I’ve been recently thinking. Mispronunciation of names (books, concepts, intellectuals) is usually taken as a sign that the person in question dosen’t really have a place in the debate and is way over his head, faking knowledge for status singaling.
But if the person makes cognisant arguments and generally shows a understanding outside of the mispronunciation what does this really say about him? Why does he then still carry a clear low status penalty? Is this perhaps low status because its a signal that the person while otherwise of sufficient calibre, but displays one or more of the following undesirable traits :
a) He has been educated primarily via written texts. This implies that he is self-taught.
b) The person in question is new in the proper social circles where such discussion usually takes places
c) He has a quirky tendency to mangle pronunciation of words he is otherwise familiar with in general.
In the modern world, with the advent of the internet, the fraction of people for who c) is true dosen’t seem to have increased.
Is perhaps the incentive to discriminate based on point a or b stronger than ever because one can’t signal proper class and group affiliations by simply having wide interests and being well read and well versed in various facts (a set of traits now also true of very low status wikipediabingers)? Could this be perhaps related to stronger credential-ism even in circumstances outside of simple economic calculations?
Cheap information in other words means one can’t signal high status and intelligence via possessing said newly cheapened information.
Information that is trivially harder to get but that one tends to acquire anyway if one receives his cheap information from the proper sources seems a substitute useful in some circumstance.
Overall I’m not really sure if this is really just about signalling or if its a good heuristic to weed out a stronger onslaught of those who produce only facsimiles of knowledge. One is hard pressed to deny that a culture of intellectual overconfidence has been fostered in certain fields due to cheap information.
I think one possibility you’re not considering, and one which applies frequently when mispronunciation is used as a negative signal, is the case of a shibboleth. A mispronunciation becomes a shibboleth when it’s frequently discussed, joked about, known in the field. If you fail the shibboleth test, that’s evidence that you’re not familiar enough with the field to have encountered the test before, and that may legitimately be a negative signal.
E.g. consider the mispronunciation of nuclear as nu-cu-lar, which carries a stigma and is liable to get you mocked. The mispronunciation has become, by itself, a widely known symbol. There are genuine linguistic reasons for this mispronunciation, and many people grow up with it “innocently”, so to speak, but then correct themselves as they start studying physics, because they’ve heard or read about its shibboleth status; even if you’re
self-taught and get most of your knowledge from books, it’s difficult to miss it. Thus if you pronounce nu-cu-lar, I can infer that
either you haven’t seen its shibboleth status discussed/maintained, which hints that you haven’t been much around physics, in
verbal or written form; or that you’ve seen that, but didn’t care to update—your c), which happens rather infrequently.
Contrast this with many possible and actual mispronunciations in physics that did not achieve a shibboleth status—in those
cases, I think most often people don’t care. Is “boson” pronounced with [s] or [z]? The dictionary happily lists both. Names are
mangled on a regular based without listeners batting an eye as long as they understand who it is. And so forth. Even if the listener could plausibly
infer your a), I haven’t found it to be a strong negative signal in many circles.
I’ve been recently thinking. Mispronunciation of names (books, concepts, intellectuals) is usually taken as a sign that the person in question dosen’t really have a place in the debate and is way over his head, faking knowledge for status singaling.
But if the person makes cognisant arguments and generally shows a understanding outside of the mispronunciation what does this really say about him? Why does he then still carry a clear low status penalty? Is this perhaps low status because its a signal that the person while otherwise of sufficient calibre, but displays one or more of the following undesirable traits :
a) He has been educated primarily via written texts. This implies that he is self-taught.
b) The person in question is new in the proper social circles where such discussion usually takes places
c) He has a quirky tendency to mangle pronunciation of words he is otherwise familiar with in general.
In the modern world, with the advent of the internet, the fraction of people for who c) is true dosen’t seem to have increased.
Is perhaps the incentive to discriminate based on point a or b stronger than ever because one can’t signal proper class and group affiliations by simply having wide interests and being well read and well versed in various facts (a set of traits now also true of very low status wikipediabingers)? Could this be perhaps related to stronger credential-ism even in circumstances outside of simple economic calculations?
Cheap information in other words means one can’t signal high status and intelligence via possessing said newly cheapened information.
Information that is trivially harder to get but that one tends to acquire anyway if one receives his cheap information from the proper sources seems a substitute useful in some circumstance.
Overall I’m not really sure if this is really just about signalling or if its a good heuristic to weed out a stronger onslaught of those who produce only facsimiles of knowledge. One is hard pressed to deny that a culture of intellectual overconfidence has been fostered in certain fields due to cheap information.
I think one possibility you’re not considering, and one which applies frequently when mispronunciation is used as a negative signal, is the case of a shibboleth. A mispronunciation becomes a shibboleth when it’s frequently discussed, joked about, known in the field. If you fail the shibboleth test, that’s evidence that you’re not familiar enough with the field to have encountered the test before, and that may legitimately be a negative signal.
E.g. consider the mispronunciation of nuclear as nu-cu-lar, which carries a stigma and is liable to get you mocked. The mispronunciation has become, by itself, a widely known symbol. There are genuine linguistic reasons for this mispronunciation, and many people grow up with it “innocently”, so to speak, but then correct themselves as they start studying physics, because they’ve heard or read about its shibboleth status; even if you’re self-taught and get most of your knowledge from books, it’s difficult to miss it. Thus if you pronounce nu-cu-lar, I can infer that either you haven’t seen its shibboleth status discussed/maintained, which hints that you haven’t been much around physics, in verbal or written form; or that you’ve seen that, but didn’t care to update—your c), which happens rather infrequently.
Contrast this with many possible and actual mispronunciations in physics that did not achieve a shibboleth status—in those cases, I think most often people don’t care. Is “boson” pronounced with [s] or [z]? The dictionary happily lists both. Names are mangled on a regular based without listeners batting an eye as long as they understand who it is. And so forth. Even if the listener could plausibly infer your a), I haven’t found it to be a strong negative signal in many circles.