Descriptivism Self-Negates on Multiple Levels

the prescriptivist knows one big wrong thing, the descriptivist knows many little wrong things

I have a review of Hamilton Nolan’s excellent new book The Hammer up at Unherd.

You’re likely already aware of the concept of the descriptivist/prescriptivist divide in grammar and education. Prescriptivists are those old-school types who think that there is a correct way to speak and write, who think that errors (or “errors”) of grammar and mechanics and usage should always be corrected, and that investing time on grammar instruction in the classroom is time well spent. They prescribe a particular approach to language. Descriptivists, in contrast, are “living language” types who think that the point of analysis of language is always to describe what actually happens in real use, not to mandate particular usage. They think that there is no such thing as an error in language, at least not in objective terms, and they disdain lists of rules for how students should or shouldn’t speak or write. They think grammar instruction is useless, with some of them further claiming that prescriptive grammar instruction is racist/sexist/classist/etc. The two groups rarely talk to each other, in part because prescriptivists don’t think of themselves as prescriptivists; typical of that kind of term, it’s used much more often as a pejorative than as self-identification.

I myself am neither a descriptivist nor a prescriptivist. I think it’s a false binary, a classic case of academics over-taxonomizing.

Part of what drives me up the wall about this conversation is that, as with many other issues, the more “progressive” side of this debate acts as though they’re the beleaguered minority, laboring under the yoke of oppression to speak truth to power, when in fact they have dominant control. Seemingly everybody in education is a descriptivist, now. In writing programs at universities, when we’d discuss these issues, people would reflexively talk about how the establishment (or similar) wanted us to be vile prescriptivists, but we were members of the descriptivist insurgency, fighting the good fight. And I would think to myself, at this very university I know hundreds of professors, administrators, grad students, and instructors involved in teaching college writing, and I may be the only person who (sometimes!) thinks grammar instruction (sometimes!) can be helpful. It was one of those classic examples of people saying “I don’t care who hears it or what it costs me, I believe the same thing everyone else believes!” The National Council of Teachers of English is the largest and most influential organization in the world of English language arts instruction. They put out a position statement arguing forcefully against the use of explicit grammar instruction…. in 1963. Descriptivism is not a rebel discourse! Descriptivists are the establishment!

I could write a whole