There are many signs that Western culture is in an existential crisis, a critical state of decline and degeneration that is teetering on the point of no return. Effective literacy rates, as the term is properly understood, continue to plummet. The very best that has been said or uttered (or rendered onto canvas or as sculpture) continues to be supplanted by the very worst, as we devolve from Beethoven and Bach to Madonna, Katy Perry, and Cardi B, to mention nothing of the absolute abomination that is rap “music,” as it both engenders anti-white animus while infusing black undertow “culture” into the mainstream. English departments no longer teach high Western literature to the degree they are obliged to. A PhD dissertation on readings of The Scarlett Letter from an “intersectionalist perspective” examining Hester Prynn through the lens of “sex, class, and race” earns the author of such nonsense a lofty doctoral degree, while undergraduate students regularly earn a Bachelors in English literature without having read Milton, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. At all levels, so-called English teachers are eschewing any standards in grammar and usage as “white supremacist.”
Although it does not attract the same level of attention as other crises in the culture, there may be no greater sign of this very crisis in the culture and those institutions that are supposed to be the bastions of culture than the rise of the descriptivist menace that has overtaken the universities and the editorial staffs of most all dictionaries, grammars, and usage guides of varying repute. The descriptivist contagion originated in the 1960s, as so much of the cancer consuming Europe and the West has. This quickly metastasized and spread throughout the culture, having “quickly and thoroughly [taken] over English education in this country” so “that just about everybody who started junior high after about 1970” was educated under descriptivism’s most pernicious influence of and stranglehold on education and culture (Wallace 81). In “Making Peace in the Language Wars,” Bryan Garner describes the situation thusly:
Through the latter half of the 20th century and still today, there has been an academic assault on linguistic standards. Today the remark “That’s not good English” would likely be met with the rejoinder, “Says who?” (234)
The favor for descriptivism in both academic circles and cultural and (for lack of a better word) quasi-literary institutions is pervasive and ubiquitous, so much so it is increasingly difficult to find reputable, persuasive essays, tracts, or books that either advocate for a prescriptive perspective[1] on grammar or usage or offer a critique or rebuttal of descriptivism or the crass vandalism it has inflicted on our language.[2]
The central position or characteristic of descriptivist grammar is that a lexicon or grammar must only set out to describe or catalog language however it is written or spoken. This descriptivist approach explicitly eschews what its proponents regard as “value judgments,” even though that is, as will be shown, an impossibility. The descriptivist creed blithely asserts that it is “impermissible to say one form of language is any better than another; as long as a native speaker says” or writes it, regardless of education, such an utterance is just as valid as any other. (Wallace 81)
The central motivation in advancing descriptivism—and denouncing prescriptivism—stems from the explicit assertion that prescriptivist grammar, or the supposed value judgments underlying prescriptivism, disadvantages or stigmatizes people of color and other marginalized people. Such disadvantages are argued to stem from lack of education as well as what leftists assert to be the nebulous, unfalsifiable specter of “systemic racism.” In “Why Linguists Should Not Be Trusted On Language Usage,” Mark Halpern critically examines descriptivism by focusing on an essay published in The Atlantic by Stanford linguistic Professor Geoffrey Nunberg ,“The Decline of Grammar.” In this critical, even disapproving examination, Halpern describes descriptivism’s “democratic objection” to prescriptivism thusly; that prescriptivism is an insidious effort “to foist the linguistic practices. . . of the educated, affluent, fortunate members of society on the less educated and affluent members of society. . .” Matters of race were at first articulated as something that overlapped with the concerns of classism, but over time fixations on race eclipsed those concerns with classism as the first and foremost objection by descriptivists. Wallace even goes so far as to contend that, under the descriptivist view, because “traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by privileged [white] males,” it is therefore “inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist…” (81, emphasis added). And now, on the basis of this most dubious precept, “the teaching of standard English is even being labeled discriminatory” (Garner).
The hostility held by descriptivists towards “conservatism” or anything remotely toward the right is express and overt. In “Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory,” George Pullum states unequivocally “There is a link between the stance of the prescriptive ideologues and actual political conservativism.” (6). Pollum of course holds the very idea of prescriptive rules in open, naked contempt, stating: “[Prescriptivist rules] seem less worthy of being taken seriously than the absurdly obvious warnings printed on” various products in America, as he later dismisses what he identifies as the principles of prescriptivism as merely the “buzzwords of political conservatism. . .” (9).
