Lost,
you’re actually reading Popular Prescriptivism, a genre sideline of certain journalists (mostly older males, the majority of whom actually do wear bow ties 20 ) whose bemused irony often masks a Colonel Blimp’s rage at the way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present. Some Pop Prescriptivism is funny and smart, though much of it just sounds like old men grumbling about the vulgarity of modern mores. 21 And some PP is offensively small-minded and knuckle-dragging, such as
Paradigms Lost’
s simplistic dismissal of Standard Black English: “As for ‘I be,’ ‘you be,’ ‘he be,’ etc., which should give us all the heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a language with its roots in history but of ignorance of how a language works.” But what’s really interesting is that the plutocratic tone and styptic wit of Newman and Safire and the best of the Pop Prescriptivists are modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same twin towers of scholarly Prescriptivism whom Garner talks about revering as a kid. 22
Descriptivists, on the other hand, don’t have weekly columns in the
Times
. These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of structural (or “descriptive”) linguistics, they are doctrinaire positivists who have their intellectual roots in Comte and Saussure and L. Bloomfield 23 and their ideological roots firmly in the US Sixties. The brief explicit mention Garner’s preface gives this crew —
Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries got hijacked by the descriptive linguists, [24] who observe language scientifically. For the pure descriptivist, it’s impermissible to say that one form of language is any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it’s OK—and anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead… . Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems. Descriptivists want to record language as it’s actually used, and they perform a useful function—although their audience is generally limited to those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research. [25]
— is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the “approaching different problems” part, because it vastly underplays the Descriptivists’ influence on US culture. For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmental movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males 26 and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think Proposition 227. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid using
he
as a generic pronoun, or of the tense, deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.’s. Think of the modern ubiquity of spin or of today’s endless rows over just the
names
of things—“Affirmative Action” vs. “Reverse Discrimination,” “Pro-Life” vs. “Pro-Choice,” * “Undocumented Worker” vs. “Illegal Alien,” “Perjury” vs. “Peccadillo,” and so on.
*INTERPOLATION
EXAMPLE OF THE APPLICATION OF WHAT THIS ARTICLE’S THESIS STATEMENT CALLS A DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT TO A HIGHLY CHARGED POLITICAL ISSUE, WHICH EXAMPLE IS
you’re actually reading Popular Prescriptivism, a genre sideline of certain journalists (mostly older males, the majority of whom actually do wear bow ties 20 ) whose bemused irony often masks a Colonel Blimp’s rage at the way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present. Some Pop Prescriptivism is funny and smart, though much of it just sounds like old men grumbling about the vulgarity of modern mores. 21 And some PP is offensively small-minded and knuckle-dragging, such as
Paradigms Lost’
s simplistic dismissal of Standard Black English: “As for ‘I be,’ ‘you be,’ ‘he be,’ etc., which should give us all the heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a language with its roots in history but of ignorance of how a language works.” But what’s really interesting is that the plutocratic tone and styptic wit of Newman and Safire and the best of the Pop Prescriptivists are modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same twin towers of scholarly Prescriptivism whom Garner talks about revering as a kid. 22
Descriptivists, on the other hand, don’t have weekly columns in the
Times
. These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of structural (or “descriptive”) linguistics, they are doctrinaire positivists who have their intellectual roots in Comte and Saussure and L. Bloomfield 23 and their ideological roots firmly in the US Sixties. The brief explicit mention Garner’s preface gives this crew —
Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries got hijacked by the descriptive linguists, [24] who observe language scientifically. For the pure descriptivist, it’s impermissible to say that one form of language is any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it’s OK—and anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead… . Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems. Descriptivists want to record language as it’s actually used, and they perform a useful function—although their audience is generally limited to those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research. [25]
— is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the “approaching different problems” part, because it vastly underplays the Descriptivists’ influence on US culture. For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmental movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males 26 and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think Proposition 227. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid using
he
as a generic pronoun, or of the tense, deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.’s. Think of the modern ubiquity of spin or of today’s endless rows over just the
names
of things—“Affirmative Action” vs. “Reverse Discrimination,” “Pro-Life” vs. “Pro-Choice,” * “Undocumented Worker” vs. “Illegal Alien,” “Perjury” vs. “Peccadillo,” and so on.
*INTERPOLATION
EXAMPLE OF THE APPLICATION OF WHAT THIS ARTICLE’S THESIS STATEMENT CALLS A DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT TO A HIGHLY CHARGED POLITICAL ISSUE, WHICH EXAMPLE IS
Similar Books
