Pissing Off the Prescriptionists

My peripheral vision got caught on linguist in my Twitter stream when @NPRCodeSwitch asked today:

Linguists of Twitter, what are your thoughts on Urban Dictionary?

My alma mater raised me as a descriptionist – a linguist who places more emphasis on describing language and natural language change rather than trying to prescribe rules. Thinking of prescriptivist systems like the one in France makes me shudder; to me it’s like placing a cheese dome over a kitten.

My replies to this tweet picked up the descriptionist-prescriptionist distinction that boils down to observing how a system evolves naturally on the one hand, and setting rules to manipulate the system on the other.

There is a place for both approaches in different contexts, but it’s very imporant to choose when to do which. More important still, to be able to prescribe a change of the system, one needs to describe its current state first. And to be able to describe a system, one needs to be able to watch, observe, and step back, because without stepping back, the system’s balance might be influenced by the observer.

As soon as he has stepped back, a good observer will notice the tiniest detail in the system, its movements and changes, If he then is skilled (or lucky) enough to see the whole of the system at the same time, he’ll grasp its meaning. And then, more often than not, he will understand that there’s no need for prescriptions that go beyond small nudges.

Language is such a system, and that what we humans use language for – communicating content – even more so. Watch your content from the outside, see how it moves, then nudge, observe, nudge again, watch.