To advance their supposedly egalitarian ends, the descriptivist creed contends that language is a living thing and that change is never either good or bad, it just is. In “The Decline of Grammar,” Nunberg compared prescriptivists to gardeners and landscapers trying to thwart the shift of tectonic plates in the continental drift that happens over millions of years. Even more preposterous, Steven Pinker submitted this crude analogy:
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology. (Pinker 409)
By this and other truly absurd analogies, arguments, and postulations, descriptivists contend that any effort to stifle or resist any change in language or usage is both futile and preposterous. There are many problems with these assertions and characterizations.
A really stupid analogy that bears little scrutiny and should not fool a child, and yet it has proven remarkably persuasive.
Language is not a living thing. A living organism is born, lives, and dies. Nutrition and other externalities will affect how any organism will grow or even whether it lives or dies, but a human, tiger, cat, snake, dog of a certain breed, or any other living organism will grow according to its DNA and genetic map. Conversely, a language lasts hundreds if not thousands of years, and the degree to which different persons in different historical periods can understand different stages or time periods of a language depend on a wide range of factors, including whether that language is borrowing heavily from other languages, social stability (or instability), whether a civilization has established lexiconic authorities and the literacy rate of the population, among other factors.[3]
It is important to note that descriptivists often if not always refer to “grammar” in terms of evolutionary psychology. In Language and Human Nature, Halpern correctly distinguishes this descriptivist view of “grammar” as “generative grammar,” the way a “grammar” populated by the way that language is hard-wired in the human brain, in accordance with the principles of evolutionary psychology. It is on this faulty premise that descriptivists assert that so-called black spoken English, also known as “African American Vernacular English” (AAVE) is just as valid as standard English because it conforms to this generative grammar. That of course is a tautological—and therefore meaningless—statement, because every spoken language conforms to this generative grammar mapped in the human brain. Under this descriptivist, skewed view of grammar as existing only in the sense of generative grammar, to condemn any utterance as ungrammatical in the sense of generative grammar “is to make a strange, almost meaningless statement,” similar to “criticizing the way stomach produces digestive juices.” Compare and contrast with how grammar is understood from a prescriptivist perspective “and the majority of the educated public;” in that sense, “grammar means the set of standards and rules, embodied in books” and hopefully instilled in pupils and the educated public by teachers. This type of grammar determines “whether an utterance is grammatically correct or not, whether un utterance is well stated or not.” (Halpern 114)
But of course, language is not just determined by the principles of generative grammar and evolutionary psychology, it is influenced by any number of externalities, including literacy levels, whether a standard lexicon has been established, whether the language is subject to borrowing an exorbitant number of loan words either through invasion or other historical events or trends such as the recent phenomenon of the export of American Unkultur into Europe and the rest of the world, the introduction of modern mass media and later social media, and a number of other factors. Whereas changes in languages can happen very quickly, just as languages can enjoy centuries of stability and very little change as these and other variables are adjusted, the shift of tectonic plates takes place over millions of years, and it happens regardless of what man does because it is (obviously) not part of civilization and culture or human affairs writ large the way language is.
Both the literary arts and music are part of “the arts.” Notwithstanding this, comparing language to music (or any other art that requires discipline and training), which is maintained and cultivated through a cultural tradition, through education and other institutions, is a most imperfect analogy because music is not hard-wired into our brains the way the propensity for language is. But like music and other fine arts, the language we speak is cultivated and refined by these auspices of culture and civilization, as it devolves and denigrates without. Indeed, despite descriptivists denouncing this notion as some sort of “theoretical heresy,” prescriptivism has “dominated the concept of language in literate societies for at least several millienia.” (Harris 7) This fundamental aspect of language exposes analogies to tectonic plates and mammalian biology as outright absurdities that should not fool a simpleton, let alone esteemed academics at Stanford or Harvard or those who shamelessly pander to them. What descriptivist vandals regard as the evils of prescriptivism are the necessary elements of such refinement of language; “rules of usage and grammar… are necessary for meaning understanding.” And as dictionaries and other authorities long since captured by the descriptivist creed have conflated bad usage with good usage, misspellings with proper spellings, the inverse is true, namely that the jettisoning of such rules and standards degrade meaning and clarity and beget literary chaos. “There is scarcely a better way of stripping a language of its accuracy, clarity, and elegance than by welcoming”—as the descriptivist plague does and has done—“all manner of change in word definitions, usage, and grammar” (Fiske 10).
