to CEO. If he doesn’t, his career at this company – and perhaps
everywhere – is over. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he’s
prepared for it.
Except when he goes to his closet to get the polished shoes, freshly
ironed shirt and crisp new suit, they aren’t there. In fact, none of his
clothes are there. He searches through the whole house, and finds not so
much as one of his socks, anywhere. The only piece of clothing is a dress
hanging in the guest room closet along with a pair of matching pumps,
which look like they will actually fit him. The dress and pumps – and the
boxers he wore to bed – are all he has.
His cell phone is dead, something he realizes just as the electricity goes
out. No way to call for help. No neighbors within shouting distance. His
car is missing – one more disaster – so he’ll have to take the bus, too.
Does he wear the dress?
Our social conventions develop over time, along with a complex set of
rationalizations. If a woman stands up in the middle of a restaurant eating
linguini with clam sauce with her hands, the owner would probably feel
justified in asking the customer to change her behavior or leave. Most
people would consider this a reasonable request.
But what if when the owner went up to the woman to ask her to leave,
she turned into a mouse and disappeared between the floorboards?
This possibility had not occurred to you, for the simple reason that it
violates all the things we understand about the physical universe. The
woman eating with her hands is ignoring the laws of socially acceptable
behavior in public; when she turns into a mouse, she is flouting the rules
of physics. Thus it is necessary to make a distinction between linguistic
grammaticality and socially constructed grammaticality.^11
I have put forward as facts that any language embedded in a viable
speech community is capable of adapting to any linguistic need, and that
every native speaker produces utterances which are by definition
grammatical. What I have not claimed and cannot claim, is that message
content can be judged in the same way. Take, for example, the sentence:
If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.This sentence is grammatical in every sense of the word, but it makes no
sense. It sounds well-formed but there isn’t any content.