[QUOTE=Randy Seltzer]
So for you, the ideal answer would first explain the prescriptive grammar rule, perhaps explore a different prescriptive grammar rule relating to the question, and finally wrap up with a disclaimer that there is another school of thought out there that would hold the prescriptive grammar rules as void? And since this is the dope, do you think it would be appropriate to include a little gag at the end? Sound good?
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Well… um… yeah. Except I would also describe why the other side has merit rather than JUST the gag. Maybe is I or wrong.
So with many people saying “this is academically ‘official’” piping in and saying “but this has been used forever as well to great **effect” (affect? **One word I get confused on often, sorry) is a good addendum to the information presented. Granted it would probably be better without the arguing but…
[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine.)
When something affects you, it has an effect. That’s how I remember it. Your usage above is correct. My mental block is practise/practice.
Way back in high school, our English teacher told us to use ‘they’ or any other workable (and unambiguous) neutral term, just to avoid grammatically correct, but substantively wrong situations like the classic;
“Man is a species who suckles his young.”
His theory was that language’s primary function is to communicate. If the rules of grammar would cause confusion, then we should respect the information rather than the rules.
Languages obviously have mechanisms that keep them at least partially tethered, but I think you ridiculously overestimate the value of “prescription”. Although I’m not a professional linguist, I do know a few and have conversations with 'em every once in a while. I read some linguistics books, histories of language, usage guides, and I can’t think of even a single clear cut case where prescription has slowed the change of any word or grammatical usage.
I see, in fact, the exact opposite. The very topics that become most heated among the prescriptivists are exactly those that are most irrelevant. I still hear complaints about split-infinitives (standard for centuries), prepositions at the end (standard for centuries), the “singular they” (standard for centuries), or hated new definitions of words (like “hopefully”, the newer and more useful definition of which being standard longer than I’ve been alive), and yet these complaints aren’t even accurate, let alone powerful enough to slow the change of the language. In my experience, all that they’ve slowed down is the fight against ignorance.
At the same time, something quiet that doesn’t get complained about at all, like putting the article before the noun instead of after (“the dog” instead of “dog the”) keeps on chugging along just fine even without the ire of the prescriptivists. So please, if you’re gonna believe this, give it some evidence, because my observations run entirely contrary to yours.
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You have confused prescriptivism in general with pedantry in particular. Certainly on this board, prescriptivism is largely dragged out in support of (or opposition to) some nitpicky point. But more broadly speaking, prescriptivism simply refers to an approach which says, “This is how language should be.” When we are taught how to speak English by our parents and our teachers, that is prescriptivism. And it does serve to slow down linguistic evolution. Layered upon that fundamental prescription of how to speak English “correctly” (according to whoever teaches it to us) is all the rest of the color of the language. Arguments around the fine points of whether or not that coloring and variation is acceptable plead prescriptive versus descriptive approaches. Nevertheless the fundamental tether that keeps a language’s evolution from proceeding so rapidly that too much clarity is lost is a baseline prescription for how English is spoken. Without prescription at its most basic level, you would not be able to read Shakespeare.
[QUOTE=Randy Seltzer]
However, I still disagree. Reread the OP. He doesn’t ask what is “acceptable.” He asks what is “correct.” This, to me, implies he wants a prescriptive rule. I understand that you could interpret it differently, but grammar questions arise pretty regularly on the Dope, and it would be unsatisfying to answer them all with “It’s right if the other guy understands what you mean.”
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Yes, but even in the search for what is “correct” there can be different answers. One person (let’s call him a “traditional grammarian”) would say that “he” is correct because it agrees in number with “student”. Another person (let’s call her a “feminist”) would say that “he” is incorrect because it implies that the student is male. Both are prescriptionists in their own way, but they are prescribing different things for different linguistic and/or social reasons. And even though the majority of the population of English speakers might in fact disagree with what they prescribe, they probably would go on prescribing it,
Most of us are prescriptionists to at least some degree, though what we prescribe will be grounded in part by linguistic reality, and in part what we see as desirable to make speech and writing intelligible and elegant.
[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
When we are taught how to speak English by our parents and our teachers, that is prescriptivism. … Nevertheless the fundamental tether that keeps a language’s evolution from proceeding so rapidly that too much clarity is lost is a baseline prescription for how English is spoken. Without prescription at its most basic level, you would not be able to read Shakespeare.
[/QUOTE]
Thinking that explicit instruction from English teachers/parents/usage guides/whoever plays a vital role in our ability to fluently communicate in our native language is like thinking that explicit training from gym class plays a vital role in our ability to adeptly walk around.
(Also, do you really think the reason we can read Shakespeare more easily than Chaucer more easily than Beowulf is because of increasing amounts of prescriptivism?)
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
Sorry, but until the 70s, “his” in this context was thought to be a gender-neutral antecedent. All style and grammar guides agreed on that point.
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You’re pretty much correct here. “His” was thought to be a gender-neutral possessive pronoun (not the “antecedent”, though, which is what “his” refers back to). And you’re correct again that it was thought to be so by even descriptive linguists.
But they were wrong.
Descriptive linguists make mistakes, too. And before the 70s, it was much more likely for the predominately male profession to make rather large mistakes about gender-neutrality based on their own biases and misconceptions. It wasn’t their fault, of course. They were simply a product of their time. But to quote my own cite:
Unless it is your contention that those sentences and others similarly constructed would’ve been perfectly grammatical before the 1970s, but suddenly became ungrammatical with the advent of the women’s movement, your argument simply doesn’t hold. Add to that Pochacco’s point about nurses and “she”, and the lack of gender-neutrality becomes even more clear. Of course, if you have any real counterexamples to the Cambridge Grammar sentences, and by this I mean examples that were actually used in writing (instead of people in usage manuals commenting about writing), I’d be happy to look at them. But to be honest, I very much doubt that you will.
This is really the greatest problem with understanding language. Even a descriptive grammar is nothing more than an attempt to figure out what’s happening. And that attempt can be wrong. In other words, just because people believed at the time that “his” was gender-neutral doesn’t make it so.
And even if I am wrong in my historical analysis here (I don’t think I am, but I’m not an expert) all of that doesn’t negate my own point that, even we decide to speak “strictly”, “he” is not gender-neutral. Quite the opposite, in fact, the more strictly and precisely we wish to describe English, the more we realize that “he” is nothing of the sort. That you believe it used to be correct would mean that we were speaking “historically”, not “strictly”.
You make an excellent point that many people do want to find out what is “correct” in the most prescriptive way possible. But “correct” as a word is not monopolized by just prescriptivists. I use that very word myself when I’m talking in the most descriptive way possible. Saying “grammatical” again and again gets clunky after a while.
And Chief Pedant, I can see how your argument would be compelling, but you still have no evidence for it, and so I just can’t agree. I hold with Indistinguishable:
