4. Prescriptivism1 can designate an approach for ‘prescribing’ how a language or variety should be used. A ‘language’ is implicitly defined as a system that expresses degrees of status, cultivation, and education within a community of speakers or (more importantly) writers. Ideologically, prescriptivism resonates with idealism, which holds that the ideal and abstract are more valid or true than the real and concrete (I.81). Historically, it originated as a pre-modernist project attuned to exclusive theories of birth, rank, and class, whereby the language variety of included ‘elites’ could help to justify their privileged status above the ‘masses’. Insofar as the variety was an idealisation, it was rarely anyone’s native language or home variety, and had to be mastered through zealous study. It was mainly deployed in prestigious texts and discourses for occasions of power, such as ceremonies for kings, priests, or honoured guests.
5. In principle, then, prescriptivism leads toward constructing and maintaining a more theoretical (ideal) variety for use in ‘high culture’ and distinct from the more practical (real) variety or varieties in
everyday use. The distinguishing criteria have been partly theoretical, such as elegance, balance, and logic; and partly practical, such as observation of prestigious usage. Theory has understandably run well ahead of practice, and in some issues and approaches away from practice.
6. Once the prestigious texts had been duly recorded, specialists were assigned to study and determine their precise form and meaning and to deter changes or errors, or influences from less prestigious varieties or languages. The sacred texts of Hinduism and Islam, such as the Vedas and the Qur’an respectively, underwent meticulous studies of Sanskrit since the 5th century BC,2 and of Arabic since the 8th century AD.3 Especially for language sounds, crucial in texts to be recited, those descriptions attained a degree of precision not achieved in Europe until the science of language was reinvented as ‘modern linguistics’. 7. Still, Europe had a venerable tradition of studying prestigious texts from the periods of ‘high culture’ in
two ‘classical languages’: Greek mainly in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., and Latin mainly from the 1st century B.C. up to the 2nd century A.D.4 These texts were more secular than sacred, ranging across poetry and drama, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, natural science, history, and govern-ment. Several projects of study emerged. The formal organisation of words and word-patterns, but also sometimes of language sounds, was studied in grammar, which we can call traditional grammar to distinguish it from ostensibly ‘modern’ notions of ‘grammar’. The functional organisation of discourse, especially of persuasive types, was studied in rhetoric. And the creative and ornamental organisation of discourse was studied in poetics. In theory, these three projects might be usefully integrated, as writers like Aristotle indicated (VI.4); but in practice, they have coexisted rather uneasily. Grammar sustains social divisions most arbitrarily, and has predominated: its forms are harder to control, yet easier to distinguish between ‘correct’ versus ‘incorrect’ (cf. II.10, 13, 189).
8. The theoretical drift of prescriptivism was intensified when ‘classical’ Greek and Latin were no longer based on a real population of native speakers yet persisted as idealised languages of power. Of the two, Latin was favoured for historical, geographical, and political reasons, such as being the direct ancestor of the ‘Romance’ languages in Europe and the idiom of Rome and its church as an enduring power centre. Latin was accordingly long retained for use by the church, state, and law, and by academic studies in fields antedating the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’ of our own times. By the account back in I.41, the practices of social inequality matched a theory of linguistic inequality asserting the superiority of classical languages, and of the high cultures they represented, over local languages and popular cultures. Ordinary people with no Latin were excluded from power, unable to sustain public discussion and negotiation or to advocate social inclusion and equality. Similarly, they were excluded from access to knowledge by a mode of education where Latin was the medium of instruction and scholarship. Primacy was given to Latin grammar as a subject matter, which bequeathed us the tradition of Britain’s ‘grammar schools’ right up into recent times (my emphasis):
[12] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘grammar’ meant Latin grammar. For Bishop William Wykeham, in the foundation charter of his College at Winchester, it was ‘the foundation, gate, and source of all the other liberal arts.’ (James Ball)5
[13] Grammar schools were most proud of helping boys to win awards at Oxford or Cambridge, urging ever-growing numbers of them successfully through public exami-nations, encouraging that sense of discipline and order. (Harry Judge)6
The notion that gifted intellectuals are identified or even fostered by studying ‘grammar’ seems embedded in British folk-wisdom.
