Another great example to this is food. You have the prescriptivists who can be quite specific about when a food can be defined as that specific food, like champagne or cheese specifications. Or just the typical disgust with 'out of the ordinary' food combinations (You can't put pineapple on pizza). Although food is interesting as well because it has Government prescriptivism in the form of food regulations, which are overall useful in making sure what consumers receive is 'safe'.
it's interesting to see culture adapt to some of those government prescriptions, especially in regards to products like chocolate that has to legally have a certain percentage of cocoa to have the name. today there's a lot more "chocolatey pieces" instead of "chocolate" on the market compared to years before
Sushi is a great example. Traditional sushi from Japan has strict rules but all around the world sushi is being treated more like a canvas to express one's culinary tastes.
As a kid, I didn’t even know fish was the main ingredient of sushi, because once my sister gave me some sushi that was literally just seaweed and rice, and there was also an episode of _Wonder Pets_ where some character prepares celery “sushi style” (I.e. stuffing a large celery stalk into a rolled up ball of rice in seaweed). So yeah, that one visual gag in _Shark Tale_ completely flew over my head as a kid, as did the mention of sushi in _The Little Mermaid 2_ .
The ultimate "prescriptivist" language today is Latin. I always try to ward people off from referring to it as dead because it is still actively learned and employed today, just in very limited circumstances (as opposed to something like Akkadian or Hittite which are both truly dead). There are Latin language societies whose entire existence is dedicated to preserving and instructing the rules and vocabulary of Latin. In fact, I once listened to a speech from one of the foremost Latinists of our day describing how the language is incredibly useful as it remains alive but purely in an archival sense. Because its rules and vocabulary aren't changing (there's no new description to be had), it is a reliable method of preservation that later people will always be able to accurately decode.
Linguistics makes a distinction between "dead" (no longer spoken as a native language) and "extinct" (no longer spoken at all). That's why Latin is classified as "dead".
There's the RUclipsr PolýMATHY/ScorpioMartianus that knows Latin and teaches his audience Latin. Also dubs movie/TV scenes & songs into Latin. Latin is labelled as "dead" but it's a misnomer.
Here is another example of Latin not being a dead language. The Catholic Church still uses it in some services. Up until Vatican 2, Latin was used in all catholic services. Now most services are in the native language where the church is, they still do offer some services in Latin as well.
It was mentioned but a dead language is one where it is no longer spoken as the lingua franca of a nation or a large enough contiguous portion of a nation. Hebrew was a dead language, it was no longer the lingua franca of the Jewish people. It was preserved and spoken just like latin currently is by clergy and some academics. So calling latin a dead language isn't a judgment statement as to its use or value. Rather a statement of fact. Maybe someday Latin can join Hebrew as a revived lingua franca.
As someone who works manual labor, watching your videos is good way to grow my perspective and learn about wide range of topics. While I love what I do the conversations with the men and women I work with are rather surface level and become quite mind numbing after a time.
Kris, as a doctor (retired) I can tell you that most conversations with my coworkers also became mind numbing after a time! I too find JJ’s videos very thought provoking.
Brazil and Portugal represent two polar opposites when it comes to given names. Portugal has a fixed list of allowed given names that are very etymologically rooted in the Portuguese language. Brazil is on the anything-goes descriptivist end of the spectrum and barely legislates about how parents can name their children. This has allowed for upper class Brazilians to name their children with Italian given names such as Enzo and lower class Brazilians to choose English names such as Jennifer for their kids.
Funny enough, we in France have a similar naming dynamic. Working-class parents, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, were inspired by American TV series for their kids' names, which led to Kevin in particular being seen as a very unfavorable name to have here, same goes in Germany I was told. The name Enzo is also very popular among French zoomers, however it's not seen as much more advantageous than the American names. Upper-class French kids still tend to have very typical French names, with hyphenated names in particular having a bit of an aristocratic vibe.
@@FairyCRat after Michael Jackson shot the music video for ‘They don’t care about us’ in Salvador, the name ‘Maicon’, an informal transliteration of ‘Michael’ into Portuguese, grow in popularity.
I have noticed some Hispanic people here in the US replace the many traditional Spanish names with Italian names like Giovanni instead of Juan or Alessandra instead of Alejandra, Francesco instead of Francisco, etc.
@@felipeitoanuatti reminds me of Perú, where there is this tradition among working class or lower income families of giving American-like names that most of the times are terribly butchered versions of abbreviated names such as Yhonny (Johnny), Yeni (Jenny), Ghreiss (Grace) or last names like Jefferson or Edison. Decades ago, and in the Andean provinces, there was the tradition of giving Greek names like Pánfilo, Teodosio or Porfirio but now those names are sometimes mocked and regarded as old stuff.
@@FairyCRat In the film "Muerte in Buenos Aires" the owner of a gay night club is asked about someone called Kevin and his response "Here they are all called Kevin" is delivered with the sort of distain only a Porteño or Parisian could muster.
First of all - I love the clip of the Georgia flag! ;) Second of all, back in the pre-internet days I subscribed to the North American Vexilogical Association monthly magazine. It was the only way to keep up with flag news at the time. The director, Dr Whitney Smith (designer of the flag of Guyana), even sent me a hand-drawn picture of what the Biafra flag looked like. At the time, there was no easy way to look it up! I'm no vexilogical prescriptivist, but I have a soft spot for the NAVA!
Vexilological guidelines and rules are meant to enable creativity with practicality and accessibility in mind, right? Are the concrete guidelines' prescriptions still being debated?
Also in my freshmen music theory class last week I was teaching them about prescriptive vs. descriptive types of musical notation and musical analysis. There's a spectrum, but some types of notation are more designed to help people perform or recreate something, whereas other types are more designed to represent how something actually sounded (e.g. a spectrogram). Similarly, with musical analysis and teaching, some interpretations aim to tell you how to hear a certain piece, whereas others aim to tell you how lots of different people hear the piece.
Something about Canada you left out is that, for English media, the state-supported television content is not popular, while in Québec, the state-supported french-speaking TV show are by far the most popular. It seem to me that the Anglo-Saxons do not play along well with prescrivisim in general, while the French (and even Latin in general) tend to be fine with it.
I agree with wode that both elements are at play. Additionally, Quebec is a unique culture where Anti-Canadian sentiment and Anti-Anglophone sentiment are heavily pushed upon francophones as a form of self-preservation, so government prescriptivism is seen as positive and directed at their well-being. While that's highly debatable in practice, the activist culture of Quebec does have a lot of up sides and so it's not hard to see how a government running on such a values-oriented, "left wing" prescriptivism might be popular.
@@wodediannao4577 Most US content is available in french and others languages (for comedy, it's notoriously bad to be honest, humor is hard to translate). For movies, usually 8 of of the 10 high-gross movies are from Hollywood with one or two local and the occasional French one. But the fact remain that Québec's creative ecosystem generate content appreciated by it's public, while it seem to not be the case in anglophone Canada
@@ryanpaulmarcoux3813 "Anti-Canadian sentiment and Anti-Anglophone sentiment are heavily pushed upon francophones"... what a loaded and inaccurate statement. Not being something does not mean you dislike the thing. Quebec's culture is not Canadian, American or French culture, but these culture are not hated.
@@nicolasrobitaille5903 Not by all, and within Montreal not even by the majority, but I have traveled in circles even among the youth wherein the "anti" perspectives are not only openly and confidently stated as activist philosophies, but are even prevalent among the younger generation. Usually, this sentiment is found in the older generation and/or in smaller Quebec townships, but it's still strong and the backbone of many Quebec parties on the provincial level (look at the CAQ's recent language protection measures for an idea). I mean, Quebec never even signed Canada's constitution and there is a myth that it refuses to take money from the Federal government on those grounds. It's deep in the history and culture.
The flag thing is interesting because it's an area where you see that some parts of culture are just dumb luck. Like, I don't really think Americans developed all these "bad" flag designs because we're super into slapping a seal onto a field of color and calling it a day. It feels more like for most of our history the majority of flags weren't created by actual designers and the topic has been so obscure that it's rare that any flag gets the kind of attention needed to propel an effort to make a change. I'm a Washingtonian, an artist, and a vexillology enthusiast, but if I'm honest with myself I don't care about my state's flag all that much, let alone my city flag. I basically never see them unless I have to go to a government building on a windy day.
With banner making available in Minecraft a whole generation will be into flag design and maybe the state seal on a bedsheet will be a thing of the past in the future
It's Americas allergy, especially acute after WWII, to government spending tax money on anything remotely tasteful in design. Government should be efficient and spend as little money as possible to provide a service or relay information.
I like my Arizona flag because it's pretty awesome and one of the better ones even among those designed. Still the primary flag is the national flag, I agree there's not a big movement to make a STATE flag unless there's some special pride behind it. Still a lot are kind of meh even when it takes effort past the official seal.
The Académie Française has a little brother: The OQLF (Office Québécois de la langue française). Their role is more to erase new English words making their way in day-to-day conversations in Quebec French, mostly from the Internet and tech world. Their suggestions usually doesn't catch on beyond journalists and official communications but some does in the general population ( like texto for text message and courriel for email).
I've always find it funny that European and Canadian francophones both use English words, but their anglicisms are very different from each other. In Canadian French, they're a lot older and more fluent-sounding, as they've been living alongside anglophones for centuries and have thus incorporated code-switching into their colloquial speech, often using whichever word has the fewest syllables in order to save time. In European French by contrast, most anglicisms came post-war due to growing American influence, and they're often used in a way that would be completely incorrect in English, the best examples of that being all the -ing words that were adopted as nouns in French (jogging, parking, camping, shampooing...). Interestingly, two of the most widely accepted anglicisms in European French, weekend and email (although we typically just say "mail" or "mèl" since our word for non-electronic mail is still "courrier") aren't used in Canada either. The period when European francophones started adopting anglicisms seems to almost coincide with the period when French Canadians stopped doing so.
I would argue that the prevalence of the confederate flag may have been initially prescriptive. Powerful groups like the daughters of the confederacy pushed hard to make confederate symbols and figures mainstream in southern culture.
@@shorewall Japan? I've never lived there, so I'm only judging by what little I know from the outside. I would say Germany also did a good job of abandoning past beliefs. Maybe not completely, there are most certainly fringe groups. But for the most part they have.
@@JimmyMon666 The Germans didn't abandon that belief. Most of them wouldn't of been hardcore believers and the ones that were basically got the Holocaust treatment in the Eastern half and ousted politically in the Western half. Beyond that Germans were glad to embrace any culture as long as it was allowed to be Germans for the most part. Japan never gave up it's culture and if we killed the emperor it would of doomed the US and USSR into having to engage in genocidal levels of warfare on the Japanese main land in the desperate hope of forcing a surrender. Rural Japan hasn't changed all that much. Urban Japan changed due to Western media influencing Japanese youths.
@@shorewall the confederacy existed for 5 years, it was hardly an institution of the south, much less an institution worth commemorating. All of the seceding states had been a part of England, France, Spain, or Mexico for far longer, and of course most had been part of the Union for generations. It was the preservation the ‘right’ for rich folks to own slaves that had been prescribed to the rest of the populace, and that was what all the pro-confederacy monuments erected in the 20th century, and the corresponding state flags, were all about
As a Canadian, I must say, most Canadian prescriptive cultural products are lame, stagnant, and predictable. The government wastes millions each year providing grants for those artists that tow the ideological line of the Laurentian Elites and the powers that be. For every successful TV show produced by the CBC (Schitts Creek, Kim’s Convenience, etc.) there’s 20 other insipid and uninspired projects greenlit without question. The Canadian government could solve this issue if they were to loosen their prescriptive cultural requirements on what gets funding, but that would mean a loss of control and if the last 4 years have shown us anything, it’s shown us that the Canadian government will do whatever it takes to not lose control of anything it deems necessary (including the restriction of human rights).
What They ought to fund is THIS CHANNEL and/or JJ himself. Give him the means to operate a “Factory” that mostly funds artists and projects that tickle his fancy and America will welcome a Canadian Invasion.
@Magnustopheles The US is the richest nation in the world, has the strongest military, largest economy, most influential politically, best universities, best sports nation, dominates music, movies, TV shows, top companies, top internet sites, most diverse, immigrant nation, most Nobel Prize winners by far, first nation to put a man on the moon, fought off Germany and Japan and rebuilt Europe through the Marshall Plan, protected Europe from Communism and fought off communist Soviet Union, US gives more foreign aid than any other nation in the world. The US also provides the breakthroughs in much of medicine and technology that Europeans then use, without having created with their system. Europeans are able to live in a peaceful world order where they can spend less on military and focus on their homogenous societies. But that doesn’t happen out of a vacuum. It comes from the Pax Americana the US provided. If every liberal democracy was Denmark, fascism, communism, authoritarianism and/or Islamic fundamentalism would dominate the world and nations would all be immeasurably worse off. Not to mention that besides other smaller nations having their quality of life because of the U.S. created world order and US advancements, no nation in human history as large and diverse as the US has had as high a quality of life as the US. The only nations that can have a higher quality of life than the US are nations much smaller, more homogenous, which benefit from the US created world order and US advancements, and which are specifically smaller and more homogenous than most large countries. Of course the top nation in the world will always be the most targeted, it’s always been this way. A truly mediocre nation would not be as targeted, because people have the inclination to try to take out the guy at the top
It’s a chicken & egg scenario. At the end of the day, people can attempt to prescribe culture, but culture will only be what it actually is. If the prescription is accepted, then the description will change to accommodate it, but if not, then it makes no sense to hold the prescription in any regard. Description wins hands down, the vernacular meaning is the only meaning that matters broadly
That’s not 100% true. Using “literally” incorrectly, for instance, will make a person look stupid to prescriptivists-and they are often people who “matter.” E.g., people who review employment applications.
This is clearly not generally true. Consider the power that prescritivist linguistics has had and continues to have on speakers of less prestigious dialects of English. They earn poor grades in school, learn to consider their dialect "wrong", and either assimilate or face discrimination the rest of their lives. The thing we forget is that the elites are elites and hold power and influence over the poor and common.
@@rogerknights857 Yes, of course it's not 100% true, a low percentage of statements of all total statements are 100% true in the real world. But more often than not it is true that descriptivism wins over time. Even the dictionaries in the English language are now largely descriptivist, when they were once relatively speaking much more on the prescriptivist than they are now just a few decades ago.
@@rogerknights857 That doesn't reflect the culture as a whole, though. The people who "matter" may dictate using language their way within the spaces they have control over, but they only have control over those spaces. That's how you get stuff like code switching--people will conform to the rules of prescriptivism when they need to, but when they don't they go back to "normal" (and truer to culture as it actually is).
Even though I disagree with JJ politically about a great many things, his cultural videos are always excellent and I'm always amazed at how introspective they are
I love that he's out there talking about culture, especially with the Canadian bent but I think he misses a little on the fullness of introspection sometimes. I feel like he decided a long time ago how he sees the world and then just locked into that.
@@WicksKE it took me decades to escape my old thinking but I agree that it seems JJ is far too comfortable in his lifestyle to consider that perhaps systems need to change.
