# A linguist's considered view on the prescriptive vs. descriptive controversy **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [June 17, 2025, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735 "2025-06-17T00:47:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/61 "2025-06-19T16:26:41Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > There’s nothing wrong with using language in a particular way, it’s the expectation that any particular way is inherently better or worse than any other. I teach my kids that there are three major uses of language: 1. Expression, where you’re singing your magnificent yawp into the universe. Or you’re talking to yourself, or making notes to yourself, or doodling, or whatever. Any criticism _whatsoever_ of how you use language here is ridiculous (except if someone’s like HEY SHADDAP I’M TRYIN TA SLEEP which is legit). 2. Communication, where you’re trying to move thoughts from your head to someone else’s. The criticism here is legit to the extent that you’ve failed to communicate those thoughts effectively to your intended audience (which can include “I got what you’re saying, but there was this thing about your communication that I found so distracting that I couldn’t pay much attention to it”). However, sometimes the communication breakdown happens primarily in the audience, so the criticism, while legit, might be misplaced. 3. Beauty, where you’re trying to elicit an emotional response with your words. Very similar to communication, except that legit criticism centers on whether you effectively elicited the emotional response from your intended audience. If I fail to communicate, or elicit the emotional response, it’s fair to say that my use of language was inherently worse than a use that successfully achieved the intended effect. But that’s not what prescriptivists do. They often claim it’s what they’re doing, but it almost never is. My go-to question for prescriptivists: “Yes or no: did you not get taught grammar as a child?” This is a very common construction in English, and everyone knows that it’s awful, that a “yes” or “no” answer is confusing. Any prescriptivist who genuinely cares about clarity of communication would treat the negative question as public enemy number one. But I’ve yet to hear a prescriptivist rail against this target. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/62 "2025-06-19T19:45:10Z")
My eleven-year-old often gets confused by this kind of sentence, and I should probably stop using it myself. For example, I’ll ask, “You didn’t do your homework?” and she’ll respond “No,” meaning she did do it. Logically, she’s negating my incorrect assumption—but I’m expecting “no” to mean “you’re right, I didn’t do it,” not the opposite. These types of negative polar questions, I agree, are far more annoying than the typical prescriptivist bugaboos. And I ought to stop using them, as they truly are confusing. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/63 "2025-06-19T20:22:07Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > If I fail to communicate, or elicit the emotional response, it’s fair to say that my use of language was inherently worse than a use that successfully achieved the intended effect. I was tempted to push back against @Pleonast’s claim that no particular way of using language is inherently better or worse than any other, but you did so much better than I would have. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/64 "2025-06-19T20:27:53Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > These types of negative polar questions, I agree, are far more annoying than the typical prescriptivist bugaboos. And I ought to stop using them, as they truly are confusing. The weird thing is that, while it would be undeniably useful to have a good way to answer these type of negative questions, there _used_ to be a way to do it in English: “Yes” and “No” were a way to answer negative questions, whereas “Yea” and “Nay” were used to answer positive questions. But apparently by the time of Early Modern English, people apparently didn’t feel like the distinction was useful anymore because both of these started to be used for both types of questions. > **[Yes and no | The Early English four-form system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_four-form_system)** > > While Modern English has a two-form system of yes and no for affirmatives and negatives, earlier forms of English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it. > 1.Will they not go? — Yes, they will. | > 2.Will they not go? — No, they will not. | > 3.Will they go? — Yea, they will. | > 4.Will they go? — Nay, they will not. This is illustrated by the ... ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/65 "2025-06-19T21:39:06Z")
Likewise, English used to have a “dual” form - for indicating the two people talking and no one else (a “we” that means only two folks, not a larger “we”) > **[Dual (grammatical number)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number))** > > Dual (abbreviated DU) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages. > The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European and persisted in many of its descendants, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, which ... Interestingly, some English dialects have reinvented that form. (a grammatical form that English could really use is a way of distinguishing generic “you” from specific “you” - so you can say “Studying math is good for your brain” (meaning generic “you”) without inadvertently insulting someone)). ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/66 "2025-06-19T21:45:02Z")
