Language is a toolkit to communicate ideas, and a toolkit frozen in glass is a useless toolkit.
You need to swap out that hammer when it starts getting damaged, or put back a screwdriver when you find out you need it again, or add new tools when you find that the tools you have now aren’t fit to purpose.
And sure, there’s some loose screws at the bottom of the bag, but they don’t harm anything, and very occasionally they come in useful.
I think there are two different sorts of “prescriptivism” that need to be distinguished.
One is based on the idea that every language has one ideal form that must be elucidated by experts and enforced across the rest of the language community. This was never a real part of linguistics—it’s a popular misconception from people imagining that linguistics is an extrapolation of grade-school grammar.
But the other form of “prescriptivism” is just fluent speakers correcting people acquiring the language when they perceive a mistake—this is a natural function that occurs in all language communities, starting with parents teaching their children. And it’s a necessary function: learning is orders of magnitude more efficient when the learner has both positive and negative examples.
The problem comes when speakers miscategorize speech in other dialects as incorrect examples of their own dialect, and attempt to correct them accordingly.
The latter comes from a place of good, but it’s still misguided. If the message was understood, then it was good enough to not need a “correction” to it
Eye urgree, ass lng ass yu Ken rid thz wy dos eet madder howl iz zpelt?
To go back to my metaphor, the difference between someone going “you should use a 2.4mm posidrive for that 2.4mm posi-head screw” when a 2.5mm will work, and someone going “you should use a hammer, not the back of your screwdriver, to hammer a nail”
Like, former one is not gonna affect anything and it’s being pedantic, the latter one you’re actually being helpful.
If the message was understood
Ain’t nobody gonna decipher your nonsense
I understood it just fine. Does that make it good English?
Excuse me sir, are you impugning my English?Xkus mi sar, arr yoo impunning mai Englees?
Don’t be daft
* “There is …”
J/k ;-)
There’s has been in that usage for like 100 years at least.
I think they were adding the missing words from your title
Only missing if they were needed. They weren’t
The comment in question was clearly tongue in cheek, calm down.
Tbh I was hangry when I replied 😂, feeling much better and see that
I suspect it should also use a semicolon instead of the comma? Or only if they left out the “because” (which itself should start with an apostrophe).
I admit my grammar is weak.
OK, OK, I’ll take off my prescriptivist hat!
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
The argument i see against anti-prescriptivism is that words are at their most useful when they mean something and everyone can pretty much agree on what that something is. Yes, it is annoying and pedantic and more or less pointless when someone insists that
youone must say “whom” and not “who”, or makes a big fuss over a verb phrases that happens to put a preposition at the end of its clause. But i think that’s different from a native speaker correcting someone who’s just learning a language (as a second language or a child learning their first) and has said something in a way that’s nonstandard and confusing.On that note, i do wonder how a language would evolve with no prescriptivism at all. A carefully controlled environment where nobody is allowed to tell anyone how to talk, offer suggestions, or even answer questions about the language or a statement’s meaning.
I think you’ll find that outside of grade school English (as a first language) classrooms people are more likely to be against prescriptivism than for it. At least, that’s what i’ve found, but i’m more immersed in the linguistics parts of the Web than the picking-fights-for-no-reason parts.
And maybe i’m wrong about my opinion there, and i’m just being hypocritical and thinking that my level of linguistic prescriptivism is the correct one. I don’t know, i’m no expert.
To add more nuance to this intentionally no-nuance take, I think what matters far far far far more than correctness is CONTEXT
You should use different linguistic context when talking to your boss than you do when talking to your mum, than you do when talking to a friend, than you do when talking to a stranger, than you do when writing a format piece of writing, etc etc etc