I’ve been in the dance world for a long time, and this has made me think about how prescriptive vs descriptive different dances/dance competition judging can be depending on which dance you’re doing. In ballroom for example, the rules are RULES. Every body movement has a name and a precise mode of execution which are documented and edited only by authorities. Competitions reflect this. Do a more advanced move when you’re competing at a lower level? Axed. Wear sequins in a collegiate competition? Out. Even dances that share the same NAME have different movement rules depending on whether you’re dancing International or American style. (ex. American Rumba and International Rumba are danced very differently.) Contrast THAT with Lindy Hop and West Coast Swing; dances that have developed into creatures that are judged primarily on musicality and ability to interpret the music with a partner as a team. Technique is still important to get the dance right, but there are incredibly famous examples of moves that everyone knows now that were universally adopted (and named) when a performer (usually a talented pro) messed up or improvised something cool and the community loved the new move so much that we gobbled it up into the cultural canon. If you’re creative/skilled enough, heck, you could redefine the entire dance the way Frankie Manning did for Lindy Hop. Even dress codes reflect this attitude. High level West Coast Swing dancers, for example, might be competing on the world stage in leggings and a T-Shirt. I love both/all worlds for different reasons, but they’re so SO culturally different that it can be a shock when you cross between one and the other. I love how this video made me think about that- I’ve known it for forever, but I haven’t explicitly thought about it a ton.
There’s a surprising one that people may not know of (mainly because there’s very, very few people studying this field, at least to the extent I do). I’ve been studying anthems relatively seriously for the past 30 years now and there is a prescriptive vs. descriptive element in there too. Prescriptive you would find things like the recent change by the Canadian government to change “in all thy sons command” to “in all of us command”. For the record I was interviewed by CBC around 2010 about this (there was just talk at this point no change) and being a descriptive at myself I am on record as saying that it shouldn’t be changed because there’s no overwhelming urge by the people to change it. (I’ve always felt, even then, that there should be and am supportive of the change but at the same time upset that it was forced on a population who by and large disagrees with my need for a change (or more likely is apathetic)). Many anthems are prescriptivist as well, imposed by a government perhaps upon independence or revolution, but many more are descriptive at in that a song used by the people becomes a de facto anthem. Thomas O’Higgins, a legislator in Ireland in 1933, describes the descriptivist way best when he said: “National Anthems come about, not because of the suitability of the particular words or notes, but because they are adopted generally by the nation. That is exactly how the “Soldier’s Song” became a National Anthem in this country. It happened to be the Anthem on the lips of the people when they came into their own and when the outsiders evacuated the country and left the insiders here to make the best or the worst of the country. It was adopted by the people here before ever it was adopted by the Executive Council”.
Another interesting note on this is the variance in cultural expectations for what the anthem ought to sound like. I grew up in Venezuela and down there every single schoolchild has seared into their memory the exact recording of the national anthem which the government mandates be played every morning before class begins. This decades-old government mandate has in turn created a culture where the national anthem has to sound exactly like the one at school, or else it's considered disrespectful and unpatriotic. In fact, there was a major controversy back around 2008 when a popular hip-hop artist released a version of the anthem with a dance-music rhythm, with enough people considering it offensive to warrant having the song banned from radio stations. Imagine my shock, then, when I moved to the United States and saw just how commonly major artists would put their own spin on the anthem at major sporting events. Yes, there is still a great reverence for the anthem at these events, but what was curious to me was the fact that the anthem could be interpreted by a wide range of solo artists in so many different styles and still be considered "correct" by the public as long as the lyrics and melody were unaltered. American schools don't seem to teach or recite the anthem at all these days (with the Pledge of Allegiance being the default instead), and I wonder to what extent that has contributed to this phenomenon.
I’ve been a Canadian citizen since 1996 and, being female, the “all her sons” line never sat well with me. I always sung “all of us”. I was very glad that the prescriptivists eventually adopted my description!
Another interesting thing to note there would be the Australian anthem. While "Waltzing Matilda" reflects the unique culture a lot more, they ended up going with a painfully anglo and unmemorable anthem, and lots of people are annoyed about that. Not an Aussie but its a pertinent example.
That makes me think of how it is common enough in the US to think that 'America the Beautiful' is the official national anthem, rather than 'Star Spangled Banner' that the Wikipedia article for 'America the Beautiful' starts with "Not to be confused with the national anthem."
Every "I'm rich, you're poor, let's dance" movie is essentially a battle between stuffy prescriptive adults dictating to their children the nature of their culture i.e. 'Footloose', 'Dirty Dancing', 'Pleasantville', 'Hairspray', 'Drumline', the list goes on...
@@JBaughb Thank you, at risk of plagiarism, I really should cite 'Family Guy' who came up with that definition in one of their gags. I'm confident that if you type that description into the search function it should come up.
@@professordogwood8985 i mean, what exactly is a word anyways? its pretty hard to define sometimes, especially since some languages don't use spaces. emoji.... are kinda words, they do show meaning in some way, and they are useful. Overall, i think its not too silly to put an emoji as a word of the year.
I find it funny that often popular international Canadian pop cultural icons are utterly indistinguishable from what could be created in the US (see Drake and Avril Lavigne, etc).
Yeah, as he said in his video about North American culture, the US is the country that innovates and Canada is the country that emulates. Generally, Canadian celebrities will spend a lot more time in the US than the other way around.
2:45 the French academe recently made a point to end the French use of the term "le weekend" because its 'too English' and took the stance that "real French people use the term 'fin de la semaine' because its more French"... sorry about spelling French is my second language!
I am from Ukraine and my country definitely has a prescreptivist vs descreptivist debate. Because of the Russian Empire and later Soviet rule, historically Russian-speaking media dominated over Ukrainian-speaking. Starting from books, music and TV shows, because of much larger consumer base and hence higher budgets Russia was able to have disproportionate influence over Ukrainians, simultaneously often pushing its own narratives. Even the president Zelensky, a formal comedian, before entering politics made primerily Russian speaking movies and shows. Now, Russian speaking does not necessarily means Russian. Most of Russian speaking Ukrainian artists for example are in general no less “pro-Ukrainian”, than your random Ukrainian speaking Ukrainian artists, but because of the incentives these artists have there is a potential for them to be entangled in Russian media sphere, that is obviously highly dependent on and influenced by the Russian government.
It always causes a lot of problems when shared culture becomes seen as a symbol of political subordination. Imagine if the Founders of the US tried to get everyone to stop speaking English because it the was the language of their former colonial oppressors. I think the country would be in a weaker place today. Instead, from the early days they just asserted that English was as much their language as Britain’s. I think more countries should be more confident in asserting that they have a right to share something.
@@JJMcCullough I mostly agree with you. Though, I think it can as well be argued that shared culture could be as much a threat as a benefit for a country. Look at the Russian leadership using the fact that a lot of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language, to deny the existence of Ukrainians as a nation and a state. I think in this case the example of the US is less useful, since historically the US did not have its own language and the British arguments for the control over North American provinces were not really based on ethno-linguistic nationalism. Instead it is as if the UK was trying to deny the existence of Irish people, because most of the Irish speak English. Another factor in the Ukrainian case, that I think it is important to mention is that Ukrainians watching and being influenced by Russian state media is an obvious danger for the country and its people. The negative attitudes of many Ukrainians to the role of Russian language is in a big part the result of this.
@@JJMcCullough I've heard stories the US thought about making German the language of government at one point, but since English was the first language spoken by a significant majority of the population at the time, and the US government itself, it made a lot more sense to stick with it.
@@JJMcCullough Although it's interesting to note that as late as WW1 there were suspicions in the US that the government was trying to push the country into war (thus subverting its interests) by means of cultural influence such as propoganda, newspaper, business connections etc. that were partially based on the common language.
@@JJMcCullough I’ve read that India, with its multitude of parochial languages, would have been better off if it had adopted English as its official language when it became independent.
The sound effects you put in whenever you cut to a particular example of a point reminds me of those childrens educational games I used to play in elementary. Gives the videos a little bit of a nostalgic aesthetic. I think it's pretty cool.
I really appreciate how you clearly favoured descriptivism, but also gave a good description of prescriptivism. I always hate when it's described as "the elite" that chooses what is "prescribed". But I can see why it would be viewed that way. Unfortunately, the way I see it is that descriptivism is only good for the culture that is the most popular, erasing other cultures as they become awash in "pop culture". Those who are in the top (like, say, english U.S. culture) will tend to favour descriptivism, as they come out ahead in the end, whereas smaller, less influential cultures, have to become prescriptive lest they become "assimilated" by the larger cultures. It's why you see more and more "anti american" sentiment, if only because there was a time where almost all cultures were affected by american culture.
A good example of that would be English words in other languages. The RAE (the Spanish version of the Académie française, although much more descriptive) is very defensive about the use of English words, and it often creates weird translations that nobody uses. But if it started including these words into Spanish, we would end up with a Spanglish that’s detached from our original language.
@@nicolasflores8544 Aha, but this raises a very important question: what is "our original language"? How far back do we have to go in order to regard a given version of Spanish as "pure Spanish"? Because, as it turns out, Spanish is rife with loanwords. Loanwords from Arabic, especially, are ubiquitous, even common terms like "alcantarilla", "aldea", "almirante", and "azúcar". Is Spanish therefore not pure because of the presence of these words? Should we purge them from the language? What about all the words that come from pre-Roman languages? Words like "cama", "ardilla", and "cerveza", again, all come from languages that are neither Spanish nor Latin, and in their case, they're actually so old we know almost nothing about the languages they originate from. My point is that "the purity of a language" is a completely arbitrary thing that can't be measured. No language is truly pure.
Prescription is a power that must be limited to a small number of people or institutions. Those with that power are elite by definition. They may not be elite in all aspects within their society, but at least in that specific way which gives them the authority to prescribe, they are elite.
But the desire to preserve the existence of smaller, dying cultures is itself prescriptivist. It's also important to note that a crucial part of descriptivism is keeping records of change over time, so that no culture is ever truly lost. Neither method neglects preservation, they just go about it in different ways.
No culture was invented out of thin air, all culture evolved descriptively, the “smaller cultures” you are so proud of only exist because they “won” that descriptive war in the place of their own origin. It’s strange to suddenly be against a very natural process.
The Australian government takes a similar prescriptivist approach to Canada. They often decry that Australians watch too much American media and lecture the public on the need to support "Australian" films and TV. But then Screen Australia, the government body that funds films in Australia, has a very odd definition of what deserves funding. It must tell an 'Australian story' which is a very nebulous concept and tends to result in very tepid, boring or bland media that basically no one wants to watch.
I’m Australian and agree 100%. Ironically enough the Australian produced TV/film I really enjoy is the stuff geared towards the outer suburban second-generation migrant crowd, which is uniquely Australian in its own way.
It's amusing to me that new Zealand has a large presence in the film industry entirely because the government focused on making it lucrative for companies to actually produce films there. It brings a lot of jobs to the small country, while ironically countries like Canada an Australia try to control the content that the few people located there actually make and end up chasing away productions, a lot of the people who want to work in the industry end up moving to LA.
@@rogerknights857 They don't make legal threats on Australians (as far as I know) so I think decry is a better word for it. Maybe denounce if you want a similarly toned substitute.
Funny thing the French academy thing you talked about I saw it watching a documentary on France on vpro RUclips channel to be honest seeing the one of the people of the 40 heads talk about how important is it to preserve the French language in this modern age was very eye opening to see how important preserving and changing different aspects in language is
Are they really preserving language though? We need to consider the linguistic situation in France to understand this. What we call French is one of several Lang D'Oil, which is a family of regional romance languages/dialects spoken in France, but the French we know as French is merely the dialect of Paris, the largest and most influential city. All those regional dialects have been looked down on by the French Academy as "improper" and discouraged in the national education system in favor of the single "official" French dialect. Is this really preserving culture? Or is it merely an imposition of uniformity and cultural cohesiveness?
@@swagmundfreud666 I understand what your saying language is board their are different varieties and language can change from time to time , you can disagree with me if you want but I believe a language needs to be standardized and be distinct so it can be used more and for all common people to communicate because if I'm thinking of learning French and there are all of these varieties and I want to be able to communicate with every region in France it would be difficult to choose what French varieties to choose , I think of language as a survival game who can survive and I believe standardisation can include some words and different meanings from different varieties so in some form words from different varieties
@@singaporenoodles7189 it is pretty standard to just learn the language or dialect of the capital city / most influencial region when you're looking to learn a new language. There's not really any point to argue for standardising the way the entire country speaks just for the sake of making it easier for foreigners to learn the language
That's why learning French is a pain in the ass. The gap between the rules of grammar book and the "proper" French decided by this Ivory tower and the French actually spoken/written in the street is as large as the Grand Canyon.
me: "We Portuguese are a very culturaly united people." someone : how do you should pronounce the portuguese word for "bee"? * portuguese civil war beguins *
@@jalvesss I believe it was not a factual statement but hyperbole - that the range of pronunciations of the word 'bee' in Portuguese is so varied that it shows the range of the culture of that place. Not that there really was a civil war over the word itself.
@@jalvesss it a joke because this word is the most used example of a dictomy of the pronounciation of the letter "e" in portuguese. The word for bee is "abelha". Northern portuguese pronouces it as it is written, but Coimbra's portuguese, wich sets the standard (and more important, Lisbon Portuguese) pronounce it like * abalha *, with an A. Making this the correct spelling. This is an example of the modern Lisbon pronounciation setting the standard above the older northern pronounciation. The northern standard, headed by the City of Porto clashes with the capital and the standard of Coimbra. Of course this is an exageration, nobody figths about this, but I've already seen some heated arguments about the correct pronounciation of "bee", wich is weird in a monoetnic country where the language is prety much the Same everywhere and the culture doesn't Change radically, even between Porto, Lisbon or the islands. Another famous example is the sound "rr".
Thing I love about J.J.’s videos is that not only are the topics of discussion incredibly diverse and interesting - but, the comment section is filled to the brim with people writing very creative interpretations and reflecting deeply on the topics and how they relate to their own experiences. Fascinating!
Arguably, the argument for keeping the confederate flag is a prescriptivist one in descriptivist clothing. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy certainly used prescriptivism to keep the flag popular, which allowed for the creation of a descriptivist argument.
When I was little I thought culture was traditional stuff like clothing, dances and songs. So to me it was very weird when I heard some say "act with culture". Here in my country we have a very deep traditional culture or rural culture as you can put it. And when we danced or sang or put on traditional clothing I always thought we were paying homage to a bygone native culture since now we all dress with British/American clothing, listen and make music in English or with some, dance hip hop and pop. Now I know it is different from what I thought but not too far from it in terms of tradition.
I dunno man, Canada and the US are still relatively new countries of very similar origins, of course they're going to very culturally similar. Cultural distinctness is not inherent, it's slowly cultivated through centuries of isolation and self sufficiency. Canada could one day become a distinct culture, but only under the condition that it's willing to remain self sufficient in certain areas. Nations like Taiwan and Cuba demonstrate this. In my opinion, prescriptivists are just playing a long term game. Just because the tides are against them doesn't mean it's a meaningless endeavor.
but the US and Canada is not the same as say Germany and the Netherlands. The US and Canada are both: new nations that became nations as a result of British settler colonies. While the manner in which they became independent (a revolution in the US, more of a gradual process in Canada) might have some impact on the nature of politics and ideology (Parliament v Presidential system, freedom of speech etc), the majority of Americans and Canadians are products of their nations both being majority anglo, majority white, but multiracial English speaking liberal democracies, which are distinct from Europe. The differences in accent or ideology is stronger within different regions of the US, than between the US and Canada as a whole. As someone who lives in a suburb outside of San Francisco, if I went to a suburb outside of Vancouver or Toronto, the culture, accent etc would be more recognizable to me than the culture, accent etc of say a place in the US South, or even a suburb of New Orleans. The reason why the US Canada situation is usually not comparable to 2 border countries where one is much bigger than the other, is because in most countries in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia etc, the two countries in question originated as their own language and ethnicity. As for Taiwan and Cuba, for your example to relate to Canada, each nation would have to be directly near another much bigger nation with the same language, culture, etc. Cuba isn't really, as it is a Spanish speaking Latino country. I guess Mexico would be the closest thing, but Cube to Mexico isn't really the same thing as US to Canada. And as for Taiwan to China, the difference is Taiwan is a democracy while China is not. I'm not saying Canada can't become a distinct culture, I just think that the examples aren't really that applicable, and for Canada to become a distinct culture from the US, Canada would have to develop a distinct culture from what it already has, as it basically is American culture, with specific added things from Canada
Actually I’d say Canada USED to have a more distinct culture from America, but since the rise of mass media Canadians have consumed so much American entertainment that they have become virtually indistinguishable from Americans. Hell I’m even starting to see Canadian Trump supporters and Canadians using Republican talking points. The only thing separating the 2 countries now is a border, other than that Canada has largely lost what made it distinct from the US. The fact that Canadians have to specify that they’re from Canada and not the US is telling enough. We dress, act, talk, think, and move the same. We have the same mannerisms, I even heard Canadian girls that were talking in a valley girl accent.