As a number of authoritative commentators (including Halpern, Garner, and Fiske) have noted, descriptivists invariably resort to a number of strawmen characterizations in their efforts to discredit or dismiss prescriptivism. First among them is the tactic of discrediting prescriptivism by touting supposed grammatical rules that have not been seriously advocated in over a century—namely split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition, and starting sentences with “and,” “but,” and so on.[4] (Fiske 13). They then use that as a vehicle to discredit and impugn prescriptivism categorically. As Halpern articulates, to use these dubious, outlier examples, which have been long since “repealed,” as a vehicle to conclude not just that these particular rules and the methods and arguments used to advance are invalid, but “to [also] conclude that [prescriptivist] rules as such have been discredited and should be ignored is [both] wrong and dangerous” (59, emphasis added),
The descriptivists contend that language invariably changes and changes in ways immune from and impervious to intermeddling by prescriptivists and other external influences—an assertion discussed and refuted at length above. They couple this assertion with another red herring: namely that prescriptivists somehow want to prevent all change, when in fact the question is at what rate a language changes, and whether any given change advances or hinders precision, clarity, and eloquence in language. The question, properly framed, is whether linguistic changes are regulated and tempered by well-educated, erudite figures and more importantly cultural, educational, and literary institutions to further cultivate a language. To answer in the negative is to concede that any and all change of a language must be regarded with the hyper relativism espoused by the descriptivist menace and other portents of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In addition, and just as damning, descriptivists routinely leave out that most changes in a language do not endure the test of time; “if a change is not accepted by enough users of a language… it does not become part of the language, and those who have opposed [such change] have won.” Descriptivists also ignore how “such rejection of change has occurred many times in the history of the language, probably far more often than the universal acceptance” of any given change. Stated another way, in their effort to interfere or prevent prescriptivists from regulating or tempering change in a language, these descriptivists commit intellectual fraud in their purposeful failure to acknowledge “all the words that purists opposed, and have since passed into oblivion.” (Halpern, 8-9)
Another spurious charge is that grammarian rules are made up and arbitrary. There are many examples of this dubious assertion, but one such off hand comes from this presentation by John McWhartor at Claremont McKenna College, in which he asserts that the first grammarian to proscribe the use of “singular they” was in the 1830s. stating:
“She just made it up. She just thought, well, I don’t like it. So “they” is supposed to be used in the plural. It’s just something she said. And then she disappeared. And here we are stuck with it. That is how arbitrary these rules are.”
It is of note that a brief internet search indicates that George Fox condemned the usage in 1660, as others have after fox through 1830. Given that McWhorter did not provide a name, it is otherwise difficult to ascertain the veracity of his claims regarding this woman and her position on the so-called singular “they.” And given that he appears wrong about that factual statement, one can only wonder what else he is mistaken about.
This most important and weighty issue is of course discussed at length in “This Mockery of Language I: The Farce of Shifting, Customizable Pronouns.” As stipulated in that tract, the use of “singular they” had been of use, with varying degrees of approval and disapproval by grammarians, teachers, and the educated public, principally in the context of anomalous “singular” pronouns that either denote a plurality (even though they are conjugated in the singular) such as “every” or “each” or are of unspecified quantity, such as “any.” There are of course examples when prestigious authors used “they” incorrectly for a known individual of a specified sex. Ideologically corrupted editorial staffs and English departments of course use such examples as an appeal to authority, rather than concede either that even the best authors can make mistakes or consider that many of these authors wrote before standardized definitions, spellings, and usages had been established by the advent of authoritative lexicons, dictionaries, and grammars (Halpern 77).[5]
Without having a particular name attributed to this grammarian (or was she just some “woman”) in the 1830s who proscribed “singular they” simply because she did not “like it,” one can ascertain that some of the valid reasons for proscribing “singular they” were a part of her rationalization as well, as these very legitimate reasons inform arguments against the use of “singular they” generally, if only more people would pay greater heed to them. As articulated in “This Mockery of Language I: The Farce of Shifting, Customizable Pronouns,” the convention to normalize the so-called “singular they” to advance radical gender ideology and transgender nuttery is an affront to language, grammar, and literary decency:
“Robert and George stated that they are going to be in attendance at this evening’s proceedings.” (emphasis added to illustrate proper conjugation that we all should have learned as toddlers). “Sarah stated they are a member of the spin class” is nothing other than fucked-up English, a linguistic abomination that should embarrass any ESL student. The correct conjugation for a singular noun is “is,” of course. Note also the lack of agreement between the plural conjugation (are as opposed to is) with the singular form of member; i.e., “Sarah stated she is a member of the class,” or “they are members of the class”—NOT “Sarah stated they are a member of the class.”