Back in the 1960s and 1970s a series of writers who had no training in linguistics started writing books about proper usage. The news personality Edwin Newman and the critic John Simon put out highly praised books that can only be described as “shrieking exhortations about the evils of ~~prescriptivism~~ descriptivism”. King of the pack (all men, of course) starting around 1980 was William Safire, whose weekly “On Language” column in the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_ was enormously popular and enormously influential. He started as a explicator of political terminology, but took questions from readers who mostly cared about grammar and usage. He knew there was a difference, but not much more, and leaned heavily toward prescriptivism at first. Fortunately, he developed a cadre of actual linguist correspondents who schooled him on his errors. Over time, to his credit, he became increasingly looser in his proclamations. No more “the one best way,” as in older engineering. The book that set me straight, though, was also published in 1980. _American Tongue and Cheek: A Populist Guide to Our Language was by Jim Quinn_, a non-linguist food columnist. He used a flensing knife to tear the fatuous off Newman and Simon and other “authorities.” The real breakthrough appeared about a decade later, when the incredibly prolific British linguist David Crystal turned from writing academic tomes (starting with _Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English_ when he was 23!) to popular books covering every aspect of how language works. The properly descriptivist _Who Cares About English Usage?_ appeared in 1984. I can’t remember anyone carping about his writing, but the other five books of his I own, mostly from Cambridge, besides being very good and readable, were non-controversial overviews of the total language. Pinker followed a few years later. I believe - @Johanna can correct me - that most of the important books on style and usage have continued to be written by actual linguists. The one huge exception was the weirdly bestselling _Eats, Shoots, and Leaves_ by Lynne Truss. The American edition was reprinted word for word from the original British edition and some of its advice simply was not appropriate for this country. It went to #1 anyway. Nevertheless, punctuation is a small subset of usage. Cambridge Ph.D. Guy Deutscher wrote an amazing deep look at the history of words used as intensifiers in _The Unfolding of Language_. Many common English words include former separate intensifiers as morphemes; undoubtedly this will continue and future speakers will not even recognize “literally” as anything other, maybe on the order of abso-fucking-lutely. There’s a great recent book that reveals how spoken English especially has turned fuck and its derivatives into a new class of words that no longer conform to the basics of English grammar. Fucking as an intensifier has become so common it might not be obscene in a few more years. I’m hoping the book isn’t McWhorter’s _Nine Dirty Words_. I thought it was _The F-Word_ but that’s a different work. Can anyone prompt my memory? The latest book I remember reading was _Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words_ by the uber-permissive Anne Curzon, who is farther out on the scale than I am. She’s never met a locution she doesn’t support. And she has particular hatred for the more presciptionist _Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style_, which is funny since Benjamin Dreyer enthusiastically blurbed her book. For credentials, Curzan is the Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where she also currently serves as the dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I’m having fun, but I hope I’m making a serious point. Usage and/or style guides have a place. Many people lack confidence in their writing skills and want to have some firm “rules” to latch onto, probably because American education for most of the 20th century relied on teachers creating rules that were broken only at a student’s peril. Theodore Bernstein, head copyeditor of the _New York Times_, wrote a series of books based on the paper’s style guide that were lighter in tone than Newman or Simon. One of them was titled _Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins_, Miss Thistlebottom being the archetypal old mail English teacher who rapped students’ knuckles if they constructed a sentence using one of pet peeves. He tried not to be that old-fashioned, but his 1971 advice would appear hopelessly outdated and pedantic today. (From memory: Balding: there is no such word as balding; use baldish instead.) Strunk and White remains a perennial seller not because it is perfect but because it is short and helpful, all that most people need. Please remember that Strunk wrote it because of its dire need by his freshman English students at Cornell. In 1918. English has changed every year since 1918. English usage has changed every year since 1918. Books about usage need to change every year as well. Guides are helpful; rules are not. Nor is formal written language all there is to English. Almost nobody who reads these books are writing formal English. English, any and every language, as Crystal did such a good job at elucidating, is composed of hundreds of overlapping constituent parts. Linguists should be the only ones addressing these, IMO; too much technical knowledge is needed. Not every professional is equally good at popularizing. I’ve thrown at the wall too many books by experts in their field that are nigh unreadable. As a popular and non-expert writer I can’t stress too highly (a phrase discouraged by many style guides) that popular works are not what experts do for a living. They are a gift to people who are not also experts in the field. No book of words can convey quantum mechanics. No book by Lynne Truss can replace a thousand-page tome on English grammar. Nevertheless, popular works are critical to what is usually called an educated populace. I find some rock rockstars unlistenable, but I wouldn’t want to do without the breed. ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/67 "2025-06-19T21:49:19Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > I teach grammar to my third graders, and I teach them that the science of language is very different from what’s often called grammar, which is much closer to etiquette. One of my favorite things to do is to ask them to use wrong grammar, and then to analyze their sentence. So they’ll pause, think really hard, and say something like, “Me want…that me eat pizza!” and I’ll explain that they used a subject, a verb, and a subordinate clause as a direct object, all following the rules of English grammar. > > It’s one of my favorite things to teach. I deeply, deeply want to sit in on one of your classes where you go through that exercise. That sounds AMAZING. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/68 "2025-06-19T22:55:14Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > (a grammatical form that English could really use is a way of distinguishing generic “you” from specific “you” - so you can say “Studying math is good for your brain” (meaning generic “you”) without inadvertently insulting someone)). English has that. I use it fairly frequently here. > Studying math is good for one. Yes, even for you, Andy. > > One could choose to routinely accept crap from one’s kids, but one would be better served to be more assertive about kids showing proper respect for their parents. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/69 "2025-06-19T22:57:42Z")
“One” works, but there are cases where it seems unnatural to me, anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/70 "2025-06-19T22:57:44Z")
Great post, thanks! Of all the books you listed, I think _The Unfolding of Language_ is the best book of its kind I’ve ever read. It’s like a Euclid’s _Elements_ of linguistics, starting from the most basic level and building systematically up from there. Also, it’s very readable but it never dumbs down the subject. I’d like to follow up on the later ones you listed. I’m so old, I cut my teeth on Mario Pei growing up as a junior linguist-in-the-making. As Roland Deschain would say to Mario Pei now, “The world has moved on.” ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/71 "2025-06-19T23:37:52Z")
I assure you I started on Mario Pei as well. Maybe earlier. I’ve always been besotted with words. They never grow old or fail to seize my mind. Age only improves them, in fact. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2025, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/72 "2025-06-19T23:43:37Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Strunk and White remains a perennial seller not because it is perfect but because it is short and helpful, all that most people need. Please remember that Strunk wrote it because of its dire need by his freshman English students at Cornell. In 1918. My favorite bit of trivia about **The Elements of Style** : at some point between editions, the how-not-to-do-it example under the heading “Do not affect a breezy manner” was updated with new “breezy” slang. Old version: > Well, chums, here I am again with my bagful of dirt about your disorderly classmates, after spending a helluva weekend in N’Yawk trying to view the Columbia game from behind two bumbershoots and a glazed cornea. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few chirce nuggets my way? New version: > Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple trying to catch the Columbia hoops tilt and then a cab-ride from hell through the West Side casbah. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few primo items this way? ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/73 "2025-06-20T01:05:56Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > My go-to question for prescriptivists: “Yes or no: did you not get taught grammar as a child?” This is a very common construction in English, and everyone knows that it’s awful, that a “yes” or “no” answer is confusing. Any prescriptivist who genuinely cares about clarity of communication would treat the negative question as public enemy number one. But I’ve yet to hear a prescriptivist rail against this target. Let me take a stab at answering that question since this subtopic seems to be on a roll despite your expressed desire not to re-litigate this whole business I’m not sure exactly what you think a “prescriptivist” is, but you seem to have constructed a caricature against which to direct your ire, something like a 19th century schoolmaster in a one-room schoolhouse drilling into his hapless menagerie the need for strict conformance to archaic rules of grammar that are often as useless as they are inexplicable. The reality is that many people who’ve been tarred with that brush are simply trying to promote better communication through better literacy, as well as hopefully promoting greater style and elegance in language both in service of that cause and in the interest of aesthetics in its own right. In a nation where (as I said in another thread) around 56% of adult Americans fall below Level 3 in literary competence, meaning that they’re effectively partially illiterate, and where half of American adults cannot read at a Grade 8 level, improving literacy seems like a noble and necessary initiative. So why aren’t so-called “prescriptivists” railing against this sort of terrible construction? This seems like something of a disingenuous question. Maybe it’s because they haven’t been asked. Did anyone ever ask William Safire about it? These sorts of confusingly constructed questions should be right in the crosshairs of anyone seeking clearer communication. But anyone writing an article or book criticizing such usage would likely be condemned as a crusading “prescriptivist”. After all, don’t we all have “innate language skills”? ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/74 "2025-06-20T01:19:03Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > > [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > > > If I fail to communicate, or elicit the emotional response, it’s fair to say that my use of language was inherently worse than a use that successfully achieved the intended effect. > > I was tempted to push back against @Pleonast’s claim that no particular way of using language is inherently better or worse than any other, but you did so much better than I would have. My use of “inherent” is in opposition to “situational”. An expression could be better or worse in a particular situation, but that doesn’t imply any inherent quality. Too often prescriptivists think that descriptivists are in favor of anything goes. But descriptivists aren’t even thinking about language in terms of what is allowed or better or any other judgements. Descriptivists are looking for what the usages actually are and what the patterns of usage are. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/75 "2025-06-20T01:54:03Z")
I have a late collection of essays from Mario Pei, _The Many Hues of English_. It reprints a 1964 essay, “A Loss for Words.” It was one of the seeming thousands of protests against the descriptiveness of Webster’s Third. > “Usage” sounds good, but whose is the usage? That of those who know how to use usage, or that of those who don’t? For language, too, is a skill. We don’t allow reckless driving. Why must we allow reckless language? Even the examples he cites have hardly changed in 21st century jeremiads. Three startling conclusions follow. 1) large numbers of people still use those incorrect usages; 2) they are still considered incorrect; 3) the language has not been corrupted by them even after 60 years. Phew! ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/76 "2025-06-20T05:07:19Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Sometimes a semantic range is narrowed. Like “hound” originally meant all dogs. Now the semantic range of hound has narrowed to mean only certain types of dogs. The etymology of the word “dog” is obscure to linguists. The best they can come up with is to suggest similar-sounding West Germanic roots with meanings like ‘stocky’ or ‘tough’. But me? When I see an etymology that can’t be traced, I attribute it to slang. Yes, slang has always been part of language, even in ancient times, coining new words with obscure origins. Imagine a conversation in Anglo-Saxon days: —By my troth, man, thou art such a… dogge. —What’s a “dogge”? —Knowest thou Æthelfrith’s hound yonder? —Aye, and a fell wight it is. —Well, like that. —So Æthelfrith’s hound is a “dogge,” too? —Soothlike, why not? ---
**Author:** ![Xocomil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xocomil/32/14927_2.png) [@Xocomil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xocomil)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/77 "2025-06-20T05:33:26Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > Too often prescriptivists think that descriptivists are in favor of anything goes. But descriptivists aren’t even thinking about language in terms of what is allowed or better or any other judgements. Descriptivists are looking for what the usages actually are and what the patterns of usage are. I can’t fathom not understanding this. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/78 "2025-06-20T10:50:34Z")
> [@CairoCarol](#): > > I deeply, deeply want to sit in on one of your classes where you go through that exercise. That sounds AMAZING. You’re very kind! [Here’s the slide show I use](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GcObopdKhybp-bSqX4YAnqlV3YNvcpx357eZ3amzUbo/edit?usp=sharing). > [@wolfpup](#): > > I’m not sure exactly what you think a “prescriptivist” is, but you seem to have constructed a caricature against which to direct your ire I’m not especially interested in your analysis here, but I will say that I think I’m not the one in this circumstance creating a caricature. Edit: > [@wolfpup](#): > > So why aren’t so-called “prescriptivists” railing against this sort of terrible construction? This seems like something of a disingenuous question. Maybe it’s because they haven’t been asked. If prescriptivists waited to be asked, I’d be satisfied. > [@Pleonast](#): > > My use of “inherent” is in opposition to “situational”. An expression could be better or worse in a particular situation, but that doesn’t imply any inherent quality. > > Too often prescriptivists think that descriptivists are in favor of anything goes. But descriptivists aren’t even thinking about language in terms of what is allowed or better or any other judgements. Descriptivists are looking for what the usages actually are and what the patterns of usage are. 100% agreed. I wasn’t really trying to refute you, but to head off the idea that descriptivism means “anything goes.” “Situational” is a good way to describe it. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/79 "2025-06-20T15:23:34Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > 100% agreed. I wasn’t really trying to refute you, but to head off the idea that descriptivism means “anything goes.” “Situational” is a good way to describe it. Thanks for the clarity. I didn’t think you were disagreeing with me, but @Thudlow_Boink seemed to be misunderstanding our points. ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2025, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735/80 "2025-06-20T16:24:26Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > You’re very kind! [Here’s the slide show I use](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GcObopdKhybp-bSqX4YAnqlV3YNvcpx357eZ3amzUbo/edit?usp=sharing). That’s for THIRD graders? Dammit, I wish you’d been _my_ third-grade teacher. We didn’t do anything remotely so wonderful in my third grade class. That slide deck is captivating. I can only imagine how engaging it must be when presented live. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-linguists-considered-view-on-the-prescriptive-vs-descriptive-controversy/1019735.md?page=5)