word, one-meaning rule on the English-speaking world. Driving the message home, he tells us explicitly that "Clearly Halpern does not like this state of affairs. But there is nothing he can do about it — writing articles in The Vocabula Review will certainly make no difference." This kind of remark is one of the standard features of debates with academic linguists; they regularly tell their adversaries that their positions are hopeless — the laws of linguistics make it inevitable that the course of the language will be what it will be, unaffected by anything the critics may say or do. When their adversaries ask the linguists why, if their triumph is inevitable, they spend so much time and energy thundering against their critics, the linguists are reduced to claiming that they just don't want to see their critics waste their time. Such is the pass we come to when we undertake to defend the indefensible, and brazen our way through situations in which our errors have become evident.

After this piece of bluster, he switches to patronization: "I would suggest Halpern comfort himself with the thought that there are more important things in the world than the use of imply and infer." Another ringing truth from Trudgill — which makes me wonder why he discusses that pair of words at such length in his essay. Too bad he didn't see their unimportance before giving them such a prominent place; it would have spared me all the labor I had to undertake to correct him. Forgetting that it was he who started this particular hare, he tells me sternly that "Halpern perhaps also should be alerted to the fact that I, correspondingly, respect him a little bit less for devoting so much time and effort to an issue as essentially trivial as this." What must he think of himself, then, for being the one to raise the imply–infer issue in the first place? It is not pretty to think how little he must respect himself.

Trudgill's peroration is the usual linguists' cant to the effect that anyone trying to establish standards in matters of usage must despise those who fail to meet those standards, and that this is very like contempt for those of other races, religions, sexual orientation, and so on. In the space of a paragraph or two, my exposure of his wrongheadedness on ambiguous terminology has somehow put me in league with Simon Legree, the Grand Inquisitor, and Vlad the Impaler — imagine where I'd be if I'd forfeited more than just a little bit of Trudgill's respect! It is very common for a linguist finding himself on the losing side of a debate with critics like me to try to trump our arguments, and divert attention from his own incoherence, by wrapping himself in the toga of Tribune of the People, as Trudgill does here (if I were shameless, I would say self-appointed Tribune, since there is no sign that the People have elected him or welcome his efforts). But Trudgill trips over his toga; he ends, as he began, with a crashing error, telling us that "Those who cannot bring themselves to respect nonstandard dialects are not only ignorant about the nature of language, but are also in danger of being perceived as bigots." It is only fitting that Trudgill should conclude by demonstrating yet again the depth of his confusion: English-language speakers who misuse infer for imply, or make other such mistakes in usage, are not speakers of a "nonstandard dialect"; they are people trying to speak English in such a way as to be both understood and respected, but having some problems in doing so — and getting no help from linguists.

Mark Halpern

Note

1. "The Meaning of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change," in Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Language Myths. Penguin Books, 1998.