9. Ironically perhaps, the shift into ‘modern’ culture was animated by the ostensible ‘renaissance’ (rebirth) of ‘ancient’ culture. From the 15th and 16th centuries onward, though in some regions much later, administration, trade, colonisation, and technology gathered momentum and stimulated the moderni - sation and diversification of European societies and of their methods of production and distribution. These trends favoured wider social inclusion and the displacement the ‘classical languages’ by the ‘modern languages’. To be sure, usage was still uncertain and perplexed some newly included groups, such as recently created aristocrats, the rising bourgeoisie, and successful immigrants. A contingent of ‘experts’ arose to dispense advice on usage, initiating an obdurate prescriptive tradition that has survived until this very day.
10. Even more ironically, then, these ‘modern languages’ were deemed to need ‘cultivation’ by analogy to the classical languages, especially if, like French, they descended from Latin. So theoretical varieties of the modern languages were duly reconstructed from the top down on extrinsic criteria of authentic or supposed resemblances to ancient languages that had themselves become partially theoretical, as I remarked in II.5-8. And due to its apparent formality, traditional grammar proved more amenable here than did rhetoric and poetics (cf. II.7).
11. By a further analogy, the theory of ‘cultivated language’ ran distinctly ahead of the practice in the modern languages too. The practices closest to the theory were achieved by highly ‘educated’ writers whose works were solemnly admitted to a ‘canon’ of the (aptly named) ‘classics’. Some consciously modelled their style on works in the ‘classical languages’, e,g., French dramas of the 17th century, or epic poems influenced by the Aeneid (VI.10.8.2). The new ‘classics’ in turn set standards for those who aspired to ‘high culture’ as a means or symbol of power.
12. Still, these approaches to the study of language have oscillated between prescriptive (how the language should be used) and descriptive (how the language was used by powerful or educated people). These two approaches combine uneasily if the prescribing implies the language is often not used as it ought to be; and so theory again runs ahead of practice, except perhaps for people who self-consciously aspire to power or, like governesses, must communicate with powerful people.
13. The term language guardians can cover whoever holds the theory that language needs to be purified and protected from usages variously derided as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘ignorant’, ‘vulgar’, and so on. Their central practices are to promulgate rules of two complementary types: to prescribe ‘good’ usage (like the ‘prescrip-tion’ from a doctor) and to proscribe ‘bad usage’ (like the ‘proscription’ of a heresy). And here again, grammar has proven the most effective implement, being the most complex and least controllable factor in language (cf. II.7, 10).
14. The sustaining ideology might be called purism, advocating a crusade to ‘purify’ language. Historically, its most influential institution in the world has been the redoubtable Académie Française, whose founding statutes of 1634 declared its own theory: to ‘give explicit rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.7 The Académie’s proposals for reference works are an allegory of how far in historical time theory can run ahead of practice. Its ‘dictionary’ was published after 60 years (in 1694);8 its ‘grammar’ after 298 years (in 1932); and its ‘rhetoric’ so far not at all. In 1998, a website9 was opened which gives advice on the French language and extols its membership of ‘immortals’, who ‘offer a faithful image of the talent, intelligence, culture, and literary and scientific imagination upon which the genius of France is founded’. ‘Their moral authority in matters of language is rooted in usages, traditions, pomp’[and ceremony?][= ‘faste’] (my translation).
15. The moralising overtones of purism are at times egregious. A panel of authors and editors,10 when asked to judge the use of the Adverb ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘it would hoped that…’, gave these responses: [14] It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.
[15] I have sworn eternal war on the bastard adverb. [16] This is one that makes me physically ill.
[17] an abomination, and its adherents should be lynched.
Grammatically, this ‘hopefully’ shares the form and function of fully accepted Adverbs like ‘fortunately’ or ‘happily’ — expressing the speaker’s attitude about the future — and so cannot be an ‘error’. I find it attested both in casual speech[18] and in formal writing[19]:
[18] ‘That’s really all you could ever ask for, isn’t it, a long and healthy life? — And hopefully, a happy one too.’ (Denise Bulger in the Liverpool Daily Post)
[19] Hopefully, if the management information system in an organization is one that reflects control and accountability,[…] then the accounting information thereby generated should demonstrate the attainment of value for money from public services.11
Those self-righteous authors who ‘swore eternal war’ and called for ‘lynchings’ had better stockpile weapons and rope for a long campaign.