6:39 Nice to see the flag of Anaheim. I find it is actually somewhat beneficial to see city flags differing from state flags. In Europe, Verona has the same flag as Sweden, Vienna as Denmark and Toulon (if I recall correctly) as Finland. Potential for confusion. The "geometric shapes only" is contradicted by white or gold lilies on blue, the old monarchic flag of France, and "no words" is contradicted by "ordem e progreso" in Brazil's flag.
Flag elitists aren't wrong, but they're just so insufferable about the whole thing that I can't help but indulge my deeply instinctual contrarian impulses.
Depends on the flag person. Some are truly very anal when it comes to the flag "rules" and are very prescriptivist. Others are more descriptivist and just view those "rules" as merely a guide to making a flag that was once seen as boring by its populace to a now beloved cultural symbol
I feel like one of the issues too is applying this to every single flag. The idea is that a flag should be distinct enough that you could immediately tell that it's the flag of _________. But, if every single flag followed the "flag rules" then there would be so many flags with simple shapes and colors that you wouldn't be able to tell which goes where. Simple flag design guidelines should be applied for national and state/provincial/regional flags. City flags, however, should be allowed leeway. And irrespective of all of this, there are enough distinct and cool looking flags that completely break the rules anyways. The Californian, Welsh, Bhutanese, and Mexican flags look great and break a bunch of flag rules.
@@OrigamiMaster06 well not entirely. They do follow some of the basic principles of the rules which favors simplicity over highly intricate designs. They don’t strictly adhere to them as it is unnecessary if you find a design that works. They are more of a guide to steer you away some less advisable practices that tend to detract from flags, but in specific cases can work wonders. California is one such example of a more complex flag that works wonders but does not have the centralized detail and overall plainness that many seal/banner flags suffer from
@@steakismeat177 But that's the point they are more of loose guidelines than anything. There are several flags that break the majority of the "rules" to wonderful results. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Mongolian flags all have complex geometries with a myriad of colors, and some sort of symbol/coat of arms. California and Mississippi have flags with complex details, tons of colors, and lettering. If it looks good then that's all that matters. The only thing that's wrong with the seal on a bedsheet style is that it's lazy and ugly as hell which makes for bad flags.
Man, you already knocked it out of the park for me with the language portion. I studied Linguistics and I general find most people who do so are Descriptivists by necessity.
I remember in school a lot of my teachers would say "ain't is not in the dictionary". We as kids would mess this up as we parroted it to other students as "ain't ain't in the dictionary".
Very interesting videos. Culture has changed throughout history and a modern day British would probably have less in common with a medieval British than a modern day French, still I think there always should be some prescriptivist aspects to keep some characteristics that makes a culture distinct or at least to keep a historical preservation. In the end, in a globalized world everything changes fastly adopting the descriptivist way, but not every amalgamation ends up being completely similar and new differences arise in different contexts, times and areas.
Always something interesting coming outta you! Btw thank you for taking the time to educate us on your culture and everyone you enlist to educate us on theirs.
A great example of Prescriptivism and Descriptivism in culture not mentioned here would be Music, While there are of-course _many_ different examples throughout music, From classical music theory to black metal, I think perhaps one of the most noteworthy is regarding the use of genres themselves: Genres originally come about to describe a new type of music, Which there isn't a term for, To make talking about it easier and to help listeners find more music they like, Among others, But then sometimes the genres can become more prescriptivist, As people try to make hard and fast rules, You can get complaints like "This isn't an x song because it doesn't do y", Or people specifically trying to follow all the "Rules" of a genre when writing a song in it, Which can often result in something quite generic sounding. Genres are also about more than just the sound of the music, Though, As they're largely shaped by a culture, And sometimes even an integral part of that culture (Perhaps even used by prescriptivists to say who is and isn't part of that culture.), But if you'd like to hear more about that (And this topic in general) I'd highly recommend the video "What We Get Wrong About Genres" by RUclipsr 12tone, They probably do a far better job explaining this than I could. (Sidenote, I notice that I've made 4 separate comments on this video now, Which honestly feels kinda "Rude" for some reason, But also I feel it'd've been really awkward to combine them into one.. Oh well.)
This idea of descriptive versus prescriptive approach to things is kinda mind blowing to me. Sounds like a concept to keep in the mind as a way to help approach new things.
I'm glad we live in the internet age, where everyone can find the culture that interests them without any guideness of old aristocratic institutes that dictate to us what we 'need'
@@adsri2755 Then my grammar checker has failed me. But that's the thing about the internet - even someone like me who isn't a native English speaker and lives far away from Canada can find JJs videos and get educated and inspired by his content. What a time to be alive
So am I, but at the same time, a lot of the institutions that enable our extremely diverse Internet culture were intentionally crafted by elites. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t exactly a day laborer.
Yeah, one more way our society can become increasingly alienating, have everyone occupy their own little niche cultural bubble. Who needs shared communal culture when you can just join a discord server.
Regardless of the broader "cultural" implications, a lot of my reactions to certain proposed changes are ultimately rooted in aesthetics and the trickle-down implications thereof. For all the talk I see about how BC's flag is (allegedly) bad, the mere suggestion of changing it aggrieves me because "remove current flag = remove context of symbols linked to said flag, thereby 'ruining' them." Similarly, I mainly support our connection to the monarchy purely because I like the crown symbol and word "Royal" on everything. While I'm mostly a descriptivist in most contexts, this particularly vein of prescriptivism is one I take very personally.
That gets tricky to categorize because your prescription is to maintain what is extant. Is that descriptivism? Frankly I'd just call that conservatism.
@@norik434 Politically, yes, I identify as a Conservative. In other contexts, like the ever-shifting English language, I've adopted a more descriptivist stance.
You say you only really care about keeping symbols for purely aesthetic reasons, but at the same time you also say that you get offended from certain symbols being removed because of the context for what they actually symbolize. You could have just said you were a Conservative without justifying every reason lol.
@@W.LL1999 I wasn't really thinking about that at the time. My headspace had spent the time prior to the video looking up local heraldry and self-assessing how I relate to such iconography, concluding a certain dread over losing identity through symbolic erasure or somesuch. More existential navel-gazing than political justification.
I’m an American who has lived in Mexico for 18 years. There is a government run museum Cecut (Centro de Cultura), and you can go into it any day and hardly see anyone, except for the problematic guards. You could shoot a shotgun and not hit anyone except the guards. There is a nightclub in Tijuana called Las Pulgas (The Fleas), and it has the distinction of selling more beer than any other location on earth. There are battles for the business of Las Pulgas by Modelo and Tecate - two Mexican beer producers. Los Angeles doesn’t even have a place this big. It has like 4 large bodegas (warehouses) where you can experience in each a different style of music, much of the time live. Culture is ambient or non-existent. True culture the people will be tripping over it, it can’t be avoided. One time I went to an art exhibit opening in Cecut, I knew personally various of the artists. While there, I realized that there was no one there that had decided to go to Cecut instead of Las Pulgas. It was just a bunch of artists who were the tail on the American dog of art, not representing in anyway the people of Mexico, who were patting each other on the back for being at Cecut. If any place in Tijuana could be called a “cultural center”, it would be La Pulgas, not the self proclaim cultural center called Cecut. Cecut is representative of artists who have been bought off by the government to keep them from making any significant commentary upon the culture. There is nothing of the Huichol culture who one Huichol told me that 40% of them are artists. That must be some kind of record. But many Mexicans would rather identify with the Triple Alliance aka The Aztecs, a culture that proved itself unworthy of survival for its imperialistic tendencies. Yet the Huichol have been through the Aztecs, The conquistadores, and all the desmadre of modern Mexico, with their culture still intact. That’s because all they want to do is their religion and their art which is influenced greatly by peyote rituals. They have been having problems with the Canadian mining industry, but this just makes me concerned for the survival of Canadian culture, not the Huichol. I think on a quantum mechanical level, Canadians bothering this humble people is having blow back, causing many of the problems that Canada is currently experiencing…
I'm so glad you brought up vexillology for this video! I've always been a flag nerd, but seeing forums like r/vexillology where everyone dogmatically sticks to arbitrary design rules has always bothered me. A good flag is a good flag because it looks good (subjective of course) not because it checks off an arbitrary design criteria.
JJ, I know you’re not a big fan of marijuana, but I did see this debate in the “stoner community” when I was in college. I noticed trendy companies would often make prescriptive merch and media for weed smokers to consume that was often really on the nose about weed. But I found many marijuana smokers found those “stoner appealing” products were often tacky or even cringey, and didn’t take into account the diverse array of interests and types of people who are pot users.
As someone that lives in the south, I do understand the general “whatever” ish attitude towards the confederate flag, no one really thinks of it like it’s the confederate flag unless they’re not from here or crazy and racist/deeply offended. I understand why we needed to change it but really the confederate flag just feels more like a part of southern culture than any racist meaning. Either way I’m happy we changed my state’s flag, we’ll hopefully be taken a bit more seriously on the federal stage and not just be seen as “poor racist rednecks.”
Research in the social sciences and humanities often has the prescriptive / descriptive spectrum that you talk about. Authors either describe phenomena and events, or take a strong stance as to their opinion on phenomena and events.
That is true but if it's prescriptive it's not science. What sets science apart from other approaches to knowledge is that it is purely descriptive. Science's prescription (wink) is if your ideas don't describe what you see then you change your ideas. That scientific approach has produced the most powerful ideas yet. But applying those ideas isn't science, that's engineering.
JJ, I love so much your choice in audio effects! They're are all so 8bit-ty and nostalgic of early videogames and consoles, my 90's baby ass adores it lol. Great work as always* :)
Also I think it would be a great Idea if the government of Canada treated “Can Con” as a cultural export and intended it for foreign audiences. it would actually solve the problem it hopes to correct rather than just propagating what it means to be Canadian to Canadians themselves
@@jhbadger Canadian Comedy is a great cultural export and people don’t laugh at the idea of a Toronto Hip Hop scene like they would’ve in the 90s. Snoop has also made CFL merchandise a flashy hip hop fashion statement because it’s hard to find in the US
Great video. As usual. I actually do have an example. It is widely accepted amongst linguists that the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin languages are just varieties of one single language, generally refered to as Serbo-croatian. However, the governments of these respective countries have engaged in, as you put it, cultural prescriptivism, by changing some of the vocabulary and even adding new letters in an attempt to render their languages more distinct. The use and acceptance of said additions among the public, however, hasn't seen much success and is often the subject of ridicule.
I'm old enough now that my inherent descriptivist nature has become prescriptive because of the passage of time. For instance: You called it "The Confederate Flag." When I was growing up (in the South mind you) it was called "The Rebel Flag," and when people said "The Confederate Flag," they meant specifically the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd national flags, which is to say, the *political* flags of the country. The Rebel Flag was seen as an apolitical thing, and either a symbol of general rebellion (Against anything, really, but usually snooty types who didn't like country or rock, and told you not to say 'ain't' in a condescending way) or a vague symbol of regional pride. Which was then and this is now, and it's good that it's finally gone. I was always uncomfortable with it. But since everyone calls it by a different name that meant a very different thing for the first two thirds of my life, I have to resist my inherent pedantic urge to correct them, remind myself that it just doesn't matter, and move on. (Thank you for indulging my explaining it here) And a lot of other things have shifted over the course of my life linguistically. People have gradually drifted in the pronunciation of certain words ("Naw-se-ah" in my youth to "Nawsha" now) starting sentences with 'so' which was so egregiously goofy that comedians frequently started sentences with it simply because it primed people for a laugh ("So I lost my girlfriend the other day...") and people using "Literally" and "Ironically" and "Decimate" wrong. And I don't want to be the cranky old man who screams about these damn kids these day, so I don't complain, but I have grown to understand *why* the old people complain: As time passes you begin to feel like a stranger in your own country. It's uncomfortable being left behind. (Well, actually I have become increasingly descriptivist about words, not because I object to their meanings changing over time, that's just natural, but words should at least mean *something* and given the frequency of new meanings getting picked up by old words, I dunno, it just feels like they can mean everything and nothing) I thought I had a point I was working towards, but I guess I don't.
Its interesting hearing this! I'm generally very descriptivist (tho I'm also pretty young and interested in language), but its interesting hearing the other side. the wayI think of it, at the end of the day, as long as two people understand each other, it should be okay. Plus, its just fun to be creative with words, and use them in fun ways. Tho, yeah, one day I'll probably be older and confused by the new slang, since you really can't stay up to date with everything forever.
@@rogerknights857 Yeah, sorry. I got distracted wondering if people were gonna call me a racist for even mentioning that damn flag, and my attention wandered. You're right.
@@syro33 Thank you. Yeah, the older I get the more I suspect we all start out as descriptivist and gradually slide into prescriptivism as the world changes and we struggle to keep a hold of it. Even casual word usage changes over time. "Gifted," sounds hopelessly pretentious to me, for instance. The kind of word that'd only be used in extremely formal circumstances, like, "The Empire of Japan gifted several hundred cherry trees to the United States," not "My grandpa gifted me a box of crayons." In situations like that we'd just say "Gave" or instead of "I was gifted," we'd say, "I got." Likewise, I tend to use full words like "Merchandise" instead of "Merch," which probably sounds hopelessly pretentious to others, and in a lot of cases I'm increasingly sure people don't realize there *is* a longer form of "Merch." This probably jumps out at me more than most since I'm a writer, and you quickly become aware of how quickly your word choices date.
A 14 years old Nort American Vexillological Association’s rules enjoyer is like “I am a part of the elites”. Edit: apparently it’s association and not society.
0:09 Who decides Cultural Boundaries? 0:30 Prescriptive - What something should be 1:01 Descriptive - What is taking place 1:43 Language 3:37 Dictionaries 5:19 FLAGS 7:40 The Confederate Flag "hung around for a long time." 9:13 Fashion 11:32 The Force of Money 12:11 Canadian Culture 13:55 Canadians don't want pushed content. 15:58 Application of Descriptive-Perspective Balance
Culture is one of the main statistics in Civilization VI. It represents a civilization's progress in the arts and crafts. Its role has been greatly enhanced since Civilization V: besides fueling border expansion at the city level, it is now used to research developments in the brand new civics tree.
Picture this, Rome had it's own culture and identity, it's added to most Civ games by virtue of being one of the largest most influential empires in history. After it's fall, the Eastern Romans kept calling themselves Rome, even after centuries their beliefs and values changed, the people we now call Byzantines (who make it into a number of games). In modern days Rome is not controlled by Rome but Italy, just a group of loose city states that were runover by the French and suddenly became a unified republic, Greece got it's own territory back but looks nothing like ancient greece, and Constantinople became the capital of the Ottomans- I mean Turks. Cultures is a lot more than just a ticking number, I like there is more to it in Civ games but I think it's also under developed in how people change their ideas and can influence others not just to join them but change their own ideas.