Because “they” is a third person plural pronoun, the lack of such a rule correctly proscribing it is contrary to the directive of speaking or writing with clarity and grace. The deleterious impact on clarity and meaning pertains most particularly in relation to this new novel use of “singular they” in regards to a specific, known person who does not want to identity with the sex that person is born as—not assigned at birth, but born as either male or female! Take for example Rachel, a young woman who, deluded by this transgender lunacy and radical gender theory, insists that everyone use “they and them” to refer to her. Consider this sample sentence. “Sitting in a conference room among their colleagues, Rachel wondered if their boss noticed them as he walked by the window.” Even worse is this sentence; “As Rachel sat in the conference room among their colleagues, they wondered if their boss noticed them as he walked by the window.” The context indicates Sarah is in a conference room among other coworkers.” But because she, Rachel, is not correctly gendered with she/her pronouns[6], it is uncertain whether the question is whether the boss just noticed her or Rachel and her colleagues in the conference room. The second sentence is unclear as to who has that concern, Rachel or the team of her colleagues collectively? Until this madness is excoriated and expunged from our public consciousness, many will wonder at the mere utterance of “they” whether it pertains to a singular, deluded individual or if it is used properly, to signify a plurality, free of shambolic prose and obfuscation of meaning. This brief discussion presents just some of the problems with the so-called “singular they,” all of which squarely controvert McWhorter’s blithe assertion that proscription of “singular they” is arbitrary or without reason.
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One particularly pernicious phenomenon resulting from the seemingly unassailable dominance of descriptivism is how most if not all dictionaries have shifted away from a role of authority and guidance to the fool’s errand of cataloging any and all usage of a word, a problem addressed both by Halpern and Wallace. This stems from two particular edicts of descriptivism, set forth in Phillip Gove’s introduction to the infamous Webster’s Third International Dictionary: “correctness rests upon usage” and “all usage is relative” (Wallace 81). Particularly in the age of the internet, this effort, all in the name of not judging “marginalized peoples,” is an impossible task. One problem, of many, is that if correctness rests on usage, descriptivists cannot answer whose usage is recognized and whose is not, especially given how much they fret about being exclusionary. This means the answer to “which people?” is “All of them.” It is glaringly apparent why “this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle,” even though it eludes most these days. As Wallace admonishes, “not everything can go in The Dictionary.” For even if these descriptivists could somehow “actually observe and record every last bit of every last native speaker’s ‘language behavior,’ . . . the resultant dictionary would weigh four million pounds and need to be updated hourly” [7] (85). However much these people convince themselves that they are free of judgment,[8] there is always a judgment call as to when a strange or wrong usage is observed to that point such utterances should be hoisted into the lofty ranks of standard dictionary entries, and when they should not. Judgment is unavoidable.
Of course, the descriptivist folly defeats the actual purpose of dictionaries.[9] To whatever extent people look up bastardized, corrupted entries of “literally” to justify their improper usage of the word or other such solecisms, the original and dominant purpose of a dictionary as well as a grammar manual is to inform and provide guidance. A reader typically looks up a word either because he does not know what the word means, wanted clarification or confirmation either as to the meaning of the word or subtleties in the meaning of that word that distinguishes it from various synonyms, as well as to confirm spelling and pronunciation. Various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary and other less authoritative lexicons also provide information as to the origin of a word and the date its usage emerged in the English language.
Contaminating standard entries reflecting the true, proper meaning of the word with misuses and misspellings of varying popularity thwart and frustrate this central purpose of the dictionary. Even worse, the entry into supposedly authoritative dictionaries of wrong usages and meanings, misspellings, or even entries that are not words of such universal and standard usage does something else: entry of these terms into dictionaries serves to legitimize, sanction, and perpetuate such misuse and abuse of language.[10] Rather than provide guidance regarding the definition of a word, the practice of incorporating all utterances, no matter how wrong or obscure or ephemeral (slang often does not last long), dictionaries that have succumbed to the descriptivist menace “promote the misuse of the English language” (Fiske 5). As they resemble more and more a “catalog of confusions, a list of illiteracies” rather than an authoritative lexicon that readers can rely on to resolve questions about proper usage, spelling, and the like. Alas, “dictionaries are no longer to be trusted” (Fiske 7). Just some errors in meaning or usage, misspellings, or other travesties perpetuated by the descriptivist activism in dictionaries and usage guides, identified by Halpern, Fiske, and Garner include:
· “Disinterested” to be synonymous with “uninterested,” when “disinterested” properly means not having a vested interest in something, as opposed to not finding it interesting.
