A prescriptivist is someone who believes that language has absolute rules about what’s right and wrong.
I’m a recovering prescriptivist. And, since “recovering” is used nowadays only for addicts who can expect a forever fight against their addictions, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever really change into a descriptivist (a person content to describe language habits rather than pontificate about what’s right or wrong).
Nevertheless, I’m no longer the 100% prescriptivist I once was. The curtain has been pulled back, and I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz and his clanking machinery. Or (more accurately in my case) I learned about Lindley Murray and others of his ilk – the autocrats who lumbered our language with senseless rules like “each and every have to take singular pronouns” and “never split an infinitive.”
Last night I curled up with the latest issue of The New Yorker to read a marvelous article about the prescriptive vs. descriptive language debate. Joan Acocella (whose day job is writing great articles about dance for the magazine) reviewed The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by descriptivist Henry Hitchings.
The article is wonderful. For example, Acocella refutes Hitchings’ attack on H.W. Fowler, pointing out that Fowler is not “the starchy old schoolmaster” that Hitchings makes him out to be.
Here’s what really thrilled me (and started me thinking about “recovering prescriptivists”): Hitchings thinks that the who/whom distinction is on the way out. (So do I.) But, Acocella says, “we never see any confusion over these pronouns in his book, which is written in largely impeccable English.”
Do I have the guts to deliberately use “every” with a plural pronoun in something I’m writing for publication? No. Coward that I am, I always recast the sentence to avoid the hideous “his-or-her” construction that’s one of the banes of modern writing. My reasoning is that even though I’m a descriptivist (sort of), there are lots of prescriptivists out there just rubbing their hands together, waiting for me to make an error.
Well, I did split an infinitive in the first sentence in the previous paragraph.
As I tell my students, your language choices need to satisfy the group for whom you’re writing. And there, my friends, is a grammatically correct sentence that’s absolutely hideous. Maybe I’m further along the road to recovery than I thought I was (although I did just look up farther and further to make sure I got this sentence right). As I said, I’m recovering….
