Considering yesterday's post, I am THRILLED to quote a David Foster Wallace essay from 2001 called "Tense Present": "To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism."
(Read the Harper's pdf rather than the later published book version... it has aged in ways that highlight all of the criticisms aimed at the author during his heyday, and I still appreciate it.)
I especially liked that Wallace appears to have written a 20 page essay about the importance of learning standard white english (a prescriptivist position despite his non-traditional style of writing) in order to rebut a student complaint. I imagine he got scolded and mumbled all the way back to his computer, listing all the arguments he wished he had raised.
Interesting. I've always considered myself a descriptivist, but in my time in college as a writing tutor I never ran into this prescriptive flavor of it. The way I deployed descriptivism was to teach the rules of professional writing without having to tell people their own way of speaking was wrong. So a lot of, "when we're writing for class, here are the rules you need to know about."
My experience was that students were pretty comfortable with the idea of code-switching and liked having rules to follow that they could understand. They were already code-switching in how they spoke, so it wasn't a huge deal to show them how to code-switch in writing as well.
To me, the benefit of a descriptivist approach was just to stick to "here are the rules for this game" rather than "here are the transcendentally correct ways of writing."
I was also at a midwest commuter school though, not a coastal school. So a lot of the ideology probably hadn't penetrated to us.
I read that essay a few years ago, book version. Lots to admire in it. I try to help my students by teaching them what has worked over time to convey ideas. To the extent, that knowing correct tenses and more precise vocabulary will allow them to both understand and express ideas, I find grammar useful. Not as a rules-based order, but as a tool box, and set of lenses with which one can gain a clearer understanding of the wor(l)d,
Which side of the road to drive on is a purely arbitrary social convention. It's probably still good for everybody to be driving on the same side on the highway.
Really looking forward to all the comments that are prescriptivist about the word "descriptivist" but insist that, when they do it, it's different. Which is the whole point, arggggggggh
The question I have with gay marriage is why standards didn't continue to evolve to accommodate polygamy, which after all probably has wider international acceptance than same sex unions. I suspect it's because the real underlying debate was about the values of domestic progressives rather than actual "tolerance".
I'm not totally sold on the term but a lot of the arguments made by the prescriptivists might fall into the category of "luxury beliefs". It's a "luxury" in the sense that the knowledge of when and how to dispense with the conventions of "standard English" is generally only available to those who have in fact mastered "standard English".
The comparison with classical music is actually quite illuminating. When I was at junior conservatoire not so long ago I took some lessons in composition. Above all, I wanted to start by learning how to write convincing pastiche in the style of e.g. Brahms or Mahler. My composition teacher responded, "You are a composer in the 21st century - there are no rules!".
I don't know if he sincerely believed this, or if this was just his way of avoiding admitting that "the rules" are incredibly complicated to learn and rely on more theory than we would conceivably be able to cover in our weekly half hour sessions. But I'm sure if I had asked him to write e.g. the exposition of a piano sonata in the style of Schumann, he would have been able to do so.
I'd never really hear the debate discussed in those terms, but my take is basically this. Yes, I tend towards the descriptivist side of things. In a wider sense, I completely reject the idea of transcendence philosophically. My big philosophical gurus are and probably always will be guys like Deleuze, Guttarri, Derrida, and Foucault. Postmodernism is out of fashion, the right treats it as a boogieman, the left has embraced a backwards looking vulgar Marxism which thinks a few language theorists are why we never got FULL COMMUNISM, but I'll still fly the post structuralist flag when pressed.
Anyhow, the short version is, just because humans are involved, just because ideas, rules, and concepts (even scientific ones) ultimately involve some degree of human production and everything that goes with it, doesn't somehow invalidate it. Like, just because science is ultimately a product of many hardworking researchers, a set of processes, academic institutions, doesn't make those conclusions bad, wrong, inaccurate. It just means that you have to live with a degree of arbitrariness. Yes, we made up language rules the same as we made up laws. Moses never handed down the rules of how we speak on some stone tablets as a proxy for God himself, but we still need to have them in order to have mutual intelligibility and a functioning society. There's no version of this story where everyone wins, sometimes the dominate culture benefits you and sometimes it doesn't, the world isn't an inherently fair or nice place, and not everyone gets to do whatever they feel like doing. It's childish to even pretend so. You can try and be as fair as possible, but everyone can't win, and collectively you have to decide on a set of rules about what is and isn't allowed.
This is such a an interesting frame for topics outside of grammar - e.g. I think a lot of social science pretends to be descriptivist (e.g. sociological claims about false consciousness) but is actually prescriptivist (the claims don't describe reality as it is, but contextualized against an imagined perfect society where all social problems are solveable). The same thing happens with vulgarized versions of all sorts of ideas, like poorly read evolutionary psychology boosters who claimed to just describe cold hard nature but are in fact making claims about what is ideal based the on naturalistic fallacy.
