Can you spray for trolls?

[icarus]

Can you spray for trolls? Because I've an infestation in Primer to the Dark Arts at the moment, crawling in the margins, chewing quote marks and shitting sawdust.

Oh. Look, now it's replying under the new pseudonym "repentantTroll."

That's an oxymoron, isn't it? *is not fooled.* *deletes review notifications unread*


ETA: Ooo. Good news - my Linguistics instructor is insane. She's crammed an enormous amount of material in just a few short weeks. And it's 200 and 300-level material crammed into the same damned class.

She also makes broad judgements about how language should and should not be used, proclamations that I can't say I believe. It's good to know that echo questions are considered weak questions, but to my mind that doesn't mean I should never use them. While there transformations make for cluttered diagrams, I think they're very useful for say, a Percy voice. Because the alternatives provided are stiff, formal and dead.

There. I said it. I think my teacher's brilliant, but I don't necessarily agree. The written word is first and foremost a reflection of the spoken. /blasphemy

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

Ask you teacher what she thinks of Deborah Tannen sometime. The answer will either be amusing or cause me to foam at the mouth.

Tannen is a feminist and one of the leading sociolinguists of the age. She's done a lot of studies on power and language, and one her findings is that tag questions usually have two functions: to ask a question more politely or to prompt your conversation partner to keep going. It's only in the West--mainly America--where the linguistically uninformed (and, apparently, your professor) stigmatize tag questions as "weak" or signs of uncertainty. Women are more likely to use tag questions than men in conversation, but then again, we're socialized to use language differently on a pretty basic level.