· Conflating infer with imply, inference with implication
· Tho as a valid spelling of though
· Irregardless as a word (thankfully this still appears with red underlines in Word)
· Conflating flout with flaunt
· To go to mean to say or utter (this one added by yours truly)
“Multiply” this small sample by “10,000,” and opponents to this descriptivist menace can begin to behold magnitude by which meaning is being eroded and otherwise embarrassing gaffes are conflated with correct, proper usage. (Garner)
In this way, the descriptivists endorse any and all influence on and changes in language--any and all change, except those changes (or recommendations against change) advocated by the most educated and erudite, by those who are able to add proper guidance. Descriptivism entertains the mad delusion that, while television, movies, pop music and other auspices of American Unkultur should have free rein to affect the languages we speak, the “grammarian, by contrast, is trying to impose something artificial on that unspoiled child of nature,” that is language unsullied by the racism, elitism, classism, and other supposed evils of prescriptivism, “and is thereby interfering with its natural development.” The descriptivist scourge thus amounts to, in practice, “the welcoming of all the forces that affect language except for that which springs from rational thought, explicit choice, and defensible principles. . ..” (Halpern 125). In this way, the descriptivist contagion exemplifies that radical relativist creed of the modern age par excellence, lifting up all voices except those it shuns: the very voices that most deserve a say.
Even the most diehard adherent to the bane that is descriptivism concedes perhaps the most fundamental flaw of all; it is impossible to teach a foreign language without a prescriptivist approach to pedagogy. French, German, any foreign language cannot be taught without setting forth hard rules as to what those foreign words in that student’s native language mean and the rules of grammar that govern that language. But just as one cannot learn even the most rudimentary basics of first year German as a foreign language without prescriptivist grammar, native speakers of English— and any other written language on the planet—cannot master their own mother tongue without this same prescriptivism that has been so demonized. Although garden variety descriptivists blather on about how black English or other non-standard dialects are just as valid as “Standard English,” they fail to discern that, unlike non-standard dialects, “Standard English”—that is to say proper English-- is nonetheless to a large degree learned and refined with at least some measure of prescriptivism, even though much of proper English is native to those for whom English is a mother tongue.[11] This process of refinement and learning is conveyed through words like “education” and “erudition,” and other hallmarks of high civilization. Indeed, the very act of grading is prescriptive, as any grade is making an evaluation of the usage, spelling, and grammar exhibited by a student’s writing in a paper, quiz, or test.
Such obvious considerations rarely dissuade adherents to the descriptivist cause from their loathing of prescriptivist standards in language or grammar. In the Grammar Revolution, Aram DeKoven, then Professor of Education at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, brazenly declares “in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a standard” (because standards are racist and oppressive). “There would be many different ways to express one’s self, rather than a [single] standard” with no standard being elevated over any other. Among many other problems with such assertions, the standardization of language is necessary to advance the function, purpose, and nature of language. In “This Mockery of Language I: The Farce of Shifting, Customized Pronouns,” the phenomenon of language was described thusly:
A critical, fundamental aspect of language is that it is, to a very large degree, commonly understood by and agreed to by way of convention and social contract.[12]
Granting equal blessing to each and every dialect frustrates this central purpose of a commonly understood convention of words and language. An educated person (or whites generally) may be able to understand most of black vernacular, but some of it will not be understood, and in any case a language need to not only be understood but understood quickly, instantaneously. There is also the consideration that along with, race, blood, common history, and religion, common language is a key binding force that helps bond a people together, or peoples in the context of the absurd experiment of multiculturalism.
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A supreme irony is that most of the mediocre sorts blathering on about how “a language is a living thing” and that “prescriptivism has no basis in academic study” seem blissfully unaware that as old-school grammarians and authorities have been dethroned in order to advance insidious, progressive causes, a new sort of prescriptivism has emerged (Wallace 110). As articulated and set forth in “This Mockery of Language II: Gender Redefined,” Websters expressly stipulates that the distinction between sex and gender advocated by transgender lunatics and their enablers is prescribed, as the salient passage of Webster’s definition of gender reads in pertinent part:
Among those who study gender and sexuality, a clear delineation between sex and gender is typically prescribed, with sex as the preferred term for biological forms, and gender limited to its meanings involving behavioral, cultural, and psychological traits.
Usage of “singular they”—even for a known individual of determined sex—has similarly been prescribed by editorial staff of lexicons of varying degrees of authority and various usage guides. The interference with and distortion of “gender” and “they” are only the most recent instances of progressive elements proscribing certain usages and prescribing others, not to describe how words are generally used by a sufficient contingent of the population, educated or otherwise, but to serve their nefarious and destructive ideological ends. Few have called out such naked, abject hypocrisy.
