I think prescriptivism is intimately tied to the need of 9th-grade English teachers who aren;t terribly well educated themselves to maintain dominance over their classes. And by extension, the maintenance of gentility by people who are only thinly distinguished from the mass. And by extension, the dominance of a new notion of political power and bourgeois elitism.

If you haven't already, try to find Ivan Illich's "Shadow Work", which (in a piece called "vernacular Values") describes the beginning of prescriptive grammar in Spain. Something like "Teaching people that they don't know how to speak their native language" is his summary of the case.

His "In the Vineyard of the Text" is a history of bookmaking and also silent reading.

Illich says many of the things Foucault does, but infinitely more straightforwardly and from a Catholic perspective.

My Old French textbook gives up in the beginning. "Old French doesn't have rules, but only tendencies".

"with understanding of even the basic elements of linguistic science as rare as it is, I award the title to anyone who has a good grasp of them"

But wouldn't this exclude many Chomsky-bots? There needs to be some sort of loophole here, I think.

The NYT has a generous blogger-friendly policy - if you append " &partner=USERLAND" to one of their URLs then it stays live. I could almost like the paper, for that, but there's still the "no cartoons" thing.

Apropropos the nutritionist example: it's more as though dietic prescriptivists are furious that persons continue to investigate the biochemical mechanisms of digestion even of foods that are clearly bad for you, the shame!

Thank you, zizka and des, for the book recommendation and the permalink trick respectively.

Baloney: Heh heh heh!

As a self-described descriptivist, I must say that my biggest problem with Fiske--and it is mostly Fiske, as far as I am concerned, because I find Garner's book charming and useful (note: his book is published by my employer, whose books I do not always like) and as I do when I read the newspapers, I recognize Garner's biases when I see them, filter them out, and move on--and others with the same affliction of acute grammar zealotry, is that the decrying of the decline of grammar (and it is grammar we are talking about; I am leaving McWhorther out of this for the moment) concentrates on the exceptional cases. Our grammar--first extrapolated from usage, anyway--persists because it tends to be followed more than not, by the writers and speakers who matter. That is, I think, the substance of your MW Concise extract, too.

The key to being a successful descriptivist, of course, is to apply the bias filter everywhere, to know the mistakes people tend to make, to know what they believe to be correct or to be grammatical, and then, rather than taking a grocer's apostrophe like a beating, to note it as a data point, and move on. As a descriptivist, I filter through the mistakes, the bad writing (or try to: sometimes I fail), and in the end, I usually come through with the message the writer intended, despite whatever roadblocks and potholes he has put in the way. Even for the writers who do not matter, what is intended is usually what is understood. That is enough for me.

But prescriptivists are useful, even the ones met at parties who insist that "anxious" and "eager" should not be used as synonyms (I referred her to the OED, sense 3). They reinject the rules in a forceful way, even when they get them wrong. Without those chanticleers of grammar, we might forget it all, along with everything else we haven't remembered from high school. You could call those grammar harridans griots, passing down the chants of the ages so that they are not forgotten. What other group in our world has such endurance?

Of course, my descriptivist mindset is contradictory to my misanthropic belief that most people are stupid and lazy and wouldn't remember or bother to breathe if the breeze didn't constantly remind them, no more than they would remember how to write if they didn't have to keep signing checks to pay minimums on vast credit card bills.

Regarding McWhorter: My dear fool, you cannot blame the Sixties unless you are willing to take back all of the changes our nation has undergone since the First World War. The nation as a whole has never perfectly spoken or perfectly written according to the rules of grammar; we simply are just hearing from more of them now than we were. That is all.

Regarding Wallace: I find myself in an awkward position because he is involved in a project for my employer. On one hand I respect his intelligence and his steadfast, dogged pursuit of quality results. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like he writes as if he were educated in prison.

But prescriptivists are useful... They reinject the rules in a forceful way

My point is that they would be infinitely more useful if they actually knew the rules (as opposed to the crap they pick up behind the barn).

Regarding the Sixties: Right on!

And as for DFW: I too respect his intelligence and like some of his writing; I just wish 1) he knew what he was talking about and 2) he didn't come on like the Smarmy All-Knowing One.

Prescriptivism (at its sanest) simply tries to use a descriptivist account of a prestige dialect as a normative standard.

Problems arises when prescriptivists mistakenly assume their prejudices are an adequate substitute for accurate description, and when they assume that the prestige of the prestige dialect is an entirely natural and politically unmediated result of its intrinsic superiority. (It is of course to laugh, but prescriptivists are often not very bright.)

