After his much publicized five-year “Million-Word Watch,” Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of Global Language Monitor, has found himself at the receiving end of harsh criticism casting doubt on the linguistic validity of his ambitious English word-count enterprise.
As quoted in a June 13
New York Times story by Jennifer Schuessler, “Keeping It Real on Dictionary Row,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley called Payack’s declaring “Web 2.0” as the 1-millionth English word “bushwa, fraud, hokum.” The same story quoted lexicographer Grant Barrett, cofounder of the online dictionary
Wordnik.com, as having similar words for it: “It’s a sham. It’s a hoax. It’s fake. It’s not real.”
And Dan Conradt, in his June 15 opinion column in the
Austin (Texas)
Post-Bulletin, declared about “Web 2.0”: “Call me old fashioned, but if it contains a number, it’s not a word in my book.”
Their reasons for debunking Payack’s pronouncements are essentially the same as the ones cited in
Jose Carillo’s Blogspot last week, where I quoted linguists as saying that Payack’s 1-millionth English word enterprise was wrongheaded from a linguistics standpoint and was simply one huge publicity stunt for his book,
A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. I concluded, though, that “no matter how shoddy and unscientific his word-counting methodology might have been, he and his spirit of enterprise have generated more interest and excitement in the English language than anyone in this generation has done, all linguists included.”
In response to these comments about his “Million-Word Watch,” Payack made this post in my blogspot last June 15:
“Three points:
“1. The Global Language Monitor has never sought the approval of these linguists who, from the beginning have maintained that since they cannot define what a word is, no one should ever attempt to count them. The Horror! The Horror!
“2. Scholars (the non-linguist variety) the world over regularly incorporate our research into peer-reviewed journal articles.
“3. The oft-stated purpose of the Million Word March was, and continues to be, the celebration of the coming of age of English as the first, true global language, with some 1.5 billion speakers.”
To which response I made the following reply in my blogspot:
“Well, Paul, linguists can be very demanding and rigorous in the application of morphology in determining whether a new word is truly a word or not, but that’s a perfectly valid exercise of their professional calling as linguists. (My 23-year-old son, a web programmer, also thinks that if ‘Web 2.0’ is indeed a new word as determined by the Global Language Monitor, then ‘English 101,’ ‘Math 101,’ ‘Logic 101,’ ‘Windows 98,’ and the whole slew of numbered thingamajigs that followed them should also have been considered as new words, but were they? My son’s no linguist, of course, but he believes that as in the case of ‘Web 2.0,’ your word-count should also have been applied to them—in which case English would be way beyond the 1-millionth word mark by now.)
“Anyway, Paul, what actually rankles with me in this whole word-formation and word-usage affair is when linguists want to dictate on how lay writers—even billion-dollar-blockbuster novelists like Dan Brown—should write. Would you believe that one of them actually called Dan Brown a ‘bad English stylist’ for allegedly messing up the very first sentence of his
The Da Vinci Code? And Dan Brown’s supposed linguistic crime, of all things, is that he uses the modifier ‘renowned’ to describe a mortally wounded character in the opening sentence of the novel: ‘Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.’
“Using ‘renowned’ in that context does sound a little iffy to me from a narrative standpoint , but I daresay that there’s nothing grammatically and semantically wrong with it—and the last I heard is that there’s still freedom of speech (and, of course, of writing) in the Free World. And who are we to dispute Dan Brown’s writing in the face of his astounding marketing success? This, to me, is why I think that some linguists—for all their methodical brilliance—can sometimes go so dangerously overboard in their criticism that they might in fact be stifling the very act of creative writing itself.”
With that, I hope to now end this rather long-running preoccupation of Jose Carillo’s English Forum with Paul Payack’s “Millionth English Word” affair.
