Out of curiosity, when was the last time in your academic career when you were actually taught any sort of grammar like that? I’m guessing it wasn’t sixth or seventh grade when most of us were last exposed to that sort of thing.
In my opinion, that’s probably the biggest reason for this kind of thing- people are taught a lot of this stuff early in life, and they make indifferent grades on it, and then never see it again. And we already know that most people don’t read very much or very often, so they are unlikely to learn grammar by osmosis by repeatedly seeing things written correctly over the subsequent decades.
Let’s say someone gets to 45 and has been talking in their particular vernacular their entire life, and for some reason, they’re required to write several sentences out that aren’t in texting lingo or their usual semi-literate Facebook posts or emails. How likely is it that they’ll remember something about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses from a class they made a C in during seventh grade back in 1985?
Again, those are all excellent points that I don’t dispute, except that I would regard the OED and its lesser equivalents as a lot more than just “useful”.
I think we all recognize that these sorts of reference works have two different important purposes that in a sense are almost diametrically opposed. The first is to be the definitive record of the present language – what words mean, how they are connected to express ideas, the rules of usage, etc. This is the prescriptive element. The second is to track how the language is evolving – the new words that arise and the new meanings for old words, new expressions and usages, etc. This is the descriptive element. And they’re both important. No one disputes that.
Sure, I tend to lean prescriptivist, but I fully recognize that language evolves, that a language used by large populations distributed over broad geographies tends to develop dialects, and that dialects have a standing in their own right and deserve to be documented and studied, and all the other things that descriptivist-leaning observers are always going on about, as if no one else was aware of it. There are not two “sides” here but merely a continuum, and differing opinions on where we should draw the line on what constitutes correct vs. incorrect usage. As LSLGuy rightly points out, and as I did earlier, too, there is a crucial purpose to prescriptive formalisms, and that is clarity of communication. Linguists do tend to lean descriptivist, and they may be fascinated by things like local dialects, but most will not hesitate to slam stupid and ignorant usage, especially when it’s contrived and pretentious like many pronouncements of officialdom and contemporary business-speak.
The technical description given by the OED may use terms that are unfamiliar to many, but it’s not the technical terminology that’s important but the principle it conveys, a principle that I think is innately recognized by most native English speakers. To take my example sentence, “The cars, that were well cared for, were in good condition after ten years”, to my ear this is intensely jarring and just screams “what the hell are those commas doing there?” Or if the person is trying to convey the idea that someone had a bunch of cars and cared well for all of them, why the hell is he using “that” instead of “which”?"
Perhaps I’m wrong, but surely it’s not just me that recognizes this kind of jarring anomaly without even necessarily being able to explain why it’s wrong without looking it up. And if you do look it up, there are dictionaries and grammar guides all over teh Interwebs that are pretty much consistent on these particular usage rules, so it’s hardly obscure.
'Til the stars fall from the sky. It’s a contraction.
I will have you know that each and every one of my superfluous commas is there for a reason: as an indication of a slight pause between clauses. Semicolons go between independent clauses when a full stop (period) seems excessive, and indicate a longer pause than a comma. Just be glad I don’t use the Victorian colon that indicates a pause longer than a semicolon but shorter than a period. These are all handy when you read to your family around the fireplace.
Technically, that should be “No, it isn’t,” but as the clauses are short I’ll let it ride. It is a contraction that some lazy layabouts used so often that some frustrated prescriptivists gave up fighting it, but not me.
People can be foggy in any language and clear in any language, or dialect thereof.
If there’s a lack of clarity between two people due to them not sharing a common dialect/language, why do we have to insist that only one of them is speaking correctly? That is what I’m arguing against here: There’s nothing inherently better or worse about how I talk, how you talk, how someone from Arkansas talks, how someone from East St. Louis talks, or how someone from Bridgeport, CT, talks.
This isn’t about egalitarianism per se, just about being factually correct when we talk about language. The fact egalitarianism falls out of that correctness tells you something rather interesting about “ranking” different dialects.
Languages all seem to find the same amount of complexity, they just arrange it in different ways. For example, deaf children in Nicaragua were taught a very simple sign language by teachers who thought they’d therefore have to learn to lip-read. Nope. The children added complexity to their language until it was complex enough to be a real language for day-to-day use.
