When I first heard of a man named Noam Chomsky, I learned that he was regarded as the father of modern linguistics, and I learned that he was a powerful force in America today. I initially regarded Chomsky, and the field of linguistics, as relatively irrelevant. The subject matter seemed to me a narrow conceit that would appeal to a very narrow audience. As my knowledge of political science increased, I learned that linguistics, or the scientific study of human language, procured not simply a war in America but the war of our times.
This war has been occurring since the late 60’s, if you listen to an author named David Foster Wallace, and it is basically a usage war. It is a war among modern day linguists that studies how the English language is to be used and interpreted. This usage war is a war between two factions that the editor-in-chief of the controversial Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, named Philip Babcock Gove,{1} described as one between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists.
“The descriptivists,” he said, “are concerned with the description of how language is used, and the prescriptivists are concerned with how the language should be used.”
The late lexicographer Robert Burchfield furthered this description thusly: “A prescriptivist by and large regards changes in the language as dangerous and resistible, and a descriptivist identifies new linguistic habits and records these changes in dictionaries and grammars with no indication that they might be unwelcome or at any rate debatable.”{2}
Anyone who engages in conversation today knows how powerful language can be. Anyone who has had their language corrected knows that if they want to succeed in life, they need to assimilate to their culture’s norms and standards. Early on in life, we learned that if we were going to succeed in the real world, we would have to perfect our spelling and grammar. After we entered the real world, we learned that if we were going to succeed we would also have to correct our speech to the codes in the political correct lexicon. I would guess that nearly everyone has, at some point in time, learned what acceptable discourse is in a relative manner. I would guess that anyone who has spoken, or written, on a professional level, has learned of the perceptions that can be gained or lost with the use of language. I would also guess that everyone has now realized how these perceptions can be altered to deprive an individual of power with enough manipulation. The latter may be the key to the descriptivist movement in linguistics today.
Most individuals are first introduced to these manipulated perceptions when they enter the workforce. We may see them parlayed in movies and television, but we don’t experience them firsthand until we enter the workplace and learn that our inability to acquiesce to these social mores may have dire consequences. This has been a form of manipulation that has resulted in an egalitarian shift of power in our daily lives. If this form of manipulation were limited to the workplace, that would be one thing. It would be powerful, but that power would be limited to that particular environment. As we have all seen when our use of language is successfully manipulated, it doesn’t end when we clock out for the day. We accidentally, or incidentally, take these rules of usage, or speech codes, out of the workplace and into our everyday lives. These incremental actions and reactions have been catalogued in a David Foster Wallace book: Consider the Lobster. Wallace’s book details the fact that lexicographers, like Phillip Babcock Gove, have used dictionaries, and other methods, as a foundation to foster a usage war that has been occurring in America since the late 60’s.
How many of us have used incorrect terminology that violates the current rules of usage? How many of us have used the words “reverse discrimination” as opposed to the more politically correct term “affirmative action”? How many of us have used the words “Pro-Abortion” only to be corrected with the more preferable “Pro-Choice” title for the movement? How many of have been told it’s not “abortion advocate” it’s “reproductive rights advocate”; it’s “undocumented worker” not “illegal immigrant”; it’s a “peccadillo” it’s not “perjury before a grand jury”; it’s “environmentalist” not “anti-corporate socialist”; it’s “militant feminist” not “man hating female who can find no other way to succeed”; “multiculturalist” not “racial quota advocate”; “rainforest” not “gathering of trees”; “sexually active” not “promiscuous”; “economic justice” not “socialism”; “fairness” not “socialism”; it’s called “giving back” not “class envy”; and it’s “community organizer” not “radical agitator”. This is the battle, and these are the little wars that the descriptivists and the liberals have been waging against the “normal” America lexicon for generations, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
One of the advantages the descriptivists/liberals have in manipulating the language, and winning the usage wars, is that most people simply want to be nice to one another. Very few people go out of their way to offend another person. When we find a person that may be different from us in some manner, we want to know how best to get along with them. We want to know their sensitivities, in other words, so we do not accidentally violate them. The question that should be brought to the debate more often is how do people learn their sensitivities? Are these sensitivities entirely internal, or are they taught to us through repeated messaging? Most people are insecure, and they don’t know how to demand satisfactory treatment, but it can be taught. An individual can be taught that something is offensive, and they can be taught how to communicate their offense. “What’s wrong with that,” is a common reply to this notion. “What’s wrong with teaching people how they should be treated? We all just want to get along with one another?”
Prescriptivists would tell you that buried beneath all this “well-intentioned” manipulation of usage is the general loss of language authority. Prescriptivists ache over the inconsistencies brought to our language through slang, dialect, and other purposeful displays of ignorance regarding how the language works. They labor over the loss of standardized language, such as that in the classical works of a Geoffrey Chaucer. Most of them do not necessarily call for a return to Chaucer-era usage, but they are offended when words like “heigth” and “irregardless” make it into modern dictionaries. They also get apoplectic when terms, such as “you is” and “she be” become more acceptable in our lexicon. And they hide in a hole when standards of modernity allow for sentences to begin with a conjunction, such as “and”, and they weep for the soul of language when casual conversation permits a sentence to end with an infinitive such as “to”. It is this lack of a controlling authority that causes a member of the prescriptivism movement to mourn. Language provides cohesion in a society, and it provides rules that provide like-mindedness to a people that want to get along. It’s fine to celebrate individuality, and some differences inherent in a melting pot as large as America’s, but if you have nothing to bind people together the result can only be chaos.
