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Are any prescriptivists any good at it?
I see a lot of prescriptivism on the Internet. But most of what I see is people who are pretty poor at it. I much prefer descriptivism, but before I write-off prescriptivism completely do you know of anyone who's good at it?
People correcting people on the internet aren't linguists and aren't practising linguistics. They are telling people to conform to a particular way of speaking and writing, and this is a natural part of the language evolution that descriptivism describes. Prescriptivism is the sort of linguistics practised in Great Britain a couple of centuries ago with grammar rule books which attempted (and in many ways succeeded) at imposing new rules on the language externally.
When someone on the internet writes 'it's had've, not had of' or w/e that is an internal force to the language and is entirely natural. There MUST be a limiting force on language evolution to counteract the natural divergent effects, otherwise nobody could understand one another. It's the mechanism by which communities stick to a common language and dialect, and interestingly its the same mechanism by which new language constructs propagate after they hit a critical mass (a threshold effect, it limits new things unless and until there is a sufficient push for them, then it promotes them).
If you write off that limiting force as prescriptivism the way language works is going to really confuse you, because it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
Prescriptivism still exists. It's alive and well in this century. There are lots of people running around telling other people how to use language: how to spell words, how to punctuate, what grammar to use, what accent to use, and so on. It's prescriptivism which says that African-American Vernacular English isn't "proper" English. It's prescriptivism which says that Received Pronunciation is how English should be spoken. It's prescriptivism which is behind us Aussies laughing at characters like Kim (of 'Kath & Kim' fame) when she says how she wants to be "effluent", or when she brings home some baby cheeses for Kath's Christmas decorations, or when her marriage with Brett is "O. V. A. H. Ovah!" That's all prescriptivism in action. It's dismissing or mocking other people's language as being wrong.
And prescriptivism is what's happening when someone on the internet writes "it's had've, not had of".
The reports of prescriptivism's death have been greatly exaggerated.
I never said it was dead, but people struggle to differentiate between actual prescriptivism and the natural cultural gravity which acts on language - the Lowth inspired prescriptivist grammarians are the classic example and cannot be mistaken for the other.
It is not prescriptivism when the change holds a difference of meaning or understanding - and language can absolutely be wrong when one language is understood in common well enough by different people to converse but differently enough that the meaning is warped. The inevitable effect of this which is known to have happened when i.e. trade began forging stronger links between areas, is that the dialects converge. The internet has meant this has started happening for local dialects of English (and probably other languages as well) - bits and pieces of each dialect will enter the mainstream, others will drop off, and to a large extent it is likely that a single dialect of written English will be the result - spoken as well once rich media over the net hits the right weight of mainstream. You'll have camps on the trigger points like color and colour that will die hard, but eventually they'll go.
And it isn't prescriptivism that says AAVE isn't proper English, it's racism.
How do we address AAVE in the context of the workplace? I know a man who tries to mentor young black men, mostly men who have been raised without a male influence in their lives. His goal is that they attend college if they show the aptitude for it. He gets them into sports programs, music, art, chess, whatever they lean towards to keep them out of trouble and, in my area, out of the one prevalent gang that's recruited a lot of local boys and men.
I've seen it in action, and while he's a good man with great intentions and gives a lot of his own time and money (and I know he's severely lacking in the latter), with a stated initial goal of college if possible, and subsequent entrance into the "professional" job market, is he missing out by not addressing their use of language? I know it's not what would be considered acceptable in a business email, for instance. Or in a presentation. Are people limiting their job opportunities by using (and I know this is controversial) "non-standard" English? Of course that question itself reeks of prescriptivism—who should try to prescribe to them how they speak? But that question is meaningless in a boardroom. "Proper English" is the expected norm.
These are just questions I've asked myself as I've watched him work with these young men. They all work for him in a manual labor field, and none have ever shown anything but humility and respect and ideal behavior. I have no reason to question their viability as smart, capable workers—and not just for manual labor; they should have the opportunity to go as far as any other person of similar ability.
Words have a meaning - this meaning is given to us by others, which we take on and use ourselves. This is part of the social contract of language that allows me to say 'purple' and know that what other people are hearing and understanding most likely matches what I am thinking. If language was purely divergent and had no concept of 'other people say this when they mean this therefore I must say that when I mean that', then that social contract is violated and you can't have a communication (the translation of an idea in one person's head to words they speak to words someone else hears to the corresponding idea in their head).
Note however that is NOT prescriptivism, rather it is what people on the internet often believe prescriptivism to be.
And for actual prescriptivism, look to the 18-19th century for when that finally started to really take hold in academic/journalistic circles in England and the early 20th century for when the prescribed rules/forms were finally being widely adopted by the public at large due to works like Henry Watson Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English being widely disseminated.
