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How do people here land on the subject of "prescriptive linguistics"? I personally find myself getting irritated at people putting down prescriptive linguistics. For the past 10 years, anyone who tells someone they're not using certain words correctly gets shut down as a prescriptive linguist. I'm reminded of an SSC post
I feel like the same applies for "prescriptive linguistics", it's basically a cudgel, a way of telling someone to die in a fire.
Charitably, people justify this argument by saying that linguistics is a descriptive science, so there's no place to be prescriptive. In their mind, linguistics is meant to just describe how people use language, not tell people how to use it.
Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything.
In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.
I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists! They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
It's not their sacred duty to simply understand language no matter what, so don't call them a prescriptive linguist. When I tell someone not to use the word "literally" as emphasis, it's because I'm finding that the word literally is less useful than it used to be, and I want to combat that. Nowadays there is no word that accurately works in as an antonym for "figuratively"; the meaning is muddled and unclear because people have watered down the definition of literally to be something else.
I also sense there may be political aspects to the use of the word "prescriptive linguistics". relating to Noam Chomsky's history in the field and his political affiliations, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I'm interested if anyone here has info on this.
I think prescriptivism is of vital importance, because without it language is completely incoherent. I find linguistic descriptivism to be rather vapid, actually - all you can really say as a descriptivist is "that person sure is using word X to mean Y". You can't actually say whether it is correct or incorrect. I would much rather have an effort (imperfect though it is) to at least try to say "this usage is the correct one" so we can actually communicate with each other.
I also think it's interesting that you mentioned postmodernism, because sometimes linguistic descriptivists feel like they are engaging in serious motte and bailey arguments. And of course, Scott Alexander's original essay talking about motte and bailey arguments focused on the rather bad faith arguments you sometimes see used to defend postmodernism. So I think there's definitely something to the parallel you are noticing.
I will say, in fairness, that language does change over time and at some point you need to accept it. But at the same time, I think you can take that too far, and it usually is taken too far. Some people are just plain ignorant, and they speak/write the language poorly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging that and refusing to lower one's standards.
You can say whether it's correct or incorrect, it's just that "correct" means "consistent with language norms of a particular time and place" rather than "consistent with the eternal unchanging Platonic ideal of English".
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