Similarly, mature languages don’t lose complexity, they just shuffle it around to different areas: English, in losing its case markers, picked up a much more analytic grammar, which means we express more information about how a word is used by putting it different places in a sentence. This is invisible to English speakers for much the same reason water is invisible to fish; the point is, all the same complexity is there, it’s just carried in a different place (word ordering instead of case marking).
The peever’s rules are frequently wrong, and I daresay the actual linguist’s rules are sometimes wrong or, at least, incomplete, but at least the linguist is willing to look at how the language is used to improve their grammatical rules.
Yes, I’m willing to agree to what you said, and I think the answer has even been mentioned in this thread already: Hypercorrection, or applying a rule handed down from teachers or parents more broadly than intended. Wikipedia has a nice summary:
Of course, us mean nasty descriptivists have to bring evidence into the mix and spoil everyone’s fun:
To the extent this is useful, it’s descriptive. There’s no need for the OED to degenerate into a style guide, and all of its notes on style should be excised in the name of linguistic accuracy.
I dispute that the role of style guide has any place in the OED’s mission, but if it helps them sell books to the peevers, so be it.
What you apparently aren’t aware of is that people communicate perfectly well without rules some nutball made up in the Nineteenth Century based on flatus and nothing. With most of the peevers’ rules, it isn’t so much about language changing as about them attempting to change the language and, largely, failing, except in a very artificial dialect they’re convinced is the only correct way of speaking.
The soupçon of racism inherent in ranking regional dialects is just the cherry on the sundae.
As I said, people are unclear in every dialect, because people are sometimes unclear, period. Dialect has absolutely nothing to do with clarity, and I thought I already said that I wasn’t going to let you smuggle in that premise.
The people who answer such questions aren’t the people who go into the whole affair convinced that one dialect (which may or may not exist in its fullest imagined form) is correct and everyone else is speaking inherently unclear mush.
Then I suggest you do not watch survivor. I say this only half seriously. There must be a style mis-usage manual that they pass out before every season. I’m not kidding, they are immune to saying me.
wolfpup, I’m a little astonished that you don’t seem to know what prescriptivism & descriptivism mean.
Descriptivism: a dialect as it is actually spoken –> empirical rules and semantics of that dialect. Descriptivism is synonymous with linguistics: it is science.
Prescriptivism: arbitrary rules and arbitrary semantics –> telling people how to speak. There are no prescriptivist linguists, because prescriptivism is (at best) sound & practical style advice or (at worst) sheer nonsense - but in any event, it is not empirical.
I think that the editors of the OED would be rather offended to learn that you believe they are in any sense setting rules for the purpose of telling people how they should speak. The OED is record of how language is used - an entirely empirical and scientific endeavor. The fact that it may be imperfect - often out of date due to its sheer size - has no bearing on the underlying scientific (descriptivist) approach.
I have no idea what a “prescriptivist dictionary” would even mean. An anthology of favorite peeves?
Heh. There is a way to make an honest prescriptivist dictionary, though: Make a dictionary which defines the meanings of technical terms in a controlled vocabulary, such that the dictionary is the authoritative source of meaning for those words.
Contracts do this sometimes, on a very tiny scale, when they define what specific words will be interpreted to mean in the context of that contract. There’s no room for appeal to any other authority: if you want to change what that word means in that contract, you have to change the contract.
I think I might call that a “glossary”? But in principle, of course - yes, a prescriptivist dictionary is possible. That’s the misconceived way that many people imagine language works in general.
I should have added to my prior post – of course many prescriptivists misuse the OED as a tool to support their misguided ideas, precisely because it’s sometimes out of date, and because many prescriptivist peeves are railing against changes in language.
Regarding the “that” vs. “which” debate, my recent research into this as part of an intensive grammar class suggests that while “that” should only be used for restrictive clauses, “which” can be used for both restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. The idea of “which” being only for non-restrictive clauses is, at best, debated. This link does a nice job of summarizing. In the end, if you are going to be a prescriptivist, you still have the debate of who’s rules are the ultimate authority.