A member of the descriptivism movement, on the other hand, celebrates the evolution of language:
Frank Palmer wrote in Grammar: “What is correct and what is not correct is ultimately only a matter of what is accepted by society, for language is a matter of conventions within society.” John Lyons echoed this sentiment in Language and Linguistics: “There are no absolute standards of correctness in language.”
Henry Sweet said of language that it is “partly rational, partly irrational and arbitrary”.
It may be arbitrary in Sweet’s theoretical world of linguists seeking to either ideologically change the culture, or update it to allow for vernaculars in the current social mores, but in the real world of America today are we doing our students, our language, or our culture any favors by constantly redefining usage? If our primary motivation for teaching arbitrary methods of usage is sensitivity to intellectual capacity, different cultures, and self-esteem is the culture as a whole made any better in the long run?
On the ideological front, the descriptivism movement has successfully implemented a requirement that all writers now use the pronouns “they” and “he or she” if that writer seeks a general description of what a general person may do or think. Repeated use of the general pronoun “he” without qualifying it with equal usage of “she”, “they”, or “he or she” is now seen as not only antiquated but sexist. The reason it is antiquated, say those of the descriptivism movement, is that it harkens back to a patriarchal, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) society. As I said, if you work in an office, and you send out communications to a team of people, you know how successful the descriptivism movement has been in infiltrating our language in this regard. Yet, no one knew enough to be offended by the repeated use of “he” as a general pronoun, until we were taught that it was offensive.
Everything that has been stated thus far is basically common knowledge to those of us who operate in any public forums in which we interact with a wide variety of people. What some may not know is that this “usage war” for the hearts and minds of language users extended to the production of dictionaries. The next logical question is how can a dictionary be ideological? There are prescriptivist dictionaries that call for “proper” interpretations and use of language, and there are descriptivist dictionaries that evolve with common use. “Usage experts”, such as David Foster Wallace, consider the creation of these two decidedly different dictionaries salvos in the Usage Wars “that have been under way ever since an editor named Phillip Babcock Gove first sought to apply the value-neutral principles of structural linguistics to lexicography in the 1971 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language.”
Gove’s response to the outrage expressed by those prescriptivist conservatives who howled at Gove’s inclusion of “OK” and “Ain’t” in his Third Edition of Webster’s Dictionary was: “A dictionary should have no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive.”{3}
One of the other reasons that descriptivism eventually took hold is that it provided for more “free form” writing. Descriptivism allows a writer to get their words down on paper without an overriding concern for proper communication. Descriptivism allows for expression without concern for proper grammar or a proper lexicon. It allows a writer to brainstorm, free form, and journal without a “fussbudget” teacher correcting these thoughts into proper usage. This was a relief to those of us who enjoyed expression without having to answer to a teacher that informed us we weren’t expressing correctly. How can one “express correctly” those of us who love to express asked. It can be said, without too much refutation, that the descriptivism movement won this argument for the reasons those of us who love to express brought forth. When I was initially instructed to explore my mind for expression, my teachers told me to get the expression down, and we’ll correct your spelling and grammar later. It wasn’t long before these teachers gave up on “correcting the spelling and grammar later” with the belief that the self-esteem of the writer was paramount. If the student doesn’t get discouraged, this theory on usage suggested, they are more apt to express themselves more often. They are more inclined to sign up for a class that doesn’t “badger” the student with concerns of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, and etymology. It could be said that colleges based this lowering of standards on economics, as much as they did their encouragement of the student. It could also be stated that this was one of the agents, along with the many others listed above, that allowed the descriptivism movement to move the language, and the culture, away from the prescriptivist rules of usage.
Some have said that the motivation for those in the descriptivism movement is not nearly as nefarious as those in the prescriptivism movement would have you believe. Descriptivists would have you believe that their goal was more an egalitarian attempt at inclusion and assimilation. They would have you believe that the prescriptivists’ grammar requirements and lexicography are exclusionary and elitist, but can you take these descriptivist interpretations and nuances into a job interview, a public speech, a formal letter, or even into a conversation among peers that you hope to impress? Can you succeed in the current climate of America today with language usage that is wide-open to a variety of interpretations? As I told an English as a Second Language teacher, “You may be frustrated with the “impossibly high standards” that George W. Bush has placed on your students, but if you want them to truly succeed in America today wouldn’t it be in their best interests that you teach them these impossibly high “Prescriptivist, Standard White English, and WASP” grammar and usage requirements in your class?”
{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Babcock_Gove
{2} http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/descriptivism-vs-prescriptivis…
{3} Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster. New York, NY. Little Brown and Company, a Hachett Book Group. 2005. eBook.