I would argue that a "descriptivist" approach to politics can often be implied to be "non-political" or "factual" (like in your analogy to the teacher's approach), while it may result in a backing of inaction, or pro status quo positions. An acceptance of ones cultural or political climate as is is in fact prescriptivist in that it tacitly acknowledges how things are as correct. Very thought provoking video, as always!
The shot of the "confederate" flag in front of the sign he uses at 8:15 is the hanging at a bar I used to frequent in college. It is in front of the sign for "Cloud" in Athens, GA. The one shown is actually an old Georgia flag, you can tell because the left third of it is blue & it has the seal of Georgia. It is still flown in some parts of Georgia for the reasons described by J.J. Weird that it ended up as stock footage in a video on one of my favorite channels Edit: added a time stamp
These definitions remind me of how my economics teacher described the terms “positive statements”, statements saying what is, and “normative statements”, statements saying what should be.
Really liked this video! But I think it would've been also good if you'd have considered the class aspect of this too: how the lower classes imitate the upper ones or vice versa. This is quite evident in how trends change over time, and make once "elite" things quite common after a few years/decades, and then new trends seen among the masses also make their way up the social hierarchy.
One of the things that always bothered me is that the U.S. has a list of "official" federal holidays, and the federal calendar doesn't reflect the holidays that are actually celebrated in the U.S. For example, Halloween and St. Patrick's Day are both widely celebrated in the U.S., but they're not considered "official" holidays, while Flag Day and Armed Forces Day are officially on the federal calendar, but tend to go unnoticed. Then there are some holidays that people are actively opposed to, such as Columbus Day, which is another holiday that most people don't pay any attention to, but has sparked a push to have the day renamed "Indigenous Peoples Day." Strangely, Congress did decide years ago to also have a "Leif Erikson Day" in addition to Columbus Day, but for some reason, none of the printed calendars include this one, and most people aren't even aware of it. On the flip side, there's Juneteenth (marking the day the last of the slaves were freed), which is a holiday that was declared an official U.S. holiday a long time ago, but was left off most calendars, and only recently, in response to the BLM movement, did they start printing it on national calendars. Another holiday that was sort of made-up by the government was "Patriot Day," which was created to memorialize the victims of the 9/11 attacks, but also not-so-subtly promote the USPatriot Act which authorized the NSA to spy on Americans' phones. When the public found out this was going on, the "holiday" mysteriously vanished from the calendars. But the one that really irritates me is President's Day (aka Presidents' Day or Washington's Birthday), mainly because it's not a widely celebrated holiday and falls in the already holiday-crowded month of February (Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl), but for some reason, car dealerships have to spend the entire month promoting President's Day sales, as if this were the most important thing happening this month. (Or maybe I'm just sick of car ads.)
In the early 2000s I was attempting to learn punctuation through google. I found that searches on hyphens, semicolons and apostrophes were most often being defined by the English Department of Cornel University. Google, Apple and Bing are the algorithmic descriptivist's while the dictionaries, English Professors and documentarians are "dust in the [algorithmic] wind".
If you haven't read Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber, do yourself a favour and grab it at your local library. It talks about this very subject, and argues that schismogenesis, the conscious act of differentiating yourself feom your neighbours, is an inescapable trait of every culture in history. And I'm actually ok with that. I love America, am grateful for the role it played in the world and benefitted Canada, don't get me wrong. But I do expect my government to make efforts to keep us different, as we are two distinct societal projects. C-11 is probably the worst way to go about that, but that's a dead horse I don't wanna beat.
You're supposed to pronounce the "s" in "française". The general rule is that, when a word ends with one or more consonants, they're usually silent, but when they're followed by an "e", they are pronounced. So in "français" (masculine), the "s" is silent, but in "française" (feminine), the "s" is pronounced.
Interesting video, prescriptivision and describtavision are a fascinating topic. Idk a lot of conflicts about that kind of thing but I can certainly elements of that debate in immigration culture, especially from people living in another country vs people living in their home nation. Like I've seen some people who are very strict about what a good person of their respective culture is supposed to be like vs. someone living in that country doing what they feel is right. Which can often lead to children of immigrants being a lot more conservative than their counterparts abroad.
So impressed with this video. You’ve basically described how bill C11 is prescriptive, delving deeper into why it’s inherit fabrics are harmful… I am from Scotland, but so invested in this Canadian bill thanks to you, and forever more in tune with how culture is changed by government.
Culture is created by what is cool. People are more easily influenced than you think, especially post media age. The cool can be set by soldiers, singers, performers, rich people and rulers. People like to emulate those on a higher standard than them. Get enough people to emulate something or someone and suddenly you got the cultural flavor of the decade. But as much people are easily influenced, they also get bored very quickly. The hip thing is quickly replaced the moment something fresh comes along. The internet effectively ruined culture. Everything is either extremely niche to never get the public to adopt it, or passes by so fast that people will immediately forget it. Look around, behold the great cultural stagnation on a planetary scale
Regarding language, in a similar way to your previous video talking about names, the utilitarian aspect of communication doesn't get enough play in discussions like this. Having discretely-defined rules of grammar and definitions of words that are mostly obeyed, as in French, makes the simple act of communicating more accessible and fluid than with more wishy-washy standards. Compare how some regions of Italy are less intelligible to each other than nations continents apart like Canada and Gabon. Anyone who's ever studied a second language with real enthusiasm will say formal, rigid rules are the most useful thing a language can have.
@@bones-f1i " many people who only know english don't know the rules of their own language. 'should of, to big,' etc. part of learning a language is to learn how the rules are commonly broken, if only to understand what people mean." That is a de facto necessity, yes, but a centralised linguistic authority minimizes it. As someone with formal FSL education who also took some Spanish courses I can say the vernacular in different French regions is easier to comprehend than the vernacular in select Spanish ones at the same language level. And as for the "colonialism" angle, standardization is an inherently top-down process that nonetheless is more useful and benign the further away from "expression" or "identity" you get. Language is somewhere in the no man's land between purely utilitarian (like numerals) and purely expressive (like art), but I'd ultimately say the expressive side of language isn't harmed as much by order as the utility side of it is harmed by disorder.
The presence of a regulatory body doesn't make a difference. Descriptivists are just as capable of conveying all the rules of a language, if not better. Just because English changes with the whims of its speakers, doesn't mean educators can't put together comprehensive and easy courses for learners. Remember, ALL languages have discretely-defined rules of grammar and definitions of words that are mostly obeyed. ALL languages have formal, rigid rules. The only difference is who defines them, which has no bearing on how they are learned. And if you think francophones don't have any issues with dialectal differences, you're sorely mistaken. There are countless dialects of French, just as with any other language, and they can be very different from one another. The Académie Française is not omnipotent, similar to the Real Academia Española, which fails to unify the wildly varied Spanish language.
@@gavinwilson5324 "Descriptivists are just as capable of conveying all the rules of a language, if not better." Considering how in the context of language they're more likely than not to attack the notion of formal rules altogether, no. Especially when it comes to English, where no matter how mutated and butchered a dialect is the more interpretivist side of social science will always circle the wagons and defend the broken gobbledygook people spew.
@@KAPTAINmORGANnWo4eva descriptivists don't do this, they simply base their rules on what is actually observed. prescriptivism is mostly based on what some people *think* should be said. if anything, prescriptivism makes learning languages harder (for example, I know a self-described prescriptivists who thinks you should never say "gonna". immagine learning from that guy, you'd sound so weird).
a media where government involvement is inevitable but uncomfortable might be teaching in school particularly history. Between teaching about patriotic education, CRT, sex education, history of slavery and aboriginal people, religious topics, or even evolution, the content taught in schools is always attracting some controversy.
I'm kinda vaguely prescriptivist, but more descriptivist on specific topics. Like I think Irish-Americans *should* learn the Irish Language, but I don't care about specific accents or spellings or slang. I'd like the Irish-American Community to speak Irish but I'd also like the "Gael-Meiriceánach" dialect to develop organically Gaeilge is Gaeilge, even if it is expressed differently from those Gaelic speakers in Ireland.
God it's hard enough getting Irish people in Ireland to learn Irish, it'll be one hell of a battle to get Irish Americans to learn Irish. I've met plenty of Americans who didn't even know Irish was an actual language that people still speak.
@@swagmundfreud666 oh, it'd be hard certainly There are 26,000 Native Irish Speakers in the US, but 30 Million Irish Americans. Still, if only 1% could be motivated to learn the language, there would be more Irish Speakers amongst Irish Americans than amongst Native Irish. And the more the Language becomes part of the cultural identity of the Community, the more people who would want to learn and immerse themselves in it.
I thought the term snowflake stemmed from people who were cynical towards people who believed strongly in the whole “everyone is unique” or “everyone is special” like snowflakes. And that wormed its way into political discussions to be used as an insult for sensitive people. It seems like they don’t care about the etymology of these terms. While I understand the way people use the English language is rapidly changing, it is literally their job. (The definitions they’re giving are very telling that they don’t fully understand them and make them poor definitions)
For Spanish we have La Real Academía Española (The Royal Spanish Academy) which from what you describe seems to be a combination of both prescriptive and descriptive organizations. As the French academy, they stablish the rules for the spanish language in general, but they also take into account cultural shifts in language and words spoken throughout the world in order to adapt and implement them to the pre stablished rules, as they are the ultimate source for dictionaries and the such. The spanish academy is also pretty active on social media and people usually ask them questions about if something is correctly said a certain way or else. So they appear to be descriptive in the sense that they are the ultimate authority for the spanish language rules and correct spelling, pronunciation, etc, but also descriptive in that they do not gatekeep cultural changes in language, but they adapt and work hard to document and implement them.
Another example is classical music. To this day classical music still has a very elitist culture, and the unfortunate effect is that modern composers, and many women and BIPOC composers, are often ignored in favor of an idolized canon of "Great" composers, whose works are always performed by the major orchestras, etc. The "prescriptivist" culture in classical music goes back centuries: orchestras and choruses and skilled pianists were prohibitively expensive, so composers were directly sponsored by aristocrats (you can see this in how many dedications of their works are to barons and countesses rather than to friends and fellow composers). The aristocracy were the taste setters, and the general public would be lucky to listen at all. In fact, it wasn't until the early 1800s - around the time of Beethoven's fifth symphony - that a ticket to a classical music concert became just affordable enough for the middle class; and from then on, at least according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, the evolving classical styles can partly be attributed to the tug of war between the elites who still wanted to dictate what is in vogue and the populace who gradually became more and more musically literate.
FLAGS!!! Now that's a culture I can get behind!! I am an old person 😁 (50), and growing up it was absolutely music culture that pervaded my youth. You were the music you listened to and it included fashion, language and even political leanings in some cases. It has been interesting to see that evolve. It is certainly still there, but as the homogenization of the music landscape has occurred to a certain degree, I am not sure it is still as pervasive. The last thing I'll mention is social media culture. Where I had band shirts growing up, I now wear RUclipsr shirts (including Hello Friends 😁) and I wonder how main stream that is. I love these thought provokers JJ 😁. Happy Saturday everyone!!
Theres an interesting duality between descriptivism and prescriptivism in Germany. One one hand there was the „Rechtschreibreform“ or spelling reformation in 1996, it changed certain rules or spelling and is widely adopted, throughout High German. One the other hand there are the many and varied dialects, which have their own grammatical quirks. In schools its encouraged to speak High German, but many students dont bother, in writing however you are penalized, if you dont use High German.
I see this prescriptivism vs descriptivism argument really play out in fictional franchises whether it be books, plays, tv shows, movies, board games, or video games. The prescriptionists argue that the products that the creators deem "canon" are the only valid products of that franchise and all non-canon products should be completely disregarded where as descriptionists will argue that how well the product is received by fans should be considered a bigger factor compared to whether or not the product is deemed "canon".
Even if some non-canon parts of a series is enjoyable, it should still be classified as such for keeping track of what has happened in each version to keep them from merging
This divide is very prevalent at my school. My administrators are obsessed with creating culture by creating rules, uniforms, and events at school. But often, there is pushback from students who say that these prescriptivist cultural touchstones don’t actually speak to what the school’s culture is really like. Instead, students say that culture truly comes from the bottom, and that the culture should be set by the students and the teachers
My High school was a lot like this as well. We got a new principal who was upset that we didn’t have enough traditions so he put a lot of effort into trying to impose them from the top down which people found kind of condescending.
Another great example to this is food. You have the prescriptivists who can be quite specific about when a food can be defined as that specific food, like champagne or cheese specifications. Or just the typical disgust with 'out of the ordinary' food combinations (You can't put pineapple on pizza). Although food is interesting as well because it has Government prescriptivism in the form of food regulations, which are overall useful in making sure what consumers receive is 'safe'.
There is a lot of gate keeping in food culture
Don't dare to ask a Spaniard about paella
it's interesting to see culture adapt to some of those government prescriptions, especially in regards to products like chocolate that has to legally have a certain percentage of cocoa to have the name. today there's a lot more "chocolatey pieces" instead of "chocolate" on the market compared to years before
Pineapple on pizza is pretty gross.
This reminds me of that Italian-American chef who hated Italian-American food for not "doing it like in Italy". Its just silliness.
Sushi is a great example. Traditional sushi from Japan has strict rules but all around the world sushi is being treated more like a canvas to express one's culinary tastes.
Exactly what descriptive Japanese do with their sushi nowadays: mayo-salmon sushi, kimchi-natto sushi...
Or mayo corn sushi
@@HeavenlyH3R0 Yuck!! Yes! I can't even go to those places anymore... probably running out of affordable fresh fish anyway
As a kid, I didn’t even know fish was the main ingredient of sushi, because once my sister gave me some sushi that was literally just seaweed and rice, and there was also an episode of _Wonder Pets_ where some character prepares celery “sushi style” (I.e. stuffing a large celery stalk into a rolled up ball of rice in seaweed).
So yeah, that one visual gag in _Shark Tale_ completely flew over my head as a kid, as did the mention of sushi in _The Little Mermaid 2_ .
The ultimate "prescriptivist" language today is Latin. I always try to ward people off from referring to it as dead because it is still actively learned and employed today, just in very limited circumstances (as opposed to something like Akkadian or Hittite which are both truly dead). There are Latin language societies whose entire existence is dedicated to preserving and instructing the rules and vocabulary of Latin. In fact, I once listened to a speech from one of the foremost Latinists of our day describing how the language is incredibly useful as it remains alive but purely in an archival sense. Because its rules and vocabulary aren't changing (there's no new description to be had), it is a reliable method of preservation that later people will always be able to accurately decode.
Linguistics makes a distinction between "dead" (no longer spoken as a native language) and "extinct" (no longer spoken at all).
That's why Latin is classified as "dead".
There's the RUclipsr PolýMATHY/ScorpioMartianus that knows Latin and teaches his audience Latin. Also dubs movie/TV scenes & songs into Latin.
Latin is labelled as "dead" but it's a misnomer.
Here is another example of Latin not being a dead language. The Catholic Church still uses it in some services. Up until Vatican 2, Latin was used in all catholic services. Now most services are in the native language where the church is, they still do offer some services in Latin as well.
@@stuartm6069 Interestingly, Church Latin differs a lot from the sort of Latin you learn at school, especially as far as pronunciation is concerned.
It was mentioned but a dead language is one where it is no longer spoken as the lingua franca of a nation or a large enough contiguous portion of a nation.
Hebrew was a dead language, it was no longer the lingua franca of the Jewish people. It was preserved and spoken just like latin currently is by clergy and some academics.
So calling latin a dead language isn't a judgment statement as to its use or value. Rather a statement of fact. Maybe someday Latin can join Hebrew as a revived lingua franca.