And if you think presciptivism wasn't needed at the time, you're dead wrong IMO. Before that you more often than not had literary works that were written like this (from an 18th century cookbook I recently purchased and have been going through):
https://archive.org/details/TheArtOfCookery/page/n5
The giant first block of text, that at first you would assume is a paragraph is actually a single sentence! And it only gets worse once you reach the actual recipes:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Hannah_Glasse_To_make_a_Currey_the_Indian_Way_1758_edition.jpg
The first sentence in that recipe is 139 words long with 13 commas and 2 semicolons. Even excluding the vernacular and typeface differences (e.g. ƒ = s), good luck parsing that effectively let alone following along with the instructions.
And don't even get me started on 18th Century journals like Peter Kalm's or Nicholas Cresswell's. Run-on sentences for days!
Hah, good luck indeed. And yeah about the earliest I have ever really gone back in terms of literature is the late 16th Century with some plays/poetry (e.g. Marlowe), but even that was a tremendous struggle. I can't even imagine what it's like to go back even further. I tried to do it once with Chaucer but it was just too much. :P
I think the recipe is completely understandable, it's hard to lex the long s properly at first but you get used to it. I also don't understand why you think a recipe should be "grammatical" in the first place, it's a recipe.
Linguists study languages as a phenomenon (I am studying my way to join them!). They are thus descriptivists, because that is the only way language can be studied scientifically.
The "grammar nazis" around the we and IRL are not really prescriptivists in that they are not really practising a scholarly discipline, they are just linguistically conservative or dickheaded highbrows. Nevertheless, correcting one another is not that sort of behavoiur all the time. It is, IMO, some sort of "negotiation of the message" and "stabilising the code" sort of behaviour, i.e. one speaker explaining the code to the other(s) to prevent or clear up ambiguity. I haven't yet studied discourse and pragmatics in depth, but this is what I can infer and offer to you with my current, rather superficial knowledge of the topic.
Or, and just hear me out on this, maybe they just care about language? If I correct someone, you can call me a dickhead all you want, but that won't make "there their they're" mean the same thing, nor it will make "than" a synonym of "then", nor it will make "would of" a thing.
This thread reminds me of an article called Regarding the Em Dash and especially this bit at the end:
I think I made the necessary distinction between ill-willed corrections and good willed, necessary ones. Apparently you just read my comment only up until the word "dickheaded highbrows". But I did not write the rest just for decorational purposes.
Proper use of punctuation and spelling is really important, but we aren't typesetting books or articles or newspapers all the time. Many times we're writing on a phone where typing is hard for many people, and automatic typing solutions like voice input and autocomplete are only mediocre. Many times, the author of some piece of text is not a native speaker of the language they are using (and I writing up this comment is such an instance). It's rude to go correcting everything unless the message is ambiguous, or we're teaching a language to someone.
You should use commas in this sort of a list.
Does this correction add to the discussion or clear any ambiguity? No. Then it's totally unnecessary whathever be the reason of the (supposed) mistake.
But that's exactly the point where corrections should be most welcome. It's not even about being a native speaker (I'm not - you and I share a native language), it's about accepting that, for any given topic, there are those who might be more knowledgeable than you, and being offered a correction should be seen as an opportunity to learn and improve yourself, not something to get indignant about.
First, there is nothing "supposed" about a mistake involving e.g there/their/they're. It's either right or wrong. As for necessity, it's firmly in the eye of the beholder. One can either choose to learn from it, or bury their head in the sand and get offended by it.
More generally, I'm horrified by the rise of anti-intellectualism and the supposedly progressive attempts to dress up ignorance as something not only acceptable, but commendable.
Turkish? Wow, it is great to encounter another Turkish speaker here! Nice to meet you!
For the rest of your comment, well, going from grammatical corrections in casual conversations to anti-intellectualism (which in and of itself is indeed a big problem that is on the rise) is a big leap, IMO. First of all, you can not assume ignorance that easily, because people who know the rules make mistakes too, they sometimes do not realise them (and that is why proofreading exists), or, because the linguistic register at play is not an elevated one, they sometimes ignore it. A mistake I make often is to type "wan't" for some reason, when I want to write "want". I obviously have the knowledge, but it is possibly some sort of conditioning which causes that error. When it is casual, and I find Tildes to be more on the casual side, missing those errors or even ignoring them is acceptable, IMO, and correcting these sort of things is rather lame TBH. Or say when texting in Turkish, I dont really care if I add a space before the particle "dA" each time, and if my interlocutor corrected that, that would be annoying. But if I am writing a work of literature or an article or something, then the register is different, the purpose is different, and there, thses sort of errors can't be tolerated indeed. I am the type that, when reading books, underline and make note of spelling errors, and even mail publishers anonymously :) (and Turkish publishers allow themselves too many of those, which is very annoying).
Also as a certified language teacher (from Marmara Uni whose center for teaching Turkish to foreign students is doing a very decent job), I've always been told by experts in field to never correct the learner except in the case of severe ambiguity or a potentially dangerous mistake; mistakes are considered a part of the learning process just as important as studying your learning material. A lovely Italian proverb goes: sbagliando, s'impara, i.e. "making mistakes, one learns".