>It’s like the debate about gay marriage. Obviously, I’m a lifelong supporter of the right to marry a same-sex partner. But there was a line on the issue that I always thought was a little weak, a little fake, something like “hey, you have your straight marriage, I’ll have my gay one, nobody’s curtailing anybody’s freedoms.” But of course what the anti-gay marriage people wanted was to preserve the traditional man-and-a-woman sacrament, to be in marriages that by their very existence reaffirmed marriage’s heterosexual exclusivity.
You sometimes see the same kind of evasiveness in debates around abortion, which is why I always describe myself as "pro-abortion" rather than that mealy-mouthed euphemism "pro-choice".
In my professional career I have worked with Indians whose only common language was English. I have also worked with Syrians, Russians, Ukrainians, Mexicans, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese who grew up speaking Mandarin versus Chinese who grew up speaking Cantonese, Hungarians, French, Columbians, etc.
The US needs a standardized, common language precisely because it is a genuinely diverse place. (It needs shared values for precisely the same reason.) I have a friend who was genuinely offended when somebody in a meeting used the term "tickety boo". We all knew what that English bastard was trying to do: debase American standardized English.
The entire misunderstanding is that while LINGUISTS should be descriptivist, as a participant in a language community there is by definition an element of prescriptivism (or more accurately the binary is stupid).
What's 'correct', what's prestigious, what gives off what vibe, these are vaguely determined by everyone in your community who speaks your language, with a kind of 'majority' vote but not exactly. This is obviously inevitable. Whether something is 'cringe' for a teenager is the same question as whether 'ain't' is grammatical to your English teacher. Vocabulary is more negotiable than syntax, but not completely.
If you're writing a linguistics book, you should just describe what's happening. But in an English community, you are part of a social push and pull on what the rules are whether you like it or not, and you are pulling in a direction, whether explicitly or implicitly. I tend to be more accepting of meaning drift like 'literally' than others, but that's prescriptive in it own way.
Can't you salvage prescriptivism by simply stating that while language conventions are not objective, effective communication is? If you can't make the person you are talking to understand what you are trying to say, at least one of you is doing language wrong. Instead of saying that there is one objectively correct way of talking, say that there are objectively better or worse ways to use language to make yourself understood.
Considering yesterday's post, I am THRILLED to quote a David Foster Wallace essay from 2001 called "Tense Present": "To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism."
(Read the Harper's pdf rather than the later published book version... it has aged in ways that highlight all of the criticisms aimed at the author during his heyday, and I still appreciate it.)
I especially liked that Wallace appears to have written a 20 page essay about the importance of learning standard white english (a prescriptivist position despite his non-traditional style of writing) in order to rebut a student complaint. I imagine he got scolded and mumbled all the way back to his computer, listing all the arguments he wished he had raised.
As a prescriptivist, I could care less about people figuratively using the word “literally.”
Because I FUCKING CARE A LOT.
Interesting. I've always considered myself a descriptivist, but in my time in college as a writing tutor I never ran into this prescriptive flavor of it. The way I deployed descriptivism was to teach the rules of professional writing without having to tell people their own way of speaking was wrong. So a lot of, "when we're writing for class, here are the rules you need to know about."
My experience was that students were pretty comfortable with the idea of code-switching and liked having rules to follow that they could understand. They were already code-switching in how they spoke, so it wasn't a huge deal to show them how to code-switch in writing as well.
To me, the benefit of a descriptivist approach was just to stick to "here are the rules for this game" rather than "here are the transcendentally correct ways of writing."
I was also at a midwest commuter school though, not a coastal school. So a lot of the ideology probably hadn't penetrated to us.
I read that essay a few years ago, book version. Lots to admire in it. I try to help my students by teaching them what has worked over time to convey ideas. To the extent, that knowing correct tenses and more precise vocabulary will allow them to both understand and express ideas, I find grammar useful. Not as a rules-based order, but as a tool box, and set of lenses with which one can gain a clearer understanding of the wor(l)d,
I love this. Thanks Freddie.
Which side of the road to drive on is a purely arbitrary social convention. It's probably still good for everybody to be driving on the same side on the highway.
Really looking forward to all the comments that are prescriptivist about the word "descriptivist" but insist that, when they do it, it's different. Which is the whole point, arggggggggh
The question I have with gay marriage is why standards didn't continue to evolve to accommodate polygamy, which after all probably has wider international acceptance than same sex unions. I suspect it's because the real underlying debate was about the values of domestic progressives rather than actual "tolerance".
I'm not totally sold on the term but a lot of the arguments made by the prescriptivists might fall into the category of "luxury beliefs". It's a "luxury" in the sense that the knowledge of when and how to dispense with the conventions of "standard English" is generally only available to those who have in fact mastered "standard English".