As someone who works manual labor, watching your videos is good way to grow my perspective and learn about wide range of topics. While I love what I do the conversations with the men and women I work with are rather surface level and become quite mind numbing after a time.
That’s nice to hear! I have a friend who does manual labor and he says similar things.
Kris, as a doctor (retired) I can tell you that most conversations with my coworkers also became mind numbing after a time! I too find JJ’s videos very thought provoking.
Brazil and Portugal represent two polar opposites when it comes to given names. Portugal has a fixed list of allowed given names that are very etymologically rooted in the Portuguese language. Brazil is on the anything-goes descriptivist end of the spectrum and barely legislates about how parents can name their children. This has allowed for upper class Brazilians to name their children with Italian given names such as Enzo and lower class Brazilians to choose English names such as Jennifer for their kids.
Funny enough, we in France have a similar naming dynamic. Working-class parents, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, were inspired by American TV series for their kids' names, which led to Kevin in particular being seen as a very unfavorable name to have here, same goes in Germany I was told. The name Enzo is also very popular among French zoomers, however it's not seen as much more advantageous than the American names. Upper-class French kids still tend to have very typical French names, with hyphenated names in particular having a bit of an aristocratic vibe.
@@FairyCRat after Michael Jackson shot the music video for ‘They don’t care about us’ in Salvador, the name ‘Maicon’, an informal transliteration of ‘Michael’ into Portuguese, grow in popularity.
I have noticed some Hispanic people here in the US replace the many traditional Spanish names with Italian names like Giovanni instead of Juan or Alessandra instead of Alejandra, Francesco instead of Francisco, etc.
@@felipeitoanuatti reminds me of Perú, where there is this tradition among working class or lower income families of giving American-like names that most of the times are terribly butchered versions of abbreviated names such as Yhonny (Johnny), Yeni (Jenny), Ghreiss (Grace) or last names like Jefferson or Edison. Decades ago, and in the Andean provinces, there was the tradition of giving Greek names like Pánfilo, Teodosio or Porfirio but now those names are sometimes mocked and regarded as old stuff.
@@FairyCRat In the film "Muerte in Buenos Aires" the owner of a gay night club is asked about someone called Kevin and his response "Here they are all called Kevin" is delivered with the sort of distain only a Porteño or Parisian could muster.
First of all - I love the clip of the Georgia flag! ;)
Second of all, back in the pre-internet days I subscribed to the North American Vexilogical Association monthly magazine. It was the only way to keep up with flag news at the time. The director, Dr Whitney Smith (designer of the flag of Guyana), even sent me a hand-drawn picture of what the Biafra flag looked like. At the time, there was no easy way to look it up!
I'm no vexilogical prescriptivist, but I have a soft spot for the NAVA!
Vexilological guidelines and rules are meant to enable creativity with practicality and accessibility in mind, right? Are the concrete guidelines' prescriptions still being debated?
Also in my freshmen music theory class last week I was teaching them about prescriptive vs. descriptive types of musical notation and musical analysis. There's a spectrum, but some types of notation are more designed to help people perform or recreate something, whereas other types are more designed to represent how something actually sounded (e.g. a spectrogram). Similarly, with musical analysis and teaching, some interpretations aim to tell you how to hear a certain piece, whereas others aim to tell you how lots of different people hear the piece.
Something about Canada you left out is that, for English media, the state-supported television content is not popular, while in Québec, the state-supported french-speaking TV show are by far the most popular. It seem to me that the Anglo-Saxons do not play along well with prescrivisim in general, while the French (and even Latin in general) tend to be fine with it.
I think this is a part of it, but I think that the lack of French-language content produced by the USA is a bigger factor.
I agree with wode that both elements are at play.
Additionally, Quebec is a unique culture where Anti-Canadian sentiment and Anti-Anglophone sentiment are heavily pushed upon francophones as a form of self-preservation, so government prescriptivism is seen as positive and directed at their well-being.
While that's highly debatable in practice, the activist culture of Quebec does have a lot of up sides and so it's not hard to see how a government running on such a values-oriented, "left wing" prescriptivism might be popular.
@@wodediannao4577 Most US content is available in french and others languages (for comedy, it's notoriously bad to be honest, humor is hard to translate). For movies, usually 8 of of the 10 high-gross movies are from Hollywood with one or two local and the occasional French one. But the fact remain that Québec's creative ecosystem generate content appreciated by it's public, while it seem to not be the case in anglophone Canada
@@ryanpaulmarcoux3813 "Anti-Canadian sentiment and Anti-Anglophone sentiment are heavily pushed upon francophones"... what a loaded and inaccurate statement. Not being something does not mean you dislike the thing. Quebec's culture is not Canadian, American or French culture, but these culture are not hated.
@@nicolasrobitaille5903 Not by all, and within Montreal not even by the majority, but I have traveled in circles even among the youth wherein the "anti" perspectives are not only openly and confidently stated as activist philosophies, but are even prevalent among the younger generation.
Usually, this sentiment is found in the older generation and/or in smaller Quebec townships, but it's still strong and the backbone of many Quebec parties on the provincial level (look at the CAQ's recent language protection measures for an idea).
I mean, Quebec never even signed Canada's constitution and there is a myth that it refuses to take money from the Federal government on those grounds. It's deep in the history and culture.
The flag thing is interesting because it's an area where you see that some parts of culture are just dumb luck.
Like, I don't really think Americans developed all these "bad" flag designs because we're super into slapping a seal onto a field of color and calling it a day. It feels more like for most of our history the majority of flags weren't created by actual designers and the topic has been so obscure that it's rare that any flag gets the kind of attention needed to propel an effort to make a change.
I'm a Washingtonian, an artist, and a vexillology enthusiast, but if I'm honest with myself I don't care about my state's flag all that much, let alone my city flag. I basically never see them unless I have to go to a government building on a windy day.
That’s a good point. We sometimes forget just how new “flag culture” is in general.
I think an area having a cool / well designed flag will increase the chance of it being flown by public organisations and the people living there
With banner making available in Minecraft a whole generation will be into flag design and maybe the state seal on a bedsheet will be a thing of the past in the future
It's Americas allergy, especially acute after WWII, to government spending tax money on anything remotely tasteful in design.
Government should be efficient and spend as little money as possible to provide a service or relay information.
I like my Arizona flag because it's pretty awesome and one of the better ones even among those designed. Still the primary flag is the national flag, I agree there's not a big movement to make a STATE flag unless there's some special pride behind it. Still a lot are kind of meh even when it takes effort past the official seal.
I still can't get over how the Académie Française is a real thing.
I can't get over that you are real
We have the same thing in Italy it's called Accademia della Crusca (Academy of the Bran). But Italian is a made up language so they make sense.
@@pitmezzari2873 isn’t it heavily based on the Tuscan dialect however?
It’s so quintessentially French lol
Same for Spanish, we have the Real Academia Española which standardizes the language but it's more descriptive than most people realize
The Académie Française has a little brother: The OQLF (Office Québécois de la langue française). Their role is more to erase new English words making their way in day-to-day conversations in Quebec French, mostly from the Internet and tech world. Their suggestions usually doesn't catch on beyond journalists and official communications but some does in the general population ( like texto for text message and courriel for email).
Texto a toujours été la version standard en France, peut-être que le mot a été importé plutôt qu’inventé par l’OQLF
I've always find it funny that European and Canadian francophones both use English words, but their anglicisms are very different from each other.
In Canadian French, they're a lot older and more fluent-sounding, as they've been living alongside anglophones for centuries and have thus incorporated code-switching into their colloquial speech, often using whichever word has the fewest syllables in order to save time.
In European French by contrast, most anglicisms came post-war due to growing American influence, and they're often used in a way that would be completely incorrect in English, the best examples of that being all the -ing words that were adopted as nouns in French (jogging, parking, camping, shampooing...). Interestingly, two of the most widely accepted anglicisms in European French, weekend and email (although we typically just say "mail" or "mèl" since our word for non-electronic mail is still "courrier") aren't used in Canada either. The period when European francophones started adopting anglicisms seems to almost coincide with the period when French Canadians stopped doing so.
@@augth Probablement. L'OQLF aurait été plus du genre à appeler ça un "mobilotexte" 🙄
Balado pour podcast, super idée !
@@FairyCRat le mot courriel semble commencer à prendre, tout comme divulgacher (déflorer l'intrigue). Comme quoi c'est juste une question d'habitude.
I would argue that the prevalence of the confederate flag may have been initially prescriptive. Powerful groups like the daughters of the confederacy pushed hard to make confederate symbols and figures mainstream in southern culture.
@@shorewall Japan? I've never lived there, so I'm only judging by what little I know from the outside. I would say Germany also did a good job of abandoning past beliefs. Maybe not completely, there are most certainly fringe groups. But for the most part they have.
@@JimmyMon666 Japan hasn't really.
To this day, they still deny the Rape of Nanjing and other war crimes.
@@JimmyMon666 The Germans didn't abandon that belief. Most of them wouldn't of been hardcore believers and the ones that were basically got the Holocaust treatment in the Eastern half and ousted politically in the Western half. Beyond that Germans were glad to embrace any culture as long as it was allowed to be Germans for the most part. Japan never gave up it's culture and if we killed the emperor it would of doomed the US and USSR into having to engage in genocidal levels of warfare on the Japanese main land in the desperate hope of forcing a surrender. Rural Japan hasn't changed all that much. Urban Japan changed due to Western media influencing Japanese youths.
@@shorewall the confederacy existed for 5 years, it was hardly an institution of the south, much less an institution worth commemorating. All of the seceding states had been a part of England, France, Spain, or Mexico for far longer, and of course most had been part of the Union for generations. It was the preservation the ‘right’ for rich folks to own slaves that had been prescribed to the rest of the populace, and that was what all the pro-confederacy monuments erected in the 20th century, and the corresponding state flags, were all about
I don’t that, I think it’s just clear that you view descriptist as good and prescribtivist as bad and you try to always justify it
As a Canadian, I must say, most Canadian prescriptive cultural products are lame, stagnant, and predictable. The government wastes millions each year providing grants for those artists that tow the ideological line of the Laurentian Elites and the powers that be. For every successful TV show produced by the CBC (Schitts Creek, Kim’s Convenience, etc.) there’s 20 other insipid and uninspired projects greenlit without question. The Canadian government could solve this issue if they were to loosen their prescriptive cultural requirements on what gets funding, but that would mean a loss of control and if the last 4 years have shown us anything, it’s shown us that the Canadian government will do whatever it takes to not lose control of anything it deems necessary (including the restriction of human rights).
ther eis probably the same success rate for American shows, they just make 10X more of failures and successful shows
What is the point of Anglo-Canada? Why not just join the States?
What They ought to fund is THIS CHANNEL and/or JJ himself. Give him the means to operate a “Factory” that mostly funds artists and projects that tickle his fancy and America will welcome a Canadian Invasion.
Watch more french Canadian TV then... We have some pretty good shows.
@Magnustopheles The US is the richest nation in the world, has the strongest military, largest economy, most influential politically, best universities, best sports nation, dominates music, movies, TV shows, top companies, top internet sites, most diverse, immigrant nation, most Nobel Prize winners by far, first nation to put a man on the moon, fought off Germany and Japan and rebuilt Europe through the Marshall Plan, protected Europe from Communism and fought off communist Soviet Union, US gives more foreign aid than any other nation in the world. The US also provides the breakthroughs in much of medicine and technology that Europeans then use, without having created with their system. Europeans are able to live in a peaceful world order where they can spend less on military and focus on their homogenous societies. But that doesn’t happen out of a vacuum. It comes from the Pax Americana the US provided. If every liberal democracy was Denmark, fascism, communism, authoritarianism and/or Islamic fundamentalism would dominate the world and nations would all be immeasurably worse off. Not to mention that besides other smaller nations having their quality of life because of the U.S. created world order and US advancements, no nation in human history as large and diverse as the US has had as high a quality of life as the US. The only nations that can have a higher quality of life than the US are nations much smaller, more homogenous, which benefit from the US created world order and US advancements, and which are specifically smaller and more homogenous than most large countries. Of course the top nation in the world will always be the most targeted, it’s always been this way. A truly mediocre nation would not be as targeted, because people have the inclination to try to take out the guy at the top
It’s a chicken & egg scenario. At the end of the day, people can attempt to prescribe culture, but culture will only be what it actually is. If the prescription is accepted, then the description will change to accommodate it, but if not, then it makes no sense to hold the prescription in any regard.
Description wins hands down, the vernacular meaning is the only meaning that matters broadly
that's a nice summary of the nature of culture
That’s not 100% true. Using “literally” incorrectly, for instance, will make a person look stupid to prescriptivists-and they are often people who “matter.” E.g., people who review employment applications.
This is clearly not generally true. Consider the power that prescritivist linguistics has had and continues to have on speakers of less prestigious dialects of English. They earn poor grades in school, learn to consider their dialect "wrong", and either assimilate or face discrimination the rest of their lives. The thing we forget is that the elites are elites and hold power and influence over the poor and common.
@@rogerknights857 Yes, of course it's not 100% true, a low percentage of statements of all total statements are 100% true in the real world. But more often than not it is true that descriptivism wins over time. Even the dictionaries in the English language are now largely descriptivist, when they were once relatively speaking much more on the prescriptivist than they are now just a few decades ago.
@@rogerknights857 That doesn't reflect the culture as a whole, though. The people who "matter" may dictate using language their way within the spaces they have control over, but they only have control over those spaces. That's how you get stuff like code switching--people will conform to the rules of prescriptivism when they need to, but when they don't they go back to "normal" (and truer to culture as it actually is).
Even though I disagree with JJ politically about a great many things, his cultural videos are always excellent and I'm always amazed at how introspective they are
I love that he's out there talking about culture, especially with the Canadian bent but I think he misses a little on the fullness of introspection sometimes. I feel like he decided a long time ago how he sees the world and then just locked into that.
@@WicksKE this kinda applies to most people, I guess I''m guilty of this as well even though I always try to be open minded and expand my perspective.
@@WicksKE it took me decades to escape my old thinking but I agree that it seems JJ is far too comfortable in his lifestyle to consider that perhaps systems need to change.
I’ve been in the dance world for a long time, and this has made me think about how prescriptive vs descriptive different dances/dance competition judging can be depending on which dance you’re doing.
In ballroom for example, the rules are RULES. Every body movement has a name and a precise mode of execution which are documented and edited only by authorities. Competitions reflect this. Do a more advanced move when you’re competing at a lower level? Axed. Wear sequins in a collegiate competition? Out. Even dances that share the same NAME have different movement rules depending on whether you’re dancing International or American style. (ex. American Rumba and International Rumba are danced very differently.)
Contrast THAT with Lindy Hop and West Coast Swing; dances that have developed into creatures that are judged primarily on musicality and ability to interpret the music with a partner as a team. Technique is still important to get the dance right, but there are incredibly famous examples of moves that everyone knows now that were universally adopted (and named) when a performer (usually a talented pro) messed up or improvised something cool and the community loved the new move so much that we gobbled it up into the cultural canon. If you’re creative/skilled enough, heck, you could redefine the entire dance the way Frankie Manning did for Lindy Hop. Even dress codes reflect this attitude. High level West Coast Swing dancers, for example, might be competing on the world stage in leggings and a T-Shirt.
I love both/all worlds for different reasons, but they’re so SO culturally different that it can be a shock when you cross between one and the other. I love how this video made me think about that- I’ve known it for forever, but I haven’t explicitly thought about it a ton.
There’s a surprising one that people may not know of (mainly because there’s very, very few people studying this field, at least to the extent I do).
