The never-ending battle between advocates of the prescriptive and descriptive schools of language was touched off in the last few weeks, starting with a May 14 article in The New Yorker titled “The English Wars”, written by the magazine’s dance critic Joan Acocella. Weighing in with Acocella on the side of the prescriptive approach was lecturer Ryan Bloom, English, who in a May 29 blog post on The New Yorker‘s website noted one contradiction in particular on the part of many descriptivists:
“When it comes time for them to write their books and articles and give their speeches about the evil, élitist, racist, wrongheadedness of forcing the ‘rules’ on the masses, they always do so in flawless, prescriptive English. Ensconced behind a mask of noble ends, something obscenely disingenuous is happening here. How easy it is for a person who is already part of the linguistic élite to tell others who are not that they don’t need to be,” he wrote.
The response from many on the opposing side was swift, with Harvard psychologist/linguist Steven Pinker writing in to the online magazine Slate that “most writers who have given serious thought to language are neither kind of iptivist”, while also stating that “[t]he fact that many prescriptive rules are worth keeping does not imply that every pet peeve, bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss Grundy’s classroom is worth keeping. Many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons, impede clear and graceful prose, and have been flouted by English’s greatest writers for centuries.”
