Prescriptivism

and Descriptivism
Beyond the Caricatures
Dan Clayton goes beyond a simplistic division between sticklers and
progressives. He shows that wanting to control language isnt confined to one
side its the aspects of language that they choose to focus on that differs.
Plain English
Have you ever walked around a
supermarket and thought about the role
of an ambient replenishment controller?
Are you involved in a customer-facing
organisation that offers solution-focused
approaches? Or perhaps an institution
thats had some of its provision outsourced
and its staff right-sized? No? Maybe you
are, but just havent realised it yet. Perhaps
you havent got a clue what those sentences
even mean, let alone if they apply to you.

Linda Combi, 2013

But its OK, because help is at hand

from the Plain English Campaign and its
war against gobbledygook, jargon and
misleading public information. The Plain
English Campaign was set up in 1979 to
get rid of this kind of corporate gibberish
and prescribe clearer, simpler English. They
even give their very own Crystal Mark to
organisations which use Plain English. So,
thats got to be a good thing, hasnt it?

Policing Offensive Language

And what about campaigns to remove
offensive and discriminatory words from
the language? For over three decades the
political correctness movement has made
inroads into the worst excesses of racist,
sexist and disablist language, encouraging
people to think about the impact of the
words they use, the potential hurt caused
by such words and the reasons why some
usages chairman, policeman, halfcaste and coloured among them have
evolved to carry such negative or loaded
connotations.

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To Greene, the sticklers are engaged in a

kind of linguistic one-upmanship, with the
author of the 2003 bestseller Eats, Shoots and
Leaves, Lynne Truss, ranking as one of the
worst offenders.

And again, surely this is a noble and

laudable goal, isnt it? However, while
studying English Language arent we often
encouraged to view those who tell us whats
right or wrong usage, good or bad English
prescriptivists rather negatively?
The debate is often polarised between two
competing positions, with the prescriptivists
on one side and the descriptivists on
the other. The usual presentation of
descriptivism as an open-minded, nonjudgemental and progressive way of
thinking about language use calling usage
non-standard rather than incorrect, not
using deficit models to describe varieties
of English, describing rather than judging
patterns of usage is often accompanied by
a presentation of prescriptivism as a fussy,
old-fashioned, pedantic and conservative
mind-set. But is this fair? Perhaps thats a
caricature of both sides of the debate. Are
descriptivists really judgement-free in their
observations about language use? You could
argue, as many language commentators
have, that by accepting usage (however
wrong) as the guide, descriptivists
are disavowing standards, allowing the
language to be warped by errors, to be
dictated to by the uneducated and to
become fragmented and unintelligible. In
other words, that a descriptivist stance is
really a laissez-faire stance: whatever will
be, will be.
Its true to some extent, however, that
prescriptivism can fall into the camps of
what Robert Lane Greene in You Are What
You Speak (2011) describes as sticklerism
and declinism, but it doesnt always
have to be this way, and some forms of
prescriptivism can be viewed as more
benign than others. But first of all, lets look
at these two camps and what they involve.

Sticklerism
Sticklerism, is characterised by a fingerwagging approach to others language
use, describing what others say as wrong
because its supposedly illogical or incorrect.

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Truss took to the streets with her trusty

marker pen, correcting comma misuse,
haranguing grocers over their dodgy
apostrophes and selling millions of books
along the way, perhaps tapping into the
insecurities that many of us have about how
we should best use the array of punctuation
marks and grammar rules that appear to
exist in English.
Ten years on, the sticklers are alive and well
and popping up on the internet in the form
of the grammar nazis: an example, if there
ever was one, of a peculiar form of language
change in action, with the once evil and
brutal connotations of the term nazi
semantically weakening as time has gone
by. These self-appointed sticklers admonish
posters on chat forums and tweeters on
Twitter whenever theres confusion over
there and their, your and youre, or
must of and must have. And while its
hard as an English teacher not to feel a
slight shudder when these usages appear,
because were in the business of teaching
students to use Standard English and these
are clearly non-standard usages, the glee
with which the grammar nazis lay into
their victims is rather unnerving. Forget the
content of whats been posted: if theres an
errant apostrophe, your points are rendered
worthless.

Rules Custom or
Correctness?
But what about these supposed rules which
sticklers and grammar nazis swear by?
Many of the rules are little more than
the preferred customs of particular writers
passed down through the generations,
bearing little relation to how language
is actually used by the majority of the
population, then or now. So, theres a
body of linguistic evidence to suggest that
rules such as avoiding split infinitives,
double negatives and prepositions at the
ends of sentences are pointless. Their usage
rarely, if ever, creates confusion or obscures
meaning, and theyre more a matter of taste
than grammar. Likewise, the use of who
and whom seems to be an increasingly
archaic distinction, and hopefully is
happily used as a sentence adverb without
anyone but the daftest pedant thinking
it means that the subject of the sentence
is literally full of hope. Oh, and even

literally, that bugbear of many a stickler, is

shown to have been used hyperbolically (as
in When she left, part of me literally died.)
since 1769, so we know that it can be used
perfectly intelligently without having to
mean to the letter as its original Oxford
English Dictionary citation for 1429 defines it.
And this is part of the problem with the
sticklers and grammar nazis. The rules
of English are not set in stone and the
language changes and evolves, adapted by
its users to suit their needs. But to many
prescriptivists, this change is a threat. They
see nearly all change as a decline.