The evisceration of the “generic he” is a prominent example. Feminist activists have insisted for over half a century that authorities dissuade its use, even though, from a descriptivist perspective, large contingents if not the overwhelming majority of English speakers used it, particularly, at first, those who possessed a classical education, as many of the more enlightened and erudite among us use it to this day. The same applies to most instances of supposedly gendered language (e.g. chairman or postman, etc., or even just “man” or “mankind” of humanity). Further discrediting the absurd analogies comparing language to the shift of tectonic plates or denouncements of prescriptivism as having as little relevance with or effect on “with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology,” this new prescriptivism of the left has had a profound, deleterious effect on how people use these words and usages the left has condemned and promoted. Even though the “generic he” is perfectly legitimate[13], and far more elegant than the inartful “he or she” or the literary monstrosity of “singular they,” the educated public has become increasingly hesitant to use it because of decades of admonitions against the “generic he" by feminists and other politically motivated elements in our midst. Some usage guides proscribe it or strongly discourage it, as the use of “generic he” in an essay for school or university could likely incur demerits on a student’s grade, just as such usage could, most regrettably, invoke negative consequences for professional writers as well as those who write in various places of business. The manner in which transgender freaks and gender lunatics have sought to redefine “gender” for their own insidious ends—and the manner in which editorial staff at different dictionaries and other publications of varying authority have facilitated this linguistic coup—has already had an impact on everyday usage. Many millennials, too lazy or stupid to consult dictionaries, insist that gender does mean “a social construct,” or an inner feeling of the sex one feels to be” rather than how it is defined by The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
Gender n. LME. 3 The state of being male, female, or neuter; sex; the members of one or other sex. Now chiefly colloq. or euphem. LME b Sex as expressed by social or cultural distinctions. (1072, emphasis added).
This utterly repudiates the lie and the delusion that gender and sex mean two different things. Most gender zealots and transgender loons will usually just deny it or commit the appeal to authority fallacy by throwing back ideologically driven redefinitions by corrupted institutions--redefinitions which are prescribed in accordance with leftist orthodoxy.
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When contemplating the true essence of the descriptivist plague, it is imperative to conceptualize this institutionalized vandalism of our language around its original motivations: an outrage at standards perceived to be derogatory, debilitating, or otherwise adverse or insulting to certain groups of people favored by the left. Originally this was principally lower classes observed to have less access to education, a consideration which also happened to overlap with blacks and other racial minorities, but the descriptivist cause is increasingly much more about matters of race. Such objections are overt, with jargon about white supremacy and “power structures” to benefit certain people (white males) to disenfranchise others as a centerpiece of descriptivist rhetoric. In condemning prescriptivism, Pollum explicitly cites outrage at the controversy around the Oakland school board’s failed initiative to officially recognize Ebonics (or AAVE as he and those of his ilk would prefer). In this way, those who wish to speak or write with some modicum of erudition, some semblance of a classical education, must wade through dictionaries, poisoned by the descriptivist menace, that conflate “disinterested” with “uninterested,” that sanction “irregardless” as a word, that catalog, and thus sanction and endorse, any number of misspellings and other errors. And we must do this because sixties radicals and their intellectual progeny harbor moral outrage that a dying breed of English teacher deserving of the moniker could make a black student feel bad or inferior for speaking or writing poorly. Put bluntly, the descriptivist phenomenon, and the unending destruction and chaos it has inflicted on our language and society, is just another example proving that diversity is not our strength.
A screenshot of notorious reddit transgender super-moderator Bardfinn, real name Steven Joel Akins, now deleted twitter profile. Just one reminder of who and what the adherents to the descriptivist blight are. Click here for his face reveal.
The pernicious effects do not end there. In conceptualizing the magnitude and the effect of the descriptivist philosophy or even ideology, an utter evisceration of seemingly any standards in language and education is observed. That evisceration of standards is the direct result of “a large, powerful contingent in higher education today – larger and more powerful than ever before – trying to eradicate any thoughts about good and bad grammar” and “correct and incorrect word choices. . ..” (Garner) Descriptivism is part and parcel of nihilist relativism par excellence. That nihilist relativism arms cretins, fools, and dullards with a fallacious “argument” that gives such persons absolute license to say and write whatever, no matter how wrong, or ignorant, or lazy. That “argument,” if one can call it that, amounts to “who are you to say,” “no academic authority of any repute respects such prescriptive dogma,” and “language is a living thing, deal with it;” for it is those who care about “good grammar” and proper usage of words that are the “problem.” (Garner) Those so deluded, so indoctrinated by that “powerful contingent in higher education,” have greater confidence in their dogmatic refrains with the appeal of authority from an ideologically corrupted, derelict education system and other cultural centers of power.
