When it comes to Sheldon, it appears that the series' screenwriters often do their homework and ensure that the character is able to rattle off long strings of scientifically sounding gobbledygook at a second’s notice. Since my own domain of in-depth expertise is limited to a small number of sub-areas of cognitive science, I can’t really estimate how much sense Sheldon makes when he pontificates on string theory, molecular biology, or even philosophy.
What I do know is that his knowledge of linguistics is equivalent to attempting to pass off, say, phrenology or homeopathy as good science. Sheldon’s attitude to language appears to be hard-core prescriptivism. Thus, in one episode he corrects Raj by asserting that saying, “You are the guy we are trying to get away from” is bad grammar and that “the correct syntax” is, “You are the guy from whom we are trying to get away.”
In other words, Sheldon believes that “ending your sentence with a preposition” is ungrammatical, as pseudo-authorities on English grammar have forever asserted. In more technical terms, Sheldon does not approve of preposition stranding, a perfectly natural phenomenon in English and some other Germanic languages and, therefore, correct syntax. Just compare this to saying something like, "You are the from guy we away are trying get to." Now that, my friends, is incorrect syntax.
Another hint of Sheldon's linguistic ignorance is his insistence on using nauseated and not nauseous to describe how one feels when vomiting is imminent. Similar to preposition stranding, People vs. Nauseous has long been a case off which language pedants simply will not get (tee hee). The simple fact of the matter is that nauseous means both "something which causes nausea" and "someone who feels nausea" and that it has been present in English in both these senses for approximately the same amounts of time.
So, why is Sheldon Cooper a prescriptivist? The face-saving answer for the screenwriters would be that this is because prescriptivism seems to go neatly with another affliction of Sheldon's, OCD. In other words, it is not impossible that Sheldon's prescriptivism is deliberate, i.e. an example of shrewd screenwriting.
However, I'd be inclined to bet that this is not it. I think that the much more likely answer is that Sheldon is a language pedant simply because the show's writers, just like the public at large, do not really have a clear idea of the existence of linguistics as a field of concerted human inquiry. If they were aware of it, they would surely know that language pedantry is an indication of linguistic ignorance rather than sophistication (cf. Stephen Pinker's well-known dissection of language mavens).
Whose fault is it that the public aren't aware of even the most basic findings of linguistics and that very few members of the general public even have a clear idea of what it is that a linguist actually does?
While it must largely be linguists' own fault (but this is a topic for a different post altogether), it is also the case that people tend to think of language as something "everybody knows about" (since everybody can "do it"), from which it clearly follows that linguistics must be a time-wasting pursuit of commonsense knowledge. Of course, this could not be farther from the truth.
However, since language will always be something that everybody believes themselves to be an expert on (another stranded preposition!), linguistics will continue having a hard time making its existence matter in the real world. But may I note with resignation that nobody goes around believing they are a pulmonologist just because they know how to breathe?
Oh and just so there's no confusion: I heart Sheldon Cooper.
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