Declinism
Declinism Robert Lane Greenes second
prescriptivist theme is a perception that
our language is in an irreversible decline
from a once-great peak, and that (as ever)
its the fault of feckless young people, vapid
technology and pesky immigrants with
broken English. Greene argues that English
is a long way from declining, quite the
opposite in fact, given that literacy rates
across the UK and USA are way higher than
they were a century ago. Declinism is also a
model that fits into one of the better known
critiques of prescriptivist thinking: Jean
Aitchisons crumbling castle.
In a series of lectures for the BBC in 1996,
Aitchison argued persuasively that many
of the complaints about the supposed
falling standards of English were simply
recycled from previous generations and that
all harked back to a mythical time when
English was supposedly at its peak. But the
problem with this tradition of complaint is
that the further back you go, the further
back this mythical peak must have been.
Each generation has its doom-mongers too.
For every Starkey, Heffer and Humphrys
now, there was a Dryden, Swift or Murray a
few centuries ago.
One thing that unites the declinists is their
lack of genuine consideration for how
language is actually used: how double
negatives like I never did nothing, for
example, rarely confuse listeners, or how
were hardly likely to be bamboozled by
10 items or less signs at supermarket
checkouts. And they rarely accept that
language changes not just by crumbling
away but by adding new words and
structures: not so much a crumbling castle
as an ever-extending new build, complete
with snooker room, sauna and mockGrecian pillars.

Missing the Bigger Point

Aitchisons metaphor the English language
as a grand castle, gradually falling into
disrepair casts the prescriptivists in the
role of arch-conservatives, desperately
trying to turn the clock back and keep
the language from changing further. And
she is quick to point out the folly of the
purist prescriptivist stance. She argues that
language change is natural and inevitable
and that the tradition of complaint about
minor details might actually be harmful,

divert[ing] attention away from more

important linguistic issues [] the
manipulation of peoples lives by skilful
use of language
In arguing that some forms of prescriptivism
are missing the bigger point, Aitchison
is identifying a need to care about
language use, but going beyond the simple
polarisation of good guys and bad guys
which descriptivism and prescriptivism
sometimes lend themselves to. But some
prescriptivists dont really help themselves
or their cause. The linguist, Deborah
Cameron, writing in Verbal Hygiene (1995)
identifies a moral and political strand in
some prescriptivist thinking. She argues
that, to many prescriptivists, language
is a proxy battleground for wider social
and cultural concerns and that grammar
has become a useful tool for waging this
war because of its strong metaphorical
association with order, tradition, authority,
hierarchy and rules. Its a theme also picked
up by Henry Hitchings in The Language Wars
(2011), when looking back at the early
prescriptivists Lindley Murray and Percy
Grainger, in particular who often see a
connection between proper syntax and
moral rectitude.

forms of language creep in: language that

in Jean Aitchisons words led to the
manipulation of peoples lives.
Right-sizing, after all, is a term that actually
means cutting jobs to the right level, but
right for who? Its certainly not the right
level for the person whos just lost their job.
And an ambient replenishment controller
sounds amazing. Who wouldnt want a
job with that title? Maybe its a touch less
glamorous when you find out its another
term for a supermarket shelf stacker,
showing that it was always designed to
embellish a fairly ordinary job title.
Whats interesting about the benign
prescriptivism of groups like the Plain
English Campaign and their campaigns
against jargon and management-speak is
that while they are being critical of what
they consider to be poor language use,
they are not necessarily making the moral
judgements of the purist prescriptivists,
instead caring more for clarity than
correctness. Thats a position that many
descriptivists would undoubtedly be happy
to adopt too.

Dan Clayton teaches at The

Sixth Form College Colchester
and is a senior examiner
and moderator for a leading
awarding body.

Links
The Plain English Campaign: http://www.
plainenglish.co.uk/
Jean Aitchisons Reith Lectures, The
Language Web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
programmes/p00gmvwx
Bryan A. Garner and Robert Lane Greene
debate prescriptivism and descriptivism in
The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.
com/roomfordebate/2012/09/27/whichlanguage-and-grammar-rules-to-flout/
For further discussion of attitudes to
language change, Language: a Student
Handbook on Key Topics and Theories
(published by the English and Media
Centre) is recommended.

And its not just in the workplace that

language can be used to dupe and confuse
us. Aitchison herself talks about the
language of nuclear warfare in Language
Change: Progress or Decay (1991) while Steve
Thorne examines how military discourse
often hides death and destruction in The
Language of War (2006). Its probably a
good thing that some people get worked
up about punctuation, because it helps
create the tension between innovation and
tradition that keeps the language intelligible
to its users, but surely, we should be more
concerned with stray smartbombs than the
occasional stray apostrophe.

In effect, the sticklers and declinists arent

really wagging their fingers or wringing
their hands at language use per se, but
at what it symbolises to them: declining
standards, a changing society and a shift in
the balance of power from an educated elite
to a wider mass of speakers and writers, and
now texters, bloggers and tweeters.

Choice of Ground for

Complaint
And its this point that takes us back to
the ambient replenishment controllers,
the right-sizers and outsourcers, because
while some prescriptivists picked battles
over language usage and engaged in a kind
of culture war, they took their eye off the
ball and let other, perhaps more pernicious,

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