I’ve been studying anthems relatively seriously for the past 30 years now and there is a prescriptive vs. descriptive element in there too. Prescriptive you would find things like the recent change by the Canadian government to change “in all thy sons command” to “in all of us command”. For the record I was interviewed by CBC around 2010 about this (there was just talk at this point no change) and being a descriptive at myself I am on record as saying that it shouldn’t be changed because there’s no overwhelming urge by the people to change it. (I’ve always felt, even then, that there should be and am supportive of the change but at the same time upset that it was forced on a population who by and large disagrees with my need for a change (or more likely is apathetic)).
Many anthems are prescriptivist as well, imposed by a government perhaps upon independence or revolution, but many more are descriptive at in that a song used by the people becomes a de facto anthem. Thomas O’Higgins, a legislator in Ireland in 1933, describes the descriptivist way best when he said: “National Anthems come about, not because of the suitability of the particular words or notes, but because they are adopted generally by the nation. That is exactly how the “Soldier’s Song” became a National Anthem in this country. It happened to be the Anthem on the lips of the people when they came into their own and when the outsiders evacuated the country and left the insiders here to make the best or the worst of the country. It was adopted by the people here before ever it was adopted by the Executive Council”.
Another interesting note on this is the variance in cultural expectations for what the anthem ought to sound like.
I grew up in Venezuela and down there every single schoolchild has seared into their memory the exact recording of the national anthem which the government mandates be played every morning before class begins. This decades-old government mandate has in turn created a culture where the national anthem has to sound exactly like the one at school, or else it's considered disrespectful and unpatriotic. In fact, there was a major controversy back around 2008 when a popular hip-hop artist released a version of the anthem with a dance-music rhythm, with enough people considering it offensive to warrant having the song banned from radio stations.
Imagine my shock, then, when I moved to the United States and saw just how commonly major artists would put their own spin on the anthem at major sporting events. Yes, there is still a great reverence for the anthem at these events, but what was curious to me was the fact that the anthem could be interpreted by a wide range of solo artists in so many different styles and still be considered "correct" by the public as long as the lyrics and melody were unaltered. American schools don't seem to teach or recite the anthem at all these days (with the Pledge of Allegiance being the default instead), and I wonder to what extent that has contributed to this phenomenon.
I’ve been a Canadian citizen since 1996 and, being female, the “all her sons” line never sat well with me. I always sung “all of us”. I was very glad that the prescriptivists eventually adopted my description!
Another interesting thing to note there would be the Australian anthem. While "Waltzing Matilda" reflects the unique culture a lot more, they ended up going with a painfully anglo and unmemorable anthem, and lots of people are annoyed about that. Not an Aussie but its a pertinent example.
Notice how the didn't dare change the French version, despite it being majorly based.
That makes me think of how it is common enough in the US to think that 'America the Beautiful' is the official national anthem, rather than 'Star Spangled Banner' that the Wikipedia article for 'America the Beautiful' starts with "Not to be confused with the national anthem."
Every "I'm rich, you're poor, let's dance" movie is essentially a battle between stuffy prescriptive adults dictating to their children the nature of their culture i.e. 'Footloose', 'Dirty Dancing', 'Pleasantville', 'Hairspray', 'Drumline', the list goes on...
"I'm rich, you're poor, let's dance." I've never heard these movies described this way, but it a succinct and apt description. I love it.
@@JBaughb Thank you, at risk of plagiarism, I really should cite 'Family Guy' who came up with that definition in one of their gags.
I'm confident that if you type that description into the search function it should come up.
nice point
Thanks Professor 🎪 🤡
@@DJK-cq2uy You're most certainly welcome. Pay close attention, this will be on the test later.
I learned of descriptivism recently on my Linguistics classes, and it's nice to see the concept applied to culture in general
If you really want to see descriptivism in action, look up the 2015 Oxford English Dictionary 'Word of the Year'.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@professordogwood8985 i mean, what exactly is a word anyways? its pretty hard to define sometimes, especially since some languages don't use spaces.
emoji.... are kinda words, they do show meaning in some way, and they are useful. Overall, i think its not too silly to put an emoji as a word of the year.
@@syro33 You did your homework. A+
I find it funny that often popular international Canadian pop cultural icons are utterly indistinguishable from what could be created in the US (see Drake and Avril Lavigne, etc).
Yeah, as he said in his video about North American culture, the US is the country that innovates and Canada is the country that emulates. Generally, Canadian celebrities will spend a lot more time in the US than the other way around.
2:45 the French academe recently made a point to end the French use of the term "le weekend" because its 'too English' and took the stance that "real French people use the term 'fin de la semaine' because its more French"... sorry about spelling French is my second language!
I am from Ukraine and my country definitely has a prescreptivist vs descreptivist debate.
Because of the Russian Empire and later Soviet rule, historically Russian-speaking media dominated over Ukrainian-speaking. Starting from books, music and TV shows, because of much larger consumer base and hence higher budgets Russia was able to have disproportionate influence over Ukrainians, simultaneously often pushing its own narratives. Even the president Zelensky, a formal comedian, before entering politics made primerily Russian speaking movies and shows.
Now, Russian speaking does not necessarily means Russian. Most of Russian speaking Ukrainian artists for example are in general no less “pro-Ukrainian”, than your random Ukrainian speaking Ukrainian artists, but because of the incentives these artists have there is a potential for them to be entangled in Russian media sphere, that is obviously highly dependent on and influenced by the Russian government.
It always causes a lot of problems when shared culture becomes seen as a symbol of political subordination. Imagine if the Founders of the US tried to get everyone to stop speaking English because it the was the language of their former colonial oppressors. I think the country would be in a weaker place today. Instead, from the early days they just asserted that English was as much their language as Britain’s. I think more countries should be more confident in asserting that they have a right to share something.
@@JJMcCullough I mostly agree with you. Though, I think it can as well be argued that shared culture could be as much a threat as a benefit for a country. Look at the Russian leadership using the fact that a lot of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language, to deny the existence of Ukrainians as a nation and a state.
I think in this case the example of the US is less useful, since historically the US did not have its own language and the British arguments for the control over North American provinces were not really based on ethno-linguistic nationalism. Instead it is as if the UK was trying to deny the existence of Irish people, because most of the Irish speak English.
Another factor in the Ukrainian case, that I think it is important to mention is that Ukrainians watching and being influenced by Russian state media is an obvious danger for the country and its people. The negative attitudes of many Ukrainians to the role of Russian language is in a big part the result of this.
@@JJMcCullough I've heard stories the US thought about making German the language of government at one point, but since English was the first language spoken by a significant majority of the population at the time, and the US government itself, it made a lot more sense to stick with it.
@@JJMcCullough Although it's interesting to note that as late as WW1 there were suspicions in the US that the government was trying to push the country into war (thus subverting its interests) by means of cultural influence such as propoganda, newspaper, business connections etc. that were partially based on the common language.
@@JJMcCullough I’ve read that India, with its multitude of parochial languages, would have been better off if it had adopted English as its official language when it became independent.
JJ my top5 RUclipsr list. Great content. Friendly. Canadian.
The sound effects you put in whenever you cut to a particular example of a point reminds me of those childrens educational games I used to play in elementary. Gives the videos a little bit of a nostalgic aesthetic. I think it's pretty cool.
I really appreciate how you clearly favoured descriptivism, but also gave a good description of prescriptivism. I always hate when it's described as "the elite" that chooses what is "prescribed". But I can see why it would be viewed that way.
Unfortunately, the way I see it is that descriptivism is only good for the culture that is the most popular, erasing other cultures as they become awash in "pop culture". Those who are in the top (like, say, english U.S. culture) will tend to favour descriptivism, as they come out ahead in the end, whereas smaller, less influential cultures, have to become prescriptive lest they become "assimilated" by the larger cultures. It's why you see more and more "anti american" sentiment, if only because there was a time where almost all cultures were affected by american culture.
A good example of that would be English words in other languages. The RAE (the Spanish version of the Académie française, although much more descriptive) is very defensive about the use of English words, and it often creates weird translations that nobody uses. But if it started including these words into Spanish, we would end up with a Spanglish that’s detached from our original language.
@@nicolasflores8544 Aha, but this raises a very important question: what is "our original language"? How far back do we have to go in order to regard a given version of Spanish as "pure Spanish"? Because, as it turns out, Spanish is rife with loanwords. Loanwords from Arabic, especially, are ubiquitous, even common terms like "alcantarilla", "aldea", "almirante", and "azúcar". Is Spanish therefore not pure because of the presence of these words? Should we purge them from the language? What about all the words that come from pre-Roman languages? Words like "cama", "ardilla", and "cerveza", again, all come from languages that are neither Spanish nor Latin, and in their case, they're actually so old we know almost nothing about the languages they originate from.
My point is that "the purity of a language" is a completely arbitrary thing that can't be measured. No language is truly pure.
Prescription is a power that must be limited to a small number of people or institutions. Those with that power are elite by definition. They may not be elite in all aspects within their society, but at least in that specific way which gives them the authority to prescribe, they are elite.
But the desire to preserve the existence of smaller, dying cultures is itself prescriptivist. It's also important to note that a crucial part of descriptivism is keeping records of change over time, so that no culture is ever truly lost. Neither method neglects preservation, they just go about it in different ways.
No culture was invented out of thin air, all culture evolved descriptively, the “smaller cultures” you are so proud of only exist because they “won” that descriptive war in the place of their own origin. It’s strange to suddenly be against a very natural process.
The Australian government takes a similar prescriptivist approach to Canada. They often decry that Australians watch too much American media and lecture the public on the need to support "Australian" films and TV. But then Screen Australia, the government body that funds films in Australia, has a very odd definition of what deserves funding. It must tell an 'Australian story' which is a very nebulous concept and tends to result in very tepid, boring or bland media that basically no one wants to watch.
I’m Australian and agree 100%. Ironically enough the Australian produced TV/film I really enjoy is the stuff geared towards the outer suburban second-generation migrant crowd, which is uniquely Australian in its own way.
It's amusing to me that new Zealand has a large presence in the film industry entirely because the government focused on making it lucrative for companies to actually produce films there. It brings a lot of jobs to the small country, while ironically countries like Canada an Australia try to control the content that the few people located there actually make and end up chasing away productions, a lot of the people who want to work in the industry end up moving to LA.
“decree” not “decry”
@@rogerknights857 They don't make legal threats on Australians (as far as I know) so I think decry is a better word for it. Maybe denounce if you want a similarly toned substitute.
@@Backwardmail You’re right; I didn’t pause and reflect.
Funny thing the French academy thing you talked about I saw it watching a documentary on France on vpro RUclips channel to be honest seeing the one of the people of the 40 heads talk about how important is it to preserve the French language in this modern age was very eye opening to see how important preserving and changing different aspects in language is
Are they really preserving language though? We need to consider the linguistic situation in France to understand this. What we call French is one of several Lang D'Oil, which is a family of regional romance languages/dialects spoken in France, but the French we know as French is merely the dialect of Paris, the largest and most influential city. All those regional dialects have been looked down on by the French Academy as "improper" and discouraged in the national education system in favor of the single "official" French dialect. Is this really preserving culture? Or is it merely an imposition of uniformity and cultural cohesiveness?
@@swagmundfreud666 I understand what your saying language is board their are different varieties and language can change from time to time , you can disagree with me if you want but I believe a language needs to be standardized and be distinct so it can be used more and for all common people to communicate because if I'm thinking of learning French and there are all of these varieties and I want to be able to communicate with every region in France it would be difficult to choose what French varieties to choose , I think of language as a survival game who can survive and I believe standardisation can include some words and different meanings from different varieties so in some form words from different varieties
@@singaporenoodles7189 it is pretty standard to just learn the language or dialect of the capital city / most influencial region when you're looking to learn a new language. There's not really any point to argue for standardising the way the entire country speaks just for the sake of making it easier for foreigners to learn the language
That's why learning French is a pain in the ass. The gap between the rules of grammar book and the "proper" French decided by this Ivory tower and the French actually spoken/written in the street is as large as the Grand Canyon.
I remember seeing a French-language movie once & thinking there were so many English words in it, it couldn't possibly be from France. It was Quebec.
me: "We Portuguese are a very culturaly united people."
someone : how do you should pronounce the portuguese word for "bee"?
* portuguese civil war beguins *
wait, really? explain pls
@@jalvesss I believe it was not a factual statement but hyperbole - that the range of pronunciations of the word 'bee' in Portuguese is so varied that it shows the range of the culture of that place. Not that there really was a civil war over the word itself.
@@jalvesss it a joke because this word is the most used example of a dictomy of the pronounciation of the letter "e" in portuguese.
The word for bee is "abelha".
Northern portuguese pronouces it as it is written, but Coimbra's portuguese, wich sets the standard (and more important, Lisbon Portuguese) pronounce it like * abalha *, with an A. Making this the correct spelling.
This is an example of the modern Lisbon pronounciation setting the standard above the older northern pronounciation.
The northern standard, headed by the City of Porto clashes with the capital and the standard of Coimbra.
Of course this is an exageration, nobody figths about this, but I've already seen some heated arguments about the correct pronounciation of "bee", wich is weird in a monoetnic country where the language is prety much the Same everywhere and the culture doesn't Change radically, even between Porto, Lisbon or the islands.
Another famous example is the sound "rr".
@@Duck-wc9de tell the alfacinhas that they're wrong.
Thing I love about J.J.’s videos is that not only are the topics of discussion incredibly diverse and interesting - but, the comment section is filled to the brim with people writing very creative interpretations and reflecting deeply on the topics and how they relate to their own experiences. Fascinating!
Seriously one of the biggest questions about human societies.
This channel deserve more recognition.
Arguably, the argument for keeping the confederate flag is a prescriptivist one in descriptivist clothing. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy certainly used prescriptivism to keep the flag popular, which allowed for the creation of a descriptivist argument.
When I was little I thought culture was traditional stuff like clothing, dances and songs. So to me it was very weird when I heard some say "act with culture". Here in my country we have a very deep traditional culture or rural culture as you can put it. And when we danced or sang or put on traditional clothing I always thought we were paying homage to a bygone native culture since now we all dress with British/American clothing, listen and make music in English or with some, dance hip hop and pop. Now I know it is different from what I thought but not too far from it in terms of tradition.
I dunno man, Canada and the US are still relatively new countries of very similar origins, of course they're going to very culturally similar. Cultural distinctness is not inherent, it's slowly cultivated through centuries of isolation and self sufficiency. Canada could one day become a distinct culture, but only under the condition that it's willing to remain self sufficient in certain areas. Nations like Taiwan and Cuba demonstrate this. In my opinion, prescriptivists are just playing a long term game. Just because the tides are against them doesn't mean it's a meaningless endeavor.
but the US and Canada is not the same as say Germany and the Netherlands. The US and Canada are both: new nations that became nations as a result of British settler colonies. While the manner in which they became independent (a revolution in the US, more of a gradual process in Canada) might have some impact on the nature of politics and ideology (Parliament v Presidential system, freedom of speech etc), the majority of Americans and Canadians are products of their nations both being majority anglo, majority white, but multiracial English speaking liberal democracies, which are distinct from Europe. The differences in accent or ideology is stronger within different regions of the US, than between the US and Canada as a whole. As someone who lives in a suburb outside of San Francisco, if I went to a suburb outside of Vancouver or Toronto, the culture, accent etc would be more recognizable to me than the culture, accent etc of say a place in the US South, or even a suburb of New Orleans.
The reason why the US Canada situation is usually not comparable to 2 border countries where one is much bigger than the other, is because in most countries in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia etc, the two countries in question originated as their own language and ethnicity.
