Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

The church is such a bound tradition, and I don’t want us to touch those. I don’t think
we have to change everything [Inf26, 41.00].
‘Modern’ has two meanings. On the one hand, the ‘modern’ is the most recent, the new, the
up-to-date; on the other, the ‘modern’ is the fashionable – and as everybody knows, today’s
fashion will fade tomorrow. The same can be claimed for the sign value of English, like this
informant does in regards to another question
I believe it [Danish] will have a renaissance. Sentiments will arise in opposition to all of
the English, and it will move in the opposite direction again. It is like giving children
names. You never give children your parents’ names, they are out of fashion, but your
grandparents’ names, you think have become trendy, so that’s the names given to children.
And the same goes for our language; there will be a reaction against all of the
MTV’ish. [Inf27, 1.12].
The prophecy of the future of English in Denmark, interesting though it may be, is secondary
to the claim that English is on the one hand ‘modern’ on the other ‘a passing fad’. Reasoning
from English being perceived as a sign of ‘modernity’, ‘internationality’, ‘non-conservatism’
and even ‘non-boring’ to English being perceived as universally ‘positive’ thus misses the
mark. English is as much a sign of shallow ‘trendy’-ness as true innovation:
[Marketing people change] the entire vocabulary every year, because they want it to
sound posh, and they want to be one step ahead of the clients. So they always have some
new words for things which make the client go ‘wow’, and make him want to pay two
thousand kroner an hour, you know. [Inf3, 5.45].
We get a laugh out of McDonald’s and companies like that, that have all these funny titles,
supervisor-this-and-that, you know. I think that is ridiculous. [Inf46, 4.10].
‘Let’s stick with what we got’ – other lines of reasoning
We have had a look at two very frequent presuppositions that informants use in arriving at an
appropriate answer when faced with our questions about their attitudes towards English. We
drew them out because in their frequency, they show a somewhat stabile, widely accepted
starting point for any line of reasoning, and also because they are rarely foregrounded and
dealt with themselves as claims, they remain backgrounded and function as implicit warrants
for other claims.
When looking at the answers informants give and trying to categorize them, one argument,
however, is even more prevailing than any of the aforementioned arguments. Viz. a ‘meta-
argument’ of leaving things the way they are, or as we could say, a wish for status quo. Noti-
ce how the argument acts as a ‘meta-argument’ in that it can be used to argue any side of the
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