The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that’s how ocean surfaces must look.īe that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. You’ll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching ‘to wipe out utterly’.ĭescriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. Now we don’t often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something – this is the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci- root). Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Is this a split personality, or can the two be reconciled into a coherent philosophy? I believe they can. But when it comes time to write my column, I study the weird mess of real language rather than being a scold about this or that mistake, I try to teach myself (and so the reader) something new. When people file me copy that has mistakes of grammar or mechanics, I fix them (as well as applying The Economist’s house style). These two jobs more or less require me to be both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive.īut it doesn’t have to be this way. Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists’ facts – this makes you a descriptivist.
Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language.
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