16. Ferocious responses like[14-17] are so far beyond all proportion and reason as to signal acute social stress being displaced onto spurious conflicts among language varieties. Right-wing ‘economic policies’ like Thatcherism and Reaganism, have left behind an underemployed or unemployed class of citizens whose de facto exclusion can be tied to their language varieties and to their exclusion from language study, even portending social problems like ‘hooliganism’:
[20] Norman Tebbit, later Chairman of the Conservative Party, claimed that the decline in the teaching of grammar had led directly to the rise in football hooliganism. Correct grammar was seen by him as part of the structures of authority, such as respect for elders, for standards of cleanliness, for discipline in schools… (Brian Cox)12
Ominously, this Tory tall-tale would cast us English teachers as conspirators abetting public violence. Still, I love to imagine what football hooligans would do with Lord Tebbit if he sternly confronted them to administer grammar lessons.
17. Historically, the prescriptivism and purism of language guardians originated as a pre-modern project, which must grow more irrational and reactionary with the passage of time. Language guardians unleash the confrontational right-wing discourse I shall call ‘flakspeak’ (VI.26f), with smears like ‘illiterate’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘bastard’. Yet strong motives sustain their campaign. It exploits the aspiration or at least subservience to power, which, as I said, can require studious conformity with prescriptive and proscriptive rules (II.13). On a deeper level of awareness, the campaign resonates among groups who feel anxious or threatened by modernisation at large. They justly view language and usage as sensitive barometers of variation and change, and unjustly attack certain usages to release resentment against groups who are in tune with new trends, mainly the youth, or against groups who are to be targeted for exclusion, mainly minorities and immigrants.
18. And most importantly, dispensing advice about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ usage remains a gigantic and lucrative business; and nowhere better than for English, with its immense and diverse population of speakers, its voracious borrowing from other languages, and its key value as the main medium of ‘global modernisation’. Since the 16th century, but with real intensity since the latter 18th century, English speakers aspiring to social status, refinement, and ‘correct’ usage have been regaled with edifying reference works, some bearing quaint, picturesque titles, such as:
[21] A Dictionary Interpreting all such Hard Words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgic[Dutch?], British[Celtic?], or Saxon as are now used in our refined English Tongue (1656)
[22] The young lady’s accidence; or, A short and easy introduction to English grammar designed, principally, for the use of the fair sex (1799)
Even today, our societies are riddled with language guardians — authors, clerics, grammarians, academics, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and schoolteachers, along with ordinary citizens who upbraid their children, sneer at their neighbours, or write indignant Letters to the Editor of the Times. They sport no formal qualifications, but only the conviction that their own variety of the language is the best model for everybody (cf. II.32, 87). They prey on the social insecurities of the public to sell handbooks on ‘errors’ with alarmist titles, the peak so far in sheer quantity and effrontery being 1001 Pitfalls in English Grammar.13 Their right-wing crusade is a discordant counterpoint to the untrammelled tonalities of contemporary conversation, like a turgid gush of tenacious and embarrassing anachronisms.
19. To drum up public demand, language guardians expediently prescribe what most people do not say (like ‘if I were he’) and proscribe what most people do say (like ‘hopefully’). Since the rules need not represent actual usage, anyone can freely invent them, and apparently no one can entirely get rid of them. Some advice is so wrong-headed you have to wonder why anyone ever believed it, such as ‘never begin a sentence with “And” or “But”‘, which survives in the ‘grammar checker’ of Microsoft Word 2000, as does (need I say?) the ban on ‘hopefully’. For the record, my own British and American Writers Corpus (hereafter BAWC), now at some 65 million words, shows 29,973 Sentences beginning with ‘And’, e.g.[23]; and 49,917 with ‘But’, e.g.[24]; the figures I find in the BNC at 100 million words are 80,101 for ‘And’ and 102,454 for ‘But’. ‘But’ is more frequent because its function of introducing contrary content encourages a division between Sentences.
[23] Little of beauty has America given the world[…]; the human spirit[…] has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song — the rhythmic cry of the slave — stands to-day as the sole American music. (Souls)bawc
[24] Analogy would lead me to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. (Origin)bawc
Mercifully, the rule is not much in favour nowadays among the Internet sites warring against ‘errors’ in English; purist language guardians mistrust the Internet anyway (see[170] in II.183). We still find some moderate claims about the usages being ‘less formal’[25].
