Word Usage – How to Use ‘Treat’ in the Context of ‘A Party’

This is Indian English. See Vishy's Indian English Dictionary.

July 12, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: doubt

doubt. /DOWT/. A question asking for clarification. In standard English and American, the noun doubt is uncountable and refers to a lack of complete trust in something. Doubt may be expressed as simply as doubting someone's abilities or as profoundly as someone doubting their own religious faith. Not so in India. In India, doubt can be used as a countable noun. When a school teacher goes over an intricate concept in class, she invariably leaves some students with doubts in their mind about their understanding of the material just covered. Students ask her questions to get a better understanding of the concept and each such question is called a doubt. It is entirely normal to hear a statement like "I have just one doubt, miss" or "If you have any doubts before the exam tomorrow, come see me in the staff room". The doubts in the aforementioned sentences are not as much rooted in a lack of faith as in a lack of understanding. Attentive readers would have encountered the Indian English sense of doubt a fair bit on online message boards in threads started by Indians. Titles such as "Visual Basic .NET/Oracle doubt" are not uncommon for threads on programming-related message boards. It is my understanding that this sense is mostly prevalent in southern India, but I could be wrong on this count.

There are a few issues I want to address here. First is the question of distinguishing preferred usages from correct usages. Correctness or grammaticality is a question of overall usage by all native speakers of a language. It is indefensible to label common usages from native speakers as “incorrect”—the closest we can get is to label some usages “nonstandard”, where speakers of the standard language nearly universally condemn a particular usage at a particular formality level. It is important not to confuse informal usage with incorrectness, but it is certainly reasonable to call for example ain’t non-standard for formal English. At the same time, while I believe it is indisputable that using both less and fewer for count nouns is standard English, individuals certainly can have preferences, using only fewer for count nouns and reserving less only for non-count nouns. Deciding on such preferences is up to the individual writer or the organization the writer is writing for, but don’t forget that individual or institutional usage preferences are just that—preferences—and deviation from those preferences does not constitute “incorrectness”, because using dispreferred usages is still grammatical English.

Next is the question of whether the usage of a group which is more closely connected to a topic (“in-group” usage) gets more weight in preferring a usage. I think there is a strong argument against following in-group preferences because often in-group usage is highly jargony and the general speaker or writer will usually want to avoid jargon or group-specific language. For example, the general writer may prefer to use the word hacker to describe people who breach computer security even though the in-group preference is for cracker for the simple reason that the lay audience will find discussion of “computer crackers” and not “computer hackers” to be puzzling. It is my belief that consideration of the reading audience outweighs consideration of the group being discussed. However, not everyone agrees with this philosophy, and some people may feel compelled to respect a connected group’s preferences. An example of this is in this question about the pronunciation of Islam, where some posters expressed a preference for respecting Muslims by pronouncing the word the way they would prefer to; that is, as closely to the original Arabic as possible. I, personally, don’t find such arguments to be persuasive, but many people do use that kind of criteria to guide them in selecting a preferred usage, and I think that is a defensible thing to do, even if it results in confusing or misleading the audience. Remember I am only addressing now the criteria for preference and not the criteria for correctness, so I am careful to distinguish the legitimacy of choosing a preferred usage from labeling dispreferred usages as “incorrect”.

Finally we get to the example posed in the original question. Even if you want to use emulation of in-group preference as a criterion for which usage to prefer, amateur linguistic analysis of the sort “it was a word that no one (native speaker or otherwise) ever says in the English speaking community in Luxembourg” tends not to be very reliable. Such statements are more often wrong than they are right, being victims of multiple cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias and expectation bias. Statements like that are a big red flag—in my experience people only come to such hard-edged conclusions as a defense mechanism for coping with the cognitive dissonance from encountering counter-examples. I generally assume the opposite to be true until I see some kind of authoritative support or statistical analysis.