An eye toward the moronic

Language behavior has been studied for thousands of years.  I would say, however, that most of the ancient people who commented on language did so notionally.  I am reminded of the Egyptian pharaoh who wanted to know what the first word spoken by a human was.  He isolated a baby who had not talked and waited until the baby spoke its first word.  The sounds were close to the Egyptian word for bread, so the pharaoh concluded that bread was the first word ever spoken.

Of course, that is an atrocious method to study language by.  But, it did spotlight people's need to know more about language.  After the advent of the scientific method, language study has improved greatly.  It still is a little sloppy sometimes, however.  I think of a study I read in graduate school of three couples who supposedly recorded all of their interactions with each other.  The point of the study was to see if men or women interrupted the other more often and why the interruptions occurred.  The study was published at a time when little was known about gender and language, so it was among the first studies in the field.  That accounts for the study being published in an edited volume by a scholar.  Still, IF one trusted that the couples didn't turn recorders off and on, IF one trusted that the 3 couples represented all couples, and IF the interactions represented all spoken interactions, then the results that men interrupted women almost exclusively for control reasons should be accepted.  Bah humbug that that study was representative of interrupting behavior by either sex.  Sloppy, sloppy research.

Language behavior can be scientifically examined, of course, and the results should dispel the notions  people try to perpetuate about such behavior.  There is a lot of merit to discourse studies, both written and spoken.  These studies patchworked together give an emerging picture of how language is really used by people.  And when the behavior is to present deception, there are methods that detect that behavior.

I am always amazed by unschooled people who think they know language well enough to practice deception.  Their notions are usually like the pharoah's and the researcher's mentioned above - sloppy.  Deceptive people's arrogance has negative consequences, though, because it keeps them from realizing how terribly transparent they are.  Fools are born every minute.  As the saying goes for these people: Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.