As for Taiwan and Cuba, for your example to relate to Canada, each nation would have to be directly near another much bigger nation with the same language, culture, etc. Cuba isn't really, as it is a Spanish speaking Latino country. I guess Mexico would be the closest thing, but Cube to Mexico isn't really the same thing as US to Canada. And as for Taiwan to China, the difference is Taiwan is a democracy while China is not. I'm not saying Canada can't become a distinct culture, I just think that the examples aren't really that applicable, and for Canada to become a distinct culture from the US, Canada would have to develop a distinct culture from what it already has, as it basically is American culture, with specific added things from Canada
Actually I’d say Canada USED to have a more distinct culture from America, but since the rise of mass media Canadians have consumed so much American entertainment that they have become virtually indistinguishable from Americans. Hell I’m even starting to see Canadian Trump supporters and Canadians using Republican talking points. The only thing separating the 2 countries now is a border, other than that Canada has largely lost what made it distinct from the US.
The fact that Canadians have to specify that they’re from Canada and not the US is telling enough. We dress, act, talk, think, and move the same. We have the same mannerisms, I even heard Canadian girls that were talking in a valley girl accent.
6:39 Nice to see the flag of Anaheim.
I find it is actually somewhat beneficial to see city flags differing from state flags.
In Europe, Verona has the same flag as Sweden, Vienna as Denmark and Toulon (if I recall correctly) as Finland. Potential for confusion.
The "geometric shapes only" is contradicted by white or gold lilies on blue, the old monarchic flag of France, and "no words" is contradicted by "ordem e progreso" in Brazil's flag.
By "state" flags, I didn't mean State in US, I mean "sovereign states"
Flag elitists aren't wrong, but they're just so insufferable about the whole thing that I can't help but indulge my deeply instinctual contrarian impulses.
Depends on the flag person. Some are truly very anal when it comes to the flag "rules" and are very prescriptivist. Others are more descriptivist and just view those "rules" as merely a guide to making a flag that was once seen as boring by its populace to a now beloved cultural symbol
Why is this so terrifyingly relatable? x3
I feel like one of the issues too is applying this to every single flag. The idea is that a flag should be distinct enough that you could immediately tell that it's the flag of _________. But, if every single flag followed the "flag rules" then there would be so many flags with simple shapes and colors that you wouldn't be able to tell which goes where. Simple flag design guidelines should be applied for national and state/provincial/regional flags. City flags, however, should be allowed leeway. And irrespective of all of this, there are enough distinct and cool looking flags that completely break the rules anyways. The Californian, Welsh, Bhutanese, and Mexican flags look great and break a bunch of flag rules.
@@OrigamiMaster06 well not entirely. They do follow some of the basic principles of the rules which favors simplicity over highly intricate designs. They don’t strictly adhere to them as it is unnecessary if you find a design that works. They are more of a guide to steer you away some less advisable practices that tend to detract from flags, but in specific cases can work wonders. California is one such example of a more complex flag that works wonders but does not have the centralized detail and overall plainness that many seal/banner flags suffer from
@@steakismeat177 But that's the point they are more of loose guidelines than anything. There are several flags that break the majority of the "rules" to wonderful results. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Mongolian flags all have complex geometries with a myriad of colors, and some sort of symbol/coat of arms. California and Mississippi have flags with complex details, tons of colors, and lettering. If it looks good then that's all that matters. The only thing that's wrong with the seal on a bedsheet style is that it's lazy and ugly as hell which makes for bad flags.
Man, you already knocked it out of the park for me with the language portion. I studied Linguistics and I general find most people who do so are Descriptivists by necessity.
I remember in school a lot of my teachers would say "ain't is not in the dictionary". We as kids would mess this up as we parroted it to other students as "ain't ain't in the dictionary".
Definitely a more technical video but really interesting. Sets up the basis for every other cultural commentary JJ does. Another great one!
Very interesting videos. Culture has changed throughout history and a modern day British would probably have less in common with a medieval British than a modern day French, still I think there always should be some prescriptivist aspects to keep some characteristics that makes a culture distinct or at least to keep a historical preservation. In the end, in a globalized world everything changes fastly adopting the descriptivist way, but not every amalgamation ends up being completely similar and new differences arise in different contexts, times and areas.
Always something interesting coming outta you! Btw thank you for taking the time to educate us on your culture and everyone you enlist to educate us on theirs.
A great example of Prescriptivism and Descriptivism in culture not mentioned here would be Music, While there are of-course _many_ different examples throughout music, From classical music theory to black metal, I think perhaps one of the most noteworthy is regarding the use of genres themselves: Genres originally come about to describe a new type of music, Which there isn't a term for, To make talking about it easier and to help listeners find more music they like, Among others, But then sometimes the genres can become more prescriptivist, As people try to make hard and fast rules, You can get complaints like "This isn't an x song because it doesn't do y", Or people specifically trying to follow all the "Rules" of a genre when writing a song in it, Which can often result in something quite generic sounding. Genres are also about more than just the sound of the music, Though, As they're largely shaped by a culture, And sometimes even an integral part of that culture (Perhaps even used by prescriptivists to say who is and isn't part of that culture.), But if you'd like to hear more about that (And this topic in general) I'd highly recommend the video "What We Get Wrong About Genres" by RUclipsr 12tone, They probably do a far better job explaining this than I could.
(Sidenote, I notice that I've made 4 separate comments on this video now, Which honestly feels kinda "Rude" for some reason, But also I feel it'd've been really awkward to combine them into one.. Oh well.)
This idea of descriptive versus prescriptive approach to things is kinda mind blowing to me. Sounds like a concept to keep in the mind as a way to help approach new things.
I'm glad we live in the internet age, where everyone can find the culture that interests them without any guideness of old aristocratic institutes that dictate to us what we 'need'
*guidance. Sorry, couldn't resist!
@@adsri2755 Then my grammar checker has failed me.
But that's the thing about the internet - even someone like me who isn't a native English speaker and lives far away from Canada can find JJs videos and get educated and inspired by his content.
What a time to be alive
@@moshmosh26 the joke was that I was dictating spelling (prescriptive) rather than allowing you to decide for yourself what it should be (descriptive)
So am I, but at the same time, a lot of the institutions that enable our extremely diverse Internet culture were intentionally crafted by elites. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t exactly a day laborer.
Yeah, one more way our society can become increasingly alienating, have everyone occupy their own little niche cultural bubble. Who needs shared communal culture when you can just join a discord server.
Wow, next level über analysis with smooth transitions my legend @J.J. McCullough
Regardless of the broader "cultural" implications, a lot of my reactions to certain proposed changes are ultimately rooted in aesthetics and the trickle-down implications thereof. For all the talk I see about how BC's flag is (allegedly) bad, the mere suggestion of changing it aggrieves me because "remove current flag = remove context of symbols linked to said flag, thereby 'ruining' them." Similarly, I mainly support our connection to the monarchy purely because I like the crown symbol and word "Royal" on everything. While I'm mostly a descriptivist in most contexts, this particularly vein of prescriptivism is one I take very personally.
That gets tricky to categorize because your prescription is to maintain what is extant. Is that descriptivism? Frankly I'd just call that conservatism.
@@norik434 Politically, yes, I identify as a Conservative. In other contexts, like the ever-shifting English language, I've adopted a more descriptivist stance.
You say you only really care about keeping symbols for purely aesthetic reasons, but at the same time you also say that you get offended from certain symbols being removed because of the context for what they actually symbolize. You could have just said you were a Conservative without justifying every reason lol.
@@W.LL1999 I wasn't really thinking about that at the time. My headspace had spent the time prior to the video looking up local heraldry and self-assessing how I relate to such iconography, concluding a certain dread over losing identity through symbolic erasure or somesuch. More existential navel-gazing than political justification.
I’m an American who has lived in Mexico for 18 years. There is a government run museum Cecut (Centro de Cultura), and you can go into it any day and hardly see anyone, except for the problematic guards. You could shoot a shotgun and not hit anyone except the guards.
There is a nightclub in Tijuana called Las Pulgas (The Fleas), and it has the distinction of selling more beer than any other location on earth. There are battles for the business of Las Pulgas by Modelo and Tecate - two Mexican beer producers. Los Angeles doesn’t even have a place this big. It has like 4 large bodegas (warehouses) where you can experience in each a different style of music, much of the time live.
Culture is ambient or non-existent. True culture the people will be tripping over it, it can’t be avoided.
One time I went to an art exhibit opening in Cecut, I knew personally various of the artists. While there, I realized that there was no one there that had decided to go to Cecut instead of Las Pulgas. It was just a bunch of artists who were the tail on the American dog of art, not representing in anyway the people of Mexico, who were patting each other on the back for being at Cecut. If any place in Tijuana could be called a “cultural center”, it would be La Pulgas, not the self proclaim cultural center called Cecut.
Cecut is representative of artists who have been bought off by the government to keep them from making any significant commentary upon the culture. There is nothing of the Huichol culture who one Huichol told me that 40% of them are artists. That must be some kind of record. But many Mexicans would rather identify with the Triple Alliance aka The Aztecs, a culture that proved itself unworthy of survival for its imperialistic tendencies. Yet the Huichol have been through the Aztecs, The conquistadores, and all the desmadre of modern Mexico, with their culture still intact. That’s because all they want to do is their religion and their art which is influenced greatly by peyote rituals. They have been having problems with the Canadian mining industry, but this just makes me concerned for the survival of Canadian culture, not the Huichol. I think on a quantum mechanical level, Canadians bothering this humble people is having blow back, causing many of the problems that Canada is currently experiencing…
Took those words right out of my mouth.
I'm so glad you brought up vexillology for this video! I've always been a flag nerd, but seeing forums like r/vexillology where everyone dogmatically sticks to arbitrary design rules has always bothered me. A good flag is a good flag because it looks good (subjective of course) not because it checks off an arbitrary design criteria.
This was insanely fascinating. My wife and I have been discussing this the past hour because it got us thinking!
JJ, I know you’re not a big fan of marijuana, but I did see this debate in the “stoner community” when I was in college. I noticed trendy companies would often make prescriptive merch and media for weed smokers to consume that was often really on the nose about weed. But I found many marijuana smokers found those “stoner appealing” products were often tacky or even cringey, and didn’t take into account the diverse array of interests and types of people who are pot users.
As someone that lives in the south, I do understand the general “whatever” ish attitude towards the confederate flag, no one really thinks of it like it’s the confederate flag unless they’re not from here or crazy and racist/deeply offended. I understand why we needed to change it but really the confederate flag just feels more like a part of southern culture than any racist meaning. Either way I’m happy we changed my state’s flag, we’ll hopefully be taken a bit more seriously on the federal stage and not just be seen as “poor racist rednecks.”
Research in the social sciences and humanities often has the prescriptive / descriptive spectrum that you talk about. Authors either describe phenomena and events, or take a strong stance as to their opinion on phenomena and events.
That is true but if it's prescriptive it's not science. What sets science apart from other approaches to knowledge is that it is purely descriptive. Science's prescription (wink) is if your ideas don't describe what you see then you change your ideas. That scientific approach has produced the most powerful ideas yet. But applying those ideas isn't science, that's engineering.
JJ, I love so much your choice in audio effects! They're are all so 8bit-ty and nostalgic of early videogames and consoles, my 90's baby ass adores it lol.
Great work as always* :)
Also I think it would be a great Idea if the government of Canada treated “Can Con” as a cultural export and intended it for foreign audiences. it would actually solve the problem it hopes to correct rather than just propagating what it means to be Canadian to Canadians themselves
Exactly! Americans love BBC shows and their Britishness. The trick is figuring out how to make Canadian culture "cool".
@@jhbadger Canadian Comedy is a great cultural export and people don’t laugh at the idea of a Toronto Hip Hop scene like they would’ve in the 90s. Snoop has also made CFL merchandise a flashy hip hop fashion statement because it’s hard to find in the US
Great video. As usual. I actually do have an example. It is widely accepted amongst linguists that the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin languages are just varieties of one single language, generally refered to as Serbo-croatian. However, the governments of these respective countries have engaged in, as you put it, cultural prescriptivism, by changing some of the vocabulary and even adding new letters in an attempt to render their languages more distinct. The use and acceptance of said additions among the public, however, hasn't seen much success and is often the subject of ridicule.
I'm old enough now that my inherent descriptivist nature has become prescriptive because of the passage of time.
For instance: You called it "The Confederate Flag." When I was growing up (in the South mind you) it was called "The Rebel Flag," and when people said "The Confederate Flag," they meant specifically the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd national flags, which is to say, the *political* flags of the country. The Rebel Flag was seen as an apolitical thing, and either a symbol of general rebellion (Against anything, really, but usually snooty types who didn't like country or rock, and told you not to say 'ain't' in a condescending way) or a vague symbol of regional pride.
Which was then and this is now, and it's good that it's finally gone. I was always uncomfortable with it. But since everyone calls it by a different name that meant a very different thing for the first two thirds of my life, I have to resist my inherent pedantic urge to correct them, remind myself that it just doesn't matter, and move on.
(Thank you for indulging my explaining it here)
And a lot of other things have shifted over the course of my life linguistically. People have gradually drifted in the pronunciation of certain words ("Naw-se-ah" in my youth to "Nawsha" now) starting sentences with 'so' which was so egregiously goofy that comedians frequently started sentences with it simply because it primed people for a laugh ("So I lost my girlfriend the other day...") and people using "Literally" and "Ironically" and "Decimate" wrong.
And I don't want to be the cranky old man who screams about these damn kids these day, so I don't complain, but I have grown to understand *why* the old people complain: As time passes you begin to feel like a stranger in your own country. It's uncomfortable being left behind.
(Well, actually I have become increasingly descriptivist about words, not because I object to their meanings changing over time, that's just natural, but words should at least mean *something* and given the frequency of new meanings getting picked up by old words, I dunno, it just feels like they can mean everything and nothing)
I thought I had a point I was working towards, but I guess I don't.
I understand 👍
Didn’t you mean to say, “Well actually I have become increasingly PREscriptivist …”
Its interesting hearing this! I'm generally very descriptivist (tho I'm also pretty young and interested in language), but its interesting hearing the other side. the wayI think of it, at the end of the day, as long as two people understand each other, it should be okay. Plus, its just fun to be creative with words, and use them in fun ways.
Tho, yeah, one day I'll probably be older and confused by the new slang, since you really can't stay up to date with everything forever.
@@rogerknights857 Yeah, sorry. I got distracted wondering if people were gonna call me a racist for even mentioning that damn flag, and my attention wandered. You're right.
@@syro33 Thank you. Yeah, the older I get the more I suspect we all start out as descriptivist and gradually slide into prescriptivism as the world changes and we struggle to keep a hold of it. Even casual word usage changes over time.
"Gifted," sounds hopelessly pretentious to me, for instance. The kind of word that'd only be used in extremely formal circumstances, like, "The Empire of Japan gifted several hundred cherry trees to the United States," not "My grandpa gifted me a box of crayons." In situations like that we'd just say "Gave" or instead of "I was gifted," we'd say, "I got."
Likewise, I tend to use full words like "Merchandise" instead of "Merch," which probably sounds hopelessly pretentious to others, and in a lot of cases I'm increasingly sure people don't realize there *is* a longer form of "Merch."
This probably jumps out at me more than most since I'm a writer, and you quickly become aware of how quickly your word choices date.
One of the best video I have seen so far this year!
I love it!
“Who gets to make our culture?”
I do.
no most you surely do not.
@@joy_gantic no
that sounds right..thank you for the culture
@@nothingisawesome no problem
omg please tell us what's the culture
Love your Content JJ. Nothing like my weekly Saturday culture lesson!
A 14 years old Nort American Vexillological Association’s rules enjoyer is like “I am a part of the elites”.
Edit: apparently it’s association and not society.
