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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 don't buy the arguments that prescriptive grammar is important for us to communicate clearly and unambiguously with each other.
The peeves of prescriptive grammarians are at best of marginal relevance to comprehension. When has a sentence-ending preposition, a figurative use of "literally", or even a dangling modifier ever actually caused you to misunderstand someone? If such mistakes make communication less "effective" it is mainly by causing educated readers and listeners to do a double take, because they were trained to sniff out such infelicities, rather than by actually causing confusion.
Of course, real confusion can be caused by malformed sentences, such as those produced by language learners. But descriptivism, not prescriptivism, is what foreign language learners need. To be understood, they need to learn how sentences are actually structured by native speakers. Shorn of those fundamentals, what remains of "prescriptive grammar" consists in large part of arcane proscriptions against mistakes that foreigners would never make in the first place. Foreign language teachers and learners understand this: the primary goal is always to "speak like a native!"
Of course, in parts of society where a narrower linguistic standard is observed, the student, native or otherwise, benefits from prescriptivist instruction by acquiring the ability to signal education, propriety, intelligence, and competence to others. (But even here, the student is best served by a descriptive mindset, refined to the set of people they wish to impress: what are the rules that reputable publishers actually follow? Learning rules that have long been ignored even by the educated is a waste of time.)
But moving from the individual to the society, what is the argument for having such a standard in the first place? I think an honest argument has to have something of the flavor of arguments for tradition, etiquette, and decorum, rather than appeal to "clarity" or "effective communication".
Preserving a more formal and technical dialect is useful. It makes more sophisticated conversation a little easier, and keeps the past accessible. At the very least, it's important to maintain technical vocabulary within fields.
The actual motivation, of course, is so that you don't look stupid.
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