So, correcting mistakes is not bad per se, just that the "when" part of it really matters.
Indeed. Hi!
I'm not assuming ignorance at all. I'm simply stating that, when someone corrects a mistake (accidental or not) getting offended is the wrong response. Either it wasn't accidental, in which case you learn something, or it was and there is no harm in the correction. It might even help someone else reading the same discussion.
We should never text then :) I would link you to https://ayriyazilir.com/
Well, one only learns from their mistakes if they know it's a mistake, no?
I'll start with this one, I think the only thing I can really add apart from what I've already said is that, not all mistakes are indicative of misinformation, and it's normal to make mistakes in one action when the focus is elsewhere. In language learning, correcting mistakes that are "out of focus" is considered harmful because it detracts from the actual purpose of the excercise, and can intimidate the learner, causing them to produce less, spoken or written, which can inhibit or even halt learning to a stop, because production is totally essential to language learning (and any other type of learning IMO), and a teacher has to do their utmost to make sure the learner is producing as much as possible. The selection of what errors to correct, when and how, is of utmost importance. Otherwise, no piece of information would've ever been learnt.
I suuuuck at typing on touchscreens, and fatfinger all the time. One of the things I hate in my life...
Well, to each their own. We're not the ones to tell others how to behave, and more times than not, the response to these corrections are more annoyment than offence, probably because most often it's a motor issue rather a linguistic one.
So, the em-dash is an interesting thing for me because it's my goto for why Wikipedia is so awful if you get it on a bad day.
There are easily hundreds of thousands of words across Wikipedia meta about whether to use n-dash, m-dash, hyphen, or minus in various places. And this wasn't idle chit-chat, this was sometimes heated argument. It made its way to Arbcom: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case&oldid=429209333#Hyphens_and_dashes
See the Village Pump discussion (lots of words, no concensus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_101#Hyphens_and_endashs
And there was endless discussion on Mexican-American War. Here's one discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_War/Archive_3#Requested_move_(February_2011)
Wow, thank you for those Wikipedia links! I have spent a solid hour reading through them and it's truly fascinating to me. Though I personally wouldn't bother, I feel a strong kinship with those arguing on the "let's use proper dashes" side :)
What does "being good at" prescriptivism even mean? I'm confused by this question.
See... to me... being good at something implies a skill in performing that activity. So, I'm imagining someone who's very skilled at correcting people's grammar and spelling.
The fact that you and I have different interpretations of this question merely confirms the need for @DanBC to clarify what they're asking.
Maybe, but it's okay if people have fun with the question and talk about whatever they want to too.
PS: yes, I deliberately dropped that apostrophe in the other post.
I would feel uncomfortable doing that. If someone asks a question, I want to provide them with a useful and relevant answer (if I can). I think it would be rude of me to just jump in with random unrelated thoughts - or even to answer the wrong question. So I try to understand the question in order to provide the best answer I can.
See this HN comment for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18695223
"Quietens isn't a word. It should just be 'quiets'."
A prescriptivist tries to control the word choice, but doesn't realise that 'quietens' is a real word, in paper dictionaries, and it's being used correctly in that article.
That's an example of a prescriptivist being bad at it.
I guess a prescriptivist who's good at it realises that language is fluid, has a deep understanding of language, and can talk about language in an interesting way without pettifogging nitpicks about fucking apostrophe's.
That sounds like "someone who likes language, but doesn't complain about the stuff I don't like to hear about".
That's a fair enough summary. I would say that I don't mind hearing about apostrophes if the discussion is about apostrophes, or punctuation, or fonts, or language, or a bunch of other stuff where apostrophes are relevant.
I think my poorly made point is that language is amazing and fascinating especially when someone knows what they're talking about, and it's so much more interesting to hear about all the other stuff than about signs with missing (or extra) apostrophes.
I agree that language is amazing and fascinating and what not, but I also think grammatical correctness is part of that. Personally, I find it really difficult to take someone seriously when they write, say, "Your just a grammar snob".
I"m going to have to partially agree with @vakieh: telling someone which word is correct, or correcting a misspelling, or advising correct punctuation, isn't linguistic prescriptivism, as such. Even a linguistic descriptivist will do this (although maybe not so much as a prescriptivist). Even descriptivists won't accept all mistakes as just being examples of a fluid language. Even descriptivists understand that language needs to be consistent and commonly understood.
Telling someone which word is correct is simply teaching people their own language. By your logic, this makes every English teacher in high schools and every English as a Second Language tutor a prescriptivist!
Prescriptivism and descriptivism are a level up from mere pedantry. Prescriptivism and descriptivism are about rejecting or accepting the evolution of language.
It's unfortunate that, in this case, someone who's obviously American didn't know about a word which is used mostly in British English.
So... they're a descriptivisit?
I assume this was deliberate irony. If not, I can see why you'd have a negative opinion of so-called "prescriptivists".
EDIT: I had to fix a typo before some nasty evil prescriptivist decided to inform me of my error.