The comparison with classical music is actually quite illuminating. When I was at junior conservatoire not so long ago I took some lessons in composition. Above all, I wanted to start by learning how to write convincing pastiche in the style of e.g. Brahms or Mahler. My composition teacher responded, "You are a composer in the 21st century - there are no rules!".
I don't know if he sincerely believed this, or if this was just his way of avoiding admitting that "the rules" are incredibly complicated to learn and rely on more theory than we would conceivably be able to cover in our weekly half hour sessions. But I'm sure if I had asked him to write e.g. the exposition of a piano sonata in the style of Schumann, he would have been able to do so.
I'd never really hear the debate discussed in those terms, but my take is basically this. Yes, I tend towards the descriptivist side of things. In a wider sense, I completely reject the idea of transcendence philosophically. My big philosophical gurus are and probably always will be guys like Deleuze, Guttarri, Derrida, and Foucault. Postmodernism is out of fashion, the right treats it as a boogieman, the left has embraced a backwards looking vulgar Marxism which thinks a few language theorists are why we never got FULL COMMUNISM, but I'll still fly the post structuralist flag when pressed.
Anyhow, the short version is, just because humans are involved, just because ideas, rules, and concepts (even scientific ones) ultimately involve some degree of human production and everything that goes with it, doesn't somehow invalidate it. Like, just because science is ultimately a product of many hardworking researchers, a set of processes, academic institutions, doesn't make those conclusions bad, wrong, inaccurate. It just means that you have to live with a degree of arbitrariness. Yes, we made up language rules the same as we made up laws. Moses never handed down the rules of how we speak on some stone tablets as a proxy for God himself, but we still need to have them in order to have mutual intelligibility and a functioning society. There's no version of this story where everyone wins, sometimes the dominate culture benefits you and sometimes it doesn't, the world isn't an inherently fair or nice place, and not everyone gets to do whatever they feel like doing. It's childish to even pretend so. You can try and be as fair as possible, but everyone can't win, and collectively you have to decide on a set of rules about what is and isn't allowed.
This is such a an interesting frame for topics outside of grammar - e.g. I think a lot of social science pretends to be descriptivist (e.g. sociological claims about false consciousness) but is actually prescriptivist (the claims don't describe reality as it is, but contextualized against an imagined perfect society where all social problems are solveable). The same thing happens with vulgarized versions of all sorts of ideas, like poorly read evolutionary psychology boosters who claimed to just describe cold hard nature but are in fact making claims about what is ideal based the on naturalistic fallacy.
>It’s like the debate about gay marriage. Obviously, I’m a lifelong supporter of the right to marry a same-sex partner. But there was a line on the issue that I always thought was a little weak, a little fake, something like “hey, you have your straight marriage, I’ll have my gay one, nobody’s curtailing anybody’s freedoms.” But of course what the anti-gay marriage people wanted was to preserve the traditional man-and-a-woman sacrament, to be in marriages that by their very existence reaffirmed marriage’s heterosexual exclusivity.
You sometimes see the same kind of evasiveness in debates around abortion, which is why I always describe myself as "pro-abortion" rather than that mealy-mouthed euphemism "pro-choice".
In my professional career I have worked with Indians whose only common language was English. I have also worked with Syrians, Russians, Ukrainians, Mexicans, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese who grew up speaking Mandarin versus Chinese who grew up speaking Cantonese, Hungarians, French, Columbians, etc.
The US needs a standardized, common language precisely because it is a genuinely diverse place. (It needs shared values for precisely the same reason.) I have a friend who was genuinely offended when somebody in a meeting used the term "tickety boo". We all knew what that English bastard was trying to do: debase American standardized English.
The entire misunderstanding is that while LINGUISTS should be descriptivist, as a participant in a language community there is by definition an element of prescriptivism (or more accurately the binary is stupid).
What's 'correct', what's prestigious, what gives off what vibe, these are vaguely determined by everyone in your community who speaks your language, with a kind of 'majority' vote but not exactly. This is obviously inevitable. Whether something is 'cringe' for a teenager is the same question as whether 'ain't' is grammatical to your English teacher. Vocabulary is more negotiable than syntax, but not completely.
If you're writing a linguistics book, you should just describe what's happening. But in an English community, you are part of a social push and pull on what the rules are whether you like it or not, and you are pulling in a direction, whether explicitly or implicitly. I tend to be more accepting of meaning drift like 'literally' than others, but that's prescriptive in it own way.
Can't you salvage prescriptivism by simply stating that while language conventions are not objective, effective communication is? If you can't make the person you are talking to understand what you are trying to say, at least one of you is doing language wrong. Instead of saying that there is one objectively correct way of talking, say that there are objectively better or worse ways to use language to make yourself understood.