[25] Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there is no reason not to begin a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and’; in fact, these words often make a sentence more forceful and graceful.[Yet doing so] does make your writing less formal (Jack Lynch, ‘Grammar and Style Notes’)www
I find Milton’s Areopagitica, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom.
20. Just because the ‘rules’ don’t need to represent actual usage, they manifest disturbing inconsistency and variation among the language guardians. Ironically, avowed defenders of the ‘standards’ of the language may patently disagree about what those ‘standards’ might be. School pupils are hardly edified by facing fresh batches of ‘rules’ from English teachers, whose collective inclination to mark ‘errors’ for obscure reasons can reach daunting intensities.14 This unsettling situation acutely endangers the credibility not just of the guardians but of English teachers in general. The most enduring effect is to convince ordinary speakers that, for reasons they don’t understand, their own usage is ‘not good English’ — this too in fine collusion with the hidden curriculum (cf. I.56).
21. The genuine motors of contested usages are the variation or change that are natural, indeed inevitable, processes in the life of a language, which is always in the process of being confirmed and constituted by discourse (I.36). Alternate usages co-exist; one displaces another; an innovation gains popularity; new ideas must be expressed; and in-groups display their solidarity:
[26] When certain groups want to create an identity, they create their own language.[…] Research carried out by Dr Tony McEnery — in conjunction with the website Student World — found that UK campuses have a language of their own,[offering] words for getting drunk,[such as] ‘trollied, klangered, bazeracked, wombled’;[…] and for sex, like ‘lancing, jousting, getting jiggy with it, parking your bus, having a boff’. (Student slang leaves parents dazed, BBC World News)
The evolution of such a system cannot be controlled, let alone purified, by the language guardians even if they were granted all the power of the state and its institutions — an authority no society seems eager to confer.
22. So the purist crusade cannot succeed, as the history of English has abundantly proven. But the guardians probably don’t expect to win. Their deeper agenda is rather to empower themselves and disempower others whose social or educational status, as reflected in their usage, offers a pretext for denying them equal rights and opportunities, especially to youth, minorities, and immigrants (II.17). This right-wing agenda favours not accurate, workable rules you can easily follow, but artificial, troublesome rules you must struggle to follow.
23. If the pre-modern agenda of prescriptivism seems outmoded in modern societies shaped by democracy, it must seem far more so in post-modern societies shaped by multilingualism and multiculturalism. Once again ironically, the more the inclusive theory of democracy gets put into practice to accommodate rising diversity, the more likely it becomes that social exclusion will be practiced on the pretext of languages or language varieties as surrogates for gender, race, religion, or tribe (I.42) — whilst producing ominously similar outcomes.
24. These outcomes markedly distinguish the exclusive projects of prescriptivism and purism from the inclusive projects of ecologism. The problems ecologists see in language and discourse are not in isolated usages being ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘ignorant’, or ‘vulgar’ (cf. II.13, 15), but in selections and combinations of usages not being genuinely efficient, effective, or appropriate, though mostly correct or grammatical by conventional norms (cf. II.130). Our own advice is not prescriptive in the mode of traditional grammar (‘you must say it this way and not that way’), but more consultative in the mode of traditional rhetoric (‘if you want that effect or emphasis, you can try saying it this way’) (II.134, 206). Our agenda faces the supplementary challenge of deflecting the counter-productive impact of
prescriptivism that has undermined so many people’s confidence in own abilities to use their language competently and creatively — another waste of human potential (I.56, 62).
II.B. Descriptive studies of language: philology
25. Descriptivism can designate an approach for ‘describing’ how a language or variety is actually used. A ‘language’ is defined here as the system shared within a community of native speakers and (less importantly) writers. Ideologically, descriptivism resonates with realism, which holds that the real and concrete is more valid or true than the ideal and abstract, and is thus the diametrical antithesis of prescriptivism resonating with idealism (cf. II.4). Historically, it originated as a modernist project for describing languages in terms of their long-range evolution. As such, the project can relate to partly prescriptive studies of a predominantly historical character, such as the ancient Sanskrit and Arabic studies of sacred texts (II.6); in fact, Sanskrit led philology to uncover the family relationship between the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Germanic’ languages (II.27).15 Yet far too little data survives of the general usage contemporary with those early studies to judge how far they were also descriptive. Plausibly, sacred texts