As just one example, any criticism or rebuke for using “literally” to mean figuratively is invalidated because such an objection is “prescriptive” in nature. Anyone who dares to point out to a nutter transgender creature or other crazed gender ideologue that gender was (and still is) defined as “sex” or “sex as expressed by social or cultural distinctions” can expect a few, select, tired, cliched rebuttals that are all but effectively meaningless: blithe dismissals such as “you’re a prescriptivist asshole.” That, in their minds, ends the debate and wins the argument, similar to how decrying something as “racist,” or “sexist,” or insert-any-other-such-insult automatically wins the day in their minds. Putting the proverbial inmates in charge of the asylum, jettisoning any effort to uphold those rules and standards for language to have meaning, clarity, or grace is part of the appeal. It not only allows but encourages people to write and speak with laziness, ignorance, and indifference with seeming impunity.
The Philistinism of mainstream conservatism, which has held matters of culture in open contempt is partly to blame for this and other crises in the culture.
In this way, the rise of descriptivism and the vandalism it has wreaked on our language is a further dismantling of hierarchy and order in our civilization. As such it is yet another indictment of liberal democracy, which mandates that idiots, degenerates, and many other sorts of undesirables have just as much say as the brilliant or the enlightened, which mandates that the swift should advance no further or faster than the slow. As with so many of our troubles, the prognosis for turning the tide seems dire. English, education, and other humanities departments in the American university system and universities throughout the Occident were captured by cultural Marxism decades ago, and that ideological corruption appears to be intractable and irreversible, absent a cleanser of blood and iron on par with Mao Zedong, but from the right. As with many of our other troubles, the lack of any meaningful, effective opposition to the descriptivist terror is attributed in great part to how flawed mainstream establishment conservatism is and has been, particularly as it has regarded matters of culture with quiet and often overt, naked contempt. Still, many of us, although standing in the gutter, still gaze at the stars, eschewing modern pulp fiction for those works that truly are the best that has been said and uttered. Some do wince whenever some mutant on reddit or twitter or elsewhere uses “literally” as a lazy, nondescript intensifier. These few can and must set that example that influences others. Ignite a radical social contagion of a different sort, and spread the contagion to those inclined to a dark enlightenment.
[1] Of course, descriptivism and prescriptivism are not mutually exclusive to one another in an absolute sense. A dictionary should accurately describe the meaning of a word and how it is used, provided that the meaning and usage are long-standing, widely accepted, and, put bluntly, correct. As argued in this essay, just because a word is often misspelled or used incorrectly does not mean such errors should be sanctioned in authoritative dictionaries. To do so erodes the clarity and precision of our language and interferes with our collective ability to speak and write clearly and eloquently.
[2] One of the most famous essays in defense of prescriptivism is arguably the late David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage” (also available here with page numbers cited in this essay). Language and Human Nature by Mark Halpern is also generally recommended, as are the writings of the late Robert Fiske, editor of the Vocabula Bound series and writer of several books, including A Dictionary of Endurable English. Bryan Garner, who wrote the dictionary Wallace reviews, generally takes a softer approach with a prescriptivist bent, although his views on singular they are somewhat disappointing, as he also regards insistence that “That is I” or “I am he” as “frippery.”
[3] This basic summary of these linguistic and historical principles should be so elementary as to preclude need for citation. This interview with Bryan Garner provides a good introduction, despite the less than lofty in source.
[4] This assertion is evidenced by the interview with Bryan Garner in Grammar Revolution,(who correctly notes that no grammarian has advocated for these rules in well over a century) as well this presentation on grammar by the Linguistic and English Language Department of the University of Edinburgh which presents them as strawmen arguments by prescriptivists. Pollum rants about the rules against split infinitives and prepositions at the end of a sentence in “Ideology, Power, and Literary Theory” as he denounces prescriptivism, as have Nunberg and Pinker in various writings and commentaries.
