Why do some people pedantically cling to dying word forms (e.g. die, oxen)?

The only times I have ever heard the word "die" to refer to one dice are from my mother, and from my primary school English teacher. Every person I ever hear always says, "give me a dice" if they want one, and "give me the dice" if they want two. I used to "correct" people to say "die" if they meant one, but that just makes me look overly pedantic and asinine.

So I have personally started using "dice" in the singular, and "dices" in the plural, which people understand, and a few of the priggish ones will try and correct.

And on that vein of thought, I thought, why not use "ox" and "oxes" instead of the stupid "oxen". Why is there such a strong pull to hold on to archaic constructs, which don't really add flavour to the language, and in fact, just make it more confusing?

Solution 1:

I take the real question here to be: "Why do some people pedantically cling to dying forms?" That's a good question. I think the answer is relatively straightforward.

People who want to present an air of education and in general lay claim to upper class privilege are the ones who tend to do this. It's largely because it is an index of education and a high degree of literacy (either that or role playing games, which is somewhat different, but still primarily an upper middle class past time...).

There is a lot more to it than that, of course. There is an intricate set of language ideologies which give rise to this kind of behavior. But the short answer is that in using such forms people attempt to identify with culturally and economically powerful (hence linguistically conservative) groups .

Everyone does this to some degree, of course.

Solution 2:

There are other answers here that accuse people of being ostentatious about their education, or of trying to appear cleverer than they are. I want to give another theory.

If throughout your childhood, your family and friends all referred to a single die as "a die", then it's going to sound odd to you when someone does otherwise.

If most of your family, friends, teachers, and the books you read, use "fewer" rather than "less" when referring to countable items, then it's going to sound odd to you when someone does otherwise.

What if you sat down for lunch with someone, and as they bit into their sandwich, they said:

"Mmm, this is a delicious sandwiches."

It simply sounds peculiar, and you'd feel obliged to comment. You might even be a bit prescriptive. You might speculate that if your friend said that often, people would think they were stupid.

If you're used to hearing a single die referred to as "a die", you get exactly the same surprising, jarring sensation when you hear "a dice". Or "some oxes", which frankly sounds illiterate, and even upsets my spellchecker.

Solution 3:

You're clearly begging the question (to pedantically use a dying word form) by assuming the conclusion that people who use a form that you find uncommon are doing it pedantically. For the record, roll a die gets about 789,000 results in google, while roll a dice gets only about 170,000 results. I go to the casino quite a bit, and I rarely hear anyone at the craps table saying "hand me that dice." Something tells me that this isn't because gamblers are an overly pedantic lot.

More likely, people simply use the variations of speech that they find most familiar. This explains why your mother and teacher say it one way, but your peers say it another. There is nothing wrong with what either group is doing; that is how language evolves. It doesn't mean anyone is dogmatically clinging to the linguistic relics of the stodgy and "flavourless" past. People, for the most part, don't put that much thought into what they are saying. They just speak.

Puzzlingly, you seem to mostly take issue with plurals that don't end with the letter 's'. What is the solution to this? Should we just change them all? In what way would that add to "the flavour of the language"? Think of all the poetry that would have to be stricken from the graces of good form. Isn't forcing people to adapt to your way of speaking just as annoyingly prescriptivist as when they try to correct you?

Solution 4:

People will understand what you mean, but it's not standard. Using dice as both singular and plural still isn't standard, but it's at least more common. "Dices" sounds strange to me.

The problem with using nonstandard words (because they are logical or simplified) is that it distracts the listener from the content of what you're saying. I recently watched The Human Spark on PBS, and they described a circuit in the brain that lights up when you hear a grammatical error. If your listener's brain is busy puzzling out your curious usage, they're not thinking about what you're saying.