A pet peeve

In his column titled Corpus Linguistics, John Rosenthal, subbing for William Safire who is on vacation from his weekly "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (registration required), points out that "Linguists can generally be divided into two groups: prescriptivists, or those who hold that language is governed by fixed rules of grammar, and descriptivists, or those who believe that patterns of actual usage reflect the way the language is used." The point of his article is that because of computers' ability to analyze massive volumes of data, the descriptivists are gaining more and more ability to argue for their point of view in this age of the Internet when common usage is so documented, accessible and easily manipulated. Never before has English as it is "spoken" everyday been so available for research. And never before, in the my opinion, has the language therefore faced such a vulgar onslaught and a profound threat.

You see, I am a prescriptivist, to use Mr. Rosenthal's term. I grew up and was educated in the 50's and 60's. English (grammar) was my favorite subject in High School and English (literature) was my major in college. I was schooled in the proper use of language by the book (which is the distinguishing characteristic of the prescriptivist approach to language usage), and what's more my college major gave me the opportunity to fall in love with words and word play but especially as they are used eloquently in the spoken word. I even spent some time teaching English at the middle school level.

So in this one area I am very much a conservative. And I might add, I am that in this one area alone. Politically and socially, I am still very much biased toward liberal thought and sensibilities, again as a result of my education during those years and my having lived through the last half of the 20th century. When I hear my grandchildren or my sons and/or their wives violating one of the rules of language I had drilled into my consciousness, I feel compelled to "help them with that."

Now, it seems, if we believe Mr. Rosenthal, the "other" school is going to become the prevailing point of view. So now I can officially enter my dotage as a language curmudgeon, pissed off regularly by the way the younger generation takes the language "to Hell in a handbasket" and quixotically fighting a losing battle against sports and news anchors and politicians who model such obnoxious phrases as "for you and I," "he shoulda went" or "he hit it good."

I've always wondered why old people seemed so angry all the time. Now the reason is becoming apparent.
- posted by Perry @ 9:12 AM