[5] A perusal of various, dubious entries in different dictionaries, usage guides, and articles reveals a certain tactic whereby descriptivists scour the various belles-lettres in the English canon, and focus on any example that invalidates or contravenes the descriptivist rule. See for example this dreadful article published on OED’s official website advocating the endorsement and proliferation of singular they, not just instances of singular pronouns that although conjugated in the singular denote a plurality or undetermined quantity, but when the sex of a single individual is known. Many of these authors wrote centuries ago, notably Milton, whose use of they to refer to a single man was cited at length in Pollum’s “Ideology, Power, and Literary Theory,” before spelling and usage was standardized. In regards to esteemed authors of more recent vintage, it is noteworthy the descriptivists never seem to set forth a percentage in which “they” has been used in ways that those of a more prescriptivist, enlightened perspective rightly denounce. In this way, such sleight of hand not only sanctions and endorses errors by way of appeal to authority, but is likely presenting the exception to invalidate the rule, when the exception proves the rule. The same specious reasoning would inform the gullible and stupid that because Brigitte Nielse butn is 6’1, women are just as tall as men. By the same token, this author has heard, on various occasions, educated, native German speakers make various errors with gendered articles, errors in case and adjective endings, as well as prepositional errors that contravene rules learned in first year high school German. A friend of mine, who is a prominent business man, once stated in conversation “in Englisch”or “in Deutsch” rather than “auf Deutsch.” (English grammar dictates a writing or utterance is in a language, where in German “auf” is used ). That such errors are made even by the most educated in German society does NOT mean, for example, “in” is the proper preposition to use in the context of something being written or uttered in a certain language. Eg, Denkst Du, daß ich solche Ideen auf Englisch ausdrücken könnte? NICHT ,,in Englisch.”
[6] Neither this author nor this publication will tolerate misgendering in any form. A woman is born as a woman, and thus takes she/her pronouns, without equivocation or customization!
[7] In his foreword to Robert Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English, Clark Elder Morrow offers a most distressing look at the consequences of such a mad undertaking, examining the dubious entries that are finding their way into the 2011 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, a subject Fiske than elaborates on in yet further detail.
[8] That these people think themselves free of judgment in any meaningful way demonstrates that they are under the most astounding sort of delusion and cognitive dissonance, as they never fail to judge those horrid, racist prescriptivists.
[9] This point is belabored by both Fiske and Halpern, and ostensibly among others. Private correspondence and conversations reveal it was an objection expressed by yours truly long before reading these tracts in preparing for this essay.
[10] Apologists and defenders of the descriptivist blight will note that usage notes indicate whether a usage is wrong or nonstandard. There are a number of problems with this. First, the process of sifting through legitimate, correct definitions with popular but wrong entries expends a great deal of time and energy. Beyond that, seeing a misspelling or wrong definition lingers in the consciousness of the reader. No matter how conscientious, deliberate, or thoughtful erudite persons try to be, those errors linger in the mind. Polluting dictionaries with errors and solecisms exhibits the phenomenon of Defining Deviancy Down in its own, peculiar way. As Fiske notes in his introduction, those usage guides, drafted by descriptivist vandals, are most begrudging and noncommittal in the most tepidly worded admonitions of the mistakes and errors they sanction.
[11] Another basis to attack the descriptivist position is to assert that not all dialects are equal to others, or at least not likely to. This author is highly doubtful that black vernacular English could ever have the expressive power that standard English or even somewhat less standard white dialects could. Halpern suggests—but only suggests—this possibility in Language and Human Nature, citing the richer vocabulary of “Standard English” (what counts is the average vocabulary of blacks in aggregate, comprised of their knowledge of both “Standard English” and whatever black vernacular, as well as the inifitely greater number of written works, music, and so on written in English. This subject is explored in some greater depth in “Race Matters in Culture Wars.”
[12] In this “This Mockery of Language I,” language is further described as: “simply a system of communication composed of words, which are formed by a particular sequence of letters, as that particular sequence of letters forming a word is signified by an oral pronunciation in spoken language, denoted by each letter or syllable; that system of words is governed by rules of syntax and grammar, all of which are commonly understood through centuries of development and regulated and refined by authoritative dictionaries and grammars that delineate and govern this collectively understood convention.
[13] Oxford defines he as “A. pron. 1. The male person or animal, OR the person or animal of unspecified sex, previously mentioned or implied or easily identified. OE.(emphasis added) pg The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Volume I A-M, (1993) 1201
Bibliography
Fiske, Robert Hartwell , Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary of Unendurable English: A Compendium of Mistakes in Grammar, Usage, and Spelling with Commentary on Lexicographers and Linguists, Simon and Schuster) 2011.
Garner, Bryan, “Making Peace in the Language Wars,” reproduced in Garner’s Modern Usage, 4th Edition. Oxford University Press. 2016
Halpern, Mark Language and Human Nature, Regent Press, 2006.
Halpern, “Why Linguists Are Not to be Trusted on Language Usage” The Vocabula Review, September 2000)
Harris, Roy, The Language Makers, (1980)
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Oxford Press (1993).
Nunberg, Geoffrey, “The Decline of Grammar,” The Atlantic, (1983)
Pinker, Steven, (2003). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Penguin UK 2003
Pollum, Geoffrey, “Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory.”
Wallace. David Foster, “On Usage and American Authority,” alternatively entitled “Tense Present.” 2001.