0:09 Who decides Cultural Boundaries?
0:30 Prescriptive - What something should be
1:01 Descriptive - What is taking place
1:43 Language
3:37 Dictionaries
5:19 FLAGS
7:40 The Confederate Flag "hung around for a long time."
9:13 Fashion
11:32 The Force of Money
12:11 Canadian Culture 13:55 Canadians don't want pushed content.
15:58 Application of Descriptive-Perspective Balance
Culture is one of the main statistics in Civilization VI. It represents a civilization's progress in the arts and crafts. Its role has been greatly enhanced since Civilization V: besides fueling border expansion at the city level, it is now used to research developments in the brand new civics tree.
Picture this, Rome had it's own culture and identity, it's added to most Civ games by virtue of being one of the largest most influential empires in history. After it's fall, the Eastern Romans kept calling themselves Rome, even after centuries their beliefs and values changed, the people we now call Byzantines (who make it into a number of games). In modern days Rome is not controlled by Rome but Italy, just a group of loose city states that were runover by the French and suddenly became a unified republic, Greece got it's own territory back but looks nothing like ancient greece, and Constantinople became the capital of the Ottomans- I mean Turks. Cultures is a lot more than just a ticking number, I like there is more to it in Civ games but I think it's also under developed in how people change their ideas and can influence others not just to join them but change their own ideas.
@@Petrico94 true, runover by the French and the Spanish for most of the Reinassance and seventeenth century.
this videos currently the only thing getting me through a fever today, your channel always makes my day dude
I am definitely not in favor of “a seal on a bedsheet”. My bed isn’t big enough as it is without having to share it with a seal!
This was the most thoughful youtube video I have watched for a long time. Enjoying my dose of 'unleftness' :)
I would argue that a "descriptivist" approach to politics can often be implied to be "non-political" or "factual" (like in your analogy to the teacher's approach), while it may result in a backing of inaction, or pro status quo positions.
An acceptance of ones cultural or political climate as is is in fact prescriptivist in that it tacitly acknowledges how things are as correct.
Very thought provoking video, as always!
The shot of the "confederate" flag in front of the sign he uses at 8:15 is the hanging at a bar I used to frequent in college. It is in front of the sign for "Cloud" in Athens, GA. The one shown is actually an old Georgia flag, you can tell because the left third of it is blue & it has the seal of Georgia. It is still flown in some parts of Georgia for the reasons described by J.J. Weird that it ended up as stock footage in a video on one of my favorite channels
Edit: added a time stamp
Could you do a video on the cultures of the Canadian provinces and territories?
These definitions remind me of how my economics teacher described the terms “positive statements”, statements saying what is, and “normative statements”, statements saying what should be.
I think Culture generally is created over a long period of time with a variety of trends people and events influeing the culture
J.J. I really appreciate and enjoy your balanced and nuanced take on this subject… and pretty much all of your content. Thank you!
Thanks so much!
Really liked this video! But I think it would've been also good if you'd have considered the class aspect of this too: how the lower classes imitate the upper ones or vice versa. This is quite evident in how trends change over time, and make once "elite" things quite common after a few years/decades, and then new trends seen among the masses also make their way up the social hierarchy.
I am delighted that these videos come out on a schedule which coincides with me coming home drunk with a kebab. brilliant.
I prefer descriptivist English, because I hate having people tell me what to do.
Hey ! This is Rob from MindGames ! Great video and it was awesome meeting you! Wish I had more time to chat but work being crazy haha
One of the things that always bothered me is that the U.S. has a list of "official" federal holidays, and the federal calendar doesn't reflect the holidays that are actually celebrated in the U.S. For example, Halloween and St. Patrick's Day are both widely celebrated in the U.S., but they're not considered "official" holidays, while Flag Day and Armed Forces Day are officially on the federal calendar, but tend to go unnoticed.
Then there are some holidays that people are actively opposed to, such as Columbus Day, which is another holiday that most people don't pay any attention to, but has sparked a push to have the day renamed "Indigenous Peoples Day." Strangely, Congress did decide years ago to also have a "Leif Erikson Day" in addition to Columbus Day, but for some reason, none of the printed calendars include this one, and most people aren't even aware of it. On the flip side, there's Juneteenth (marking the day the last of the slaves were freed), which is a holiday that was declared an official U.S. holiday a long time ago, but was left off most calendars, and only recently, in response to the BLM movement, did they start printing it on national calendars. Another holiday that was sort of made-up by the government was "Patriot Day," which was created to memorialize the victims of the 9/11 attacks, but also not-so-subtly promote the USPatriot Act which authorized the NSA to spy on Americans' phones. When the public found out this was going on, the "holiday" mysteriously vanished from the calendars.
But the one that really irritates me is President's Day (aka Presidents' Day or Washington's Birthday), mainly because it's not a widely celebrated holiday and falls in the already holiday-crowded month of February (Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl), but for some reason, car dealerships have to spend the entire month promoting President's Day sales, as if this were the most important thing happening this month. (Or maybe I'm just sick of car ads.)
In the early 2000s I was attempting to learn punctuation through google. I found that searches on hyphens, semicolons and apostrophes were most often being defined by the English Department of Cornel University. Google, Apple and Bing are the algorithmic descriptivist's while the dictionaries, English Professors and documentarians are "dust in the [algorithmic] wind".
If you haven't read Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber, do yourself a favour and grab it at your local library. It talks about this very subject, and argues that schismogenesis, the conscious act of differentiating yourself feom your neighbours, is an inescapable trait of every culture in history.
And I'm actually ok with that. I love America, am grateful for the role it played in the world and benefitted Canada, don't get me wrong. But I do expect my government to make efforts to keep us different, as we are two distinct societal projects.
C-11 is probably the worst way to go about that, but that's a dead horse I don't wanna beat.
You're supposed to pronounce the "s" in "française". The general rule is that, when a word ends with one or more consonants, they're usually silent, but when they're followed by an "e", they are pronounced. So in "français" (masculine), the "s" is silent, but in "française" (feminine), the "s" is pronounced.
Interesting video, prescriptivision and describtavision are a fascinating topic.
Idk a lot of conflicts about that kind of thing but I can certainly elements of that debate in immigration culture, especially from people living in another country vs people living in their home nation.
Like I've seen some people who are very strict about what a good person of their respective culture is supposed to be like vs. someone living in that country doing what they feel is right. Which can often lead to children of immigrants being a lot more conservative than their counterparts abroad.
So impressed with this video. You’ve basically described how bill C11 is prescriptive, delving deeper into why it’s inherit fabrics are harmful… I am from Scotland, but so invested in this Canadian bill thanks to you, and forever more in tune with how culture is changed by government.
Culture is created by what is cool. People are more easily influenced than you think, especially post media age. The cool can be set by soldiers, singers, performers, rich people and rulers. People like to emulate those on a higher standard than them. Get enough people to emulate something or someone and suddenly you got the cultural flavor of the decade. But as much people are easily influenced, they also get bored very quickly. The hip thing is quickly replaced the moment something fresh comes along. The internet effectively ruined culture. Everything is either extremely niche to never get the public to adopt it, or passes by so fast that people will immediately forget it. Look around, behold the great cultural stagnation on a planetary scale
Always a good day when JJ uploads a video
Regarding language, in a similar way to your previous video talking about names, the utilitarian aspect of communication doesn't get enough play in discussions like this. Having discretely-defined rules of grammar and definitions of words that are mostly obeyed, as in French, makes the simple act of communicating more accessible and fluid than with more wishy-washy standards. Compare how some regions of Italy are less intelligible to each other than nations continents apart like Canada and Gabon. Anyone who's ever studied a second language with real enthusiasm will say formal, rigid rules are the most useful thing a language can have.
@@bones-f1i " many people who only know english don't know the rules of their own language. 'should of, to big,' etc. part of learning a language is to learn how the rules are commonly broken, if only to understand what people mean."
That is a de facto necessity, yes, but a centralised linguistic authority minimizes it.
As someone with formal FSL education who also took some Spanish courses I can say the vernacular in different French regions is easier to comprehend than the vernacular in select Spanish ones at the same language level.
And as for the "colonialism" angle, standardization is an inherently top-down process that nonetheless is more useful and benign the further away from "expression" or "identity" you get. Language is somewhere in the no man's land between purely utilitarian (like numerals) and purely expressive (like art), but I'd ultimately say the expressive side of language isn't harmed as much by order as the utility side of it is harmed by disorder.
The presence of a regulatory body doesn't make a difference. Descriptivists are just as capable of conveying all the rules of a language, if not better. Just because English changes with the whims of its speakers, doesn't mean educators can't put together comprehensive and easy courses for learners.
Remember, ALL languages have discretely-defined rules of grammar and definitions of words that are mostly obeyed. ALL languages have formal, rigid rules. The only difference is who defines them, which has no bearing on how they are learned.
And if you think francophones don't have any issues with dialectal differences, you're sorely mistaken. There are countless dialects of French, just as with any other language, and they can be very different from one another. The Académie Française is not omnipotent, similar to the Real Academia Española, which fails to unify the wildly varied Spanish language.
@@gavinwilson5324 "Descriptivists are just as capable of conveying all the rules of a language, if not better."
Considering how in the context of language they're more likely than not to attack the notion of formal rules altogether, no. Especially when it comes to English, where no matter how mutated and butchered a dialect is the more interpretivist side of social science will always circle the wagons and defend the broken gobbledygook people spew.
@@KAPTAINmORGANnWo4eva descriptivists don't do this, they simply base their rules on what is actually observed. prescriptivism is mostly based on what some people *think* should be said. if anything, prescriptivism makes learning languages harder (for example, I know a self-described prescriptivists who thinks you should never say "gonna". immagine learning from that guy, you'd sound so weird).
Most of people in Gabon are not native French speakers, but speak bantu` languages completely distinct from French or any other European language.
a media where government involvement is inevitable but uncomfortable might be teaching in school particularly history. Between teaching about patriotic education, CRT, sex education, history of slavery and aboriginal people, religious topics, or even evolution, the content taught in schools is always attracting some controversy.
I'm kinda vaguely prescriptivist, but more descriptivist on specific topics.
Like I think Irish-Americans *should* learn the Irish Language,
but I don't care about specific accents or spellings or slang.
I'd like the Irish-American Community to speak Irish but I'd also like the "Gael-Meiriceánach" dialect to develop organically
Gaeilge is Gaeilge, even if it is expressed differently from those Gaelic speakers in Ireland.
God it's hard enough getting Irish people in Ireland to learn Irish, it'll be one hell of a battle to get Irish Americans to learn Irish. I've met plenty of Americans who didn't even know Irish was an actual language that people still speak.
@@swagmundfreud666 oh, it'd be hard certainly
There are 26,000 Native Irish Speakers in the US, but 30 Million Irish Americans.
Still, if only 1% could be motivated to learn the language, there would be more Irish Speakers amongst Irish Americans than amongst Native Irish.
And the more the Language becomes part of the cultural identity of the Community, the more people who would want to learn and immerse themselves in it.
I live in North Carolina and I'm a huge fan of this channel.
I thought the term snowflake stemmed from people who were cynical towards people who believed strongly in the whole “everyone is unique” or “everyone is special” like snowflakes. And that wormed its way into political discussions to be used as an insult for sensitive people. It seems like they don’t care about the etymology of these terms. While I understand the way people use the English language is rapidly changing, it is literally their job. (The definitions they’re giving are very telling that they don’t fully understand them and make them poor definitions)
Are you sure it is not someone so overly sensitive they will melt like a snowflake if even slightly offended?
@@StevenHughes-hr5hp no because people would literally say “special snowflake”
For Spanish we have La Real Academía Española (The Royal Spanish Academy) which from what you describe seems to be a combination of both prescriptive and descriptive organizations. As the French academy, they stablish the rules for the spanish language in general, but they also take into account cultural shifts in language and words spoken throughout the world in order to adapt and implement them to the pre stablished rules, as they are the ultimate source for dictionaries and the such. The spanish academy is also pretty active on social media and people usually ask them questions about if something is correctly said a certain way or else. So they appear to be descriptive in the sense that they are the ultimate authority for the spanish language rules and correct spelling, pronunciation, etc, but also descriptive in that they do not gatekeep cultural changes in language, but they adapt and work hard to document and implement them.
Another example is classical music. To this day classical music still has a very elitist culture, and the unfortunate effect is that modern composers, and many women and BIPOC composers, are often ignored in favor of an idolized canon of "Great" composers, whose works are always performed by the major orchestras, etc. The "prescriptivist" culture in classical music goes back centuries: orchestras and choruses and skilled pianists were prohibitively expensive, so composers were directly sponsored by aristocrats (you can see this in how many dedications of their works are to barons and countesses rather than to friends and fellow composers). The aristocracy were the taste setters, and the general public would be lucky to listen at all. In fact, it wasn't until the early 1800s - around the time of Beethoven's fifth symphony - that a ticket to a classical music concert became just affordable enough for the middle class; and from then on, at least according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, the evolving classical styles can partly be attributed to the tug of war between the elites who still wanted to dictate what is in vogue and the populace who gradually became more and more musically literate.
FLAGS!!! Now that's a culture I can get behind!! I am an old person 😁 (50), and growing up it was absolutely music culture that pervaded my youth. You were the music you listened to and it included fashion, language and even political leanings in some cases. It has been interesting to see that evolve. It is certainly still there, but as the homogenization of the music landscape has occurred to a certain degree, I am not sure it is still as pervasive. The last thing I'll mention is social media culture. Where I had band shirts growing up, I now wear RUclipsr shirts (including Hello Friends 😁) and I wonder how main stream that is. I love these thought provokers JJ 😁. Happy Saturday everyone!!
Nice breakdown of a topic that could’ve been very dry but wasn’t. Great work!
Theres an interesting duality between descriptivism and prescriptivism in Germany. One one hand there was the „Rechtschreibreform“ or spelling reformation in 1996, it changed certain rules or spelling and is widely adopted, throughout High German. One the other hand there are the many and varied dialects, which have their own grammatical quirks. In schools its encouraged to speak High German, but many students dont bother, in writing however you are penalized, if you dont use High German.
I see this prescriptivism vs descriptivism argument really play out in fictional franchises whether it be books, plays, tv shows, movies, board games, or video games. The prescriptionists argue that the products that the creators deem "canon" are the only valid products of that franchise and all non-canon products should be completely disregarded where as descriptionists will argue that how well the product is received by fans should be considered a bigger factor compared to whether or not the product is deemed "canon".
Great example. The idea of “canon” is super prescriptivist even though it’s really just a made up concept.
Even if some non-canon parts of a series is enjoyable, it should still be classified as such for keeping track of what has happened in each version to keep them from merging
I'm a J.J. McCullough descriptionist because I'll always adore his life's work without question.
J.J. McCullough is a great RUclipsr
This divide is very prevalent at my school. My administrators are obsessed with creating culture by creating rules, uniforms, and events at school. But often, there is pushback from students who say that these prescriptivist cultural touchstones don’t actually speak to what the school’s culture is really like. Instead, students say that culture truly comes from the bottom, and that the culture should be set by the students and the teachers
My High school was a lot like this as well. We got a new principal who was upset that we didn’t have enough traditions so he put a lot of effort into trying to impose them from the top down which people found kind of condescending.
Hi love your videos very interesting
I’ve always liked learning about culture so I really love your channel
3:42 Don't forget the Macquarie!
I feel like Canada should subsidize its creatives just to give them more opportunities, but shouldn't try to hard to keep American works out.
where does Canada try to keep American Works out???
@@TheTroyc1982 More of just that they require a certain amount to Canadian programming to be shown.
This video fills me with very strong emotions which pull me in both directions, and I am glad that you have made it J. J.