The low origins of <fake>
 
'Fake Phonology' is the title of an article that I am working on at the moment.  Just because a system or method claims to be 'phonological' is no guarantee in itself that it is actually so. Ersatz phonologies abound in the schooling literature world, and none is so fallacious as the error-ridden ‘phonemic awareness’ industry whose output infests so many schools.
 
19/08/08
My curiosity is aroused As I typed <fake> my mind inevitably wandered over the possible etymology of the word. My first instinct was to relate it to the Latin root < fac(ere) / fact(um) > "make". My idea was that something that is 'fake' has been 'made up' or is 'artificial'. If this is true, I was thinking, then it is certainly appropriate for the subject matter of the article that I am writing. It's about edubabbling systems and methods that push a manufactured version of 'phonology' that fits their ideas, but that in reality distorts and misrepresents the strict meaning of phonology so much that any claim to veracity in them is linguistically unrecognizable. I test my hypothesis As a real speller I am always hypothesizing. I also know that a hypothesis is not, in itself, a conclusion so I went to my shelves to test my hypothesis about the etymology of <fake>. I was wrong about the root (it's actually Germanic), but I discovered that the real etymology might suit my purpose even better than I thought! It appears that <fake> has come to us from nineteenth century "thieves' cant", the specialized in-group slang of criminal classes. The original sense of the term 'fake' was apparently something like "polish", a sense that underlies the modern meaning of the word. Ayto's apt definition of <fake> is, "to do up something spurious to make it seem genuine". Now that seemed to fit my subject matter like a glove, as I am using the cant term 'fake' to categorize the 'theft' of a respectable and definable linguistic term for ends that are certainly ignoble. My choice of title seems to fit my argument nicely... The politically distorted pseudoscience of the edubabble ‘research’ industry pushes the false and misleading notion that in English text the alphabetic letters function as codes for what the edubabblers call ‘sounds’. This, together with the corresponding fallacy that reading is the ‘decoding’ of letters to produce their supposed ‘sounds’, is quite simply, and in Ayto’s terms, spurious. Unfortunately for the edubabblers, there is a serious problem of credibility for their so-called “regular letter-sound correspondences”: there are hundreds of spellings that do not conform! So there is a rather desperate need to ‘polish up’ their phonics fallacy and give it respectability by the theft and distortion of the genuine linguistic terms 'phonology' and ‘phoneme’ give it the specious appearance of a scientific basis. ... but on second thoughts, the title may not be strictly appropriate! For someone to produce a ‘fake’ in its denotational sense, we must presuppose that they are fully aware that what they “doing up in order to make it seem genuine” is, in fact, spurious. And I cannot bring myself to believe that the edubabblers who are producing their linguistically incoherent postulations are doing so in the full knowledge that what are doing is a sham. I far prefer to take the more charitable view that edubabble is simply incapable of grasping what is glaringly obvious from the evidence; its promoters, blind to all the incoherences, do seem to believe what they are publishing! Heigh-ho! It looks as if I shall have to settle for the rather more neutral title ‘False Phonology’. But I have, nevertheless, enjoyed discovering more about a word whose meaning I had previously taken for granted, but will henceforth be able to use with greater precision.