More societies than literate ones have a conservative prestige register or dialect, and it is not to McWhorter's credit that he conflates the two, (unless he's writing down to the Great Unwashed, I s'pose). It is in the nature of things that changes within the prestige dialect come from "below", since after all conservatism is what it does, but the levelling of distinctions of social rank in western societies that perhaps peaked in the '60's isn't going to be undone by trying to make kids today talk proper (which they don't; and their music if you can call it music, mumble mumble.)

On the other hand, the formal prestige registers are sometimes (sociopolitically) appropriate, and not teaching them in schools can disadvantage those whose native dialects are far from the prestige one, and may not easily acquire it without exposure and instruction.

My solution (which is mine) would be to explicitly teach the highbrow forms (the ones that actually matter, based on a careful descriptive account of prestige dialect utterances culled from and tested against fancy-pants newspapers or whatever) but to make it clear that thuswisely expressing oneself is a tool of assimilation to the establishment. (I.e., selling out to The Man, but if you want to grow up to be a lawyer or whatever you gotta have what The Man wants to buy.) Offering persons an opt-in is the opposite of discriminatory, for sure.

In short: prestige dialects are not inherently superior in any sense other than having prestige, but that is after all not a small thing to have.

(This is a sketch of part of my thought I call "Rightist policies for leftist reasons.")

Yeah, what he said. (Must be nice to be fully awake and all that kind of thing.)

Oh, what a shame I missed that - I have Garner's Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage within reach here.

Btw, do you Americans never use the word 'linguist' in two meanings - one is someone who speaks one or more foreign languages, the other is a student of linguistics or someone who has studied linguistics. I only ever meet the second meaning here.

That's what I call a loaded question! Yes, Americans (and I believe other English speakers) often use the word in the first sense... but American (and I presume other) linguists in the specialized sense deprecate the use and try to get people to say "polyglot" or "multilingual" or "gee, you speak a lot of languages" instead, because it's hard enough explaining what linguistics is without having to explain over and over and over that a linguist isn't (just) somebody who speaks other languages.

Just thinking about prescriptive grammar again. To me prescriptive grammar is hard to disengage from good writing style, and to a degree, spelling is like that too. For example, if my little niece writes to me "com to ar hous todai" or if someone says "We ain't got no dog" the supposedly primary function of communication is unimpaired, but the self-presentation is poor or at least un-educated, childish, and non-elite.

And I think that I edit all three in the same part of my brain, which is a different part than where I think up what I want to say. So I'll hear myself say something (or see something I've written) and think, "Something's wrong there." It might be a misspelling, or an error of grammar, or the use of a non-prescribed form, or just a clumsy sentence, but my "Something's wrong there" is initially the same.

I'm snooty enough that I don't never use the ain't-got-none country dialect I heard growing up except on purpose. A linguist -- by any standard --who grew up near me claimed that he visited home once for two weeks and never heard the word "doesn't" used once.

language hat: Isn't that a bit prescriptivist of you?

Btw I only ask because I find it confusing. If the disapproved meaning had died, I wouldn't.

Love the slogan:
A society is generally as lax as its language.

Well, of course it's a bit precriptivist of me. As Jim (of UJG) said, "Within every soi disant descriptivist is a prescriptivist dying to drop all the pretense and nonsense and correct somebody." But surely every specialist is irritated when people use specialist terms in vague, sloppy, confusing ways.

What the hell is a 'lax society'?

Would they also concede, "A society is generally as rigid as its language"? This is more the impression I get from the site. Every article I've seen there is embarrassing to read.

Online tomorrow, Nov. 23, the November issue of The Vocabula Review:

Ain't We Got Fun? -- Steven G. Kellman
Marginalized -- Joseph Epstein
Ollie, Ollie, -Ologist -- Michael J. Sheehan
The Age of Exploration -- Kerr Houston
The Greatest Dictionary -- Richard Lederer
Literary Review: Hamlet in the Closet -- John Kilgore
The Elder Statesman: My Life as an Owl, Part Dos -- Clark Elder Morrow
The Critical Reader: Two Worrisome Thoughts -- Mark Halpern
The Last Word: From Down-Home to Decadence -- Christopher Orlet
Grumbling About Grammar
Elegant English
On Dimwitticisms
Clues to Concise Writing
Scarcely Used Words
Oddments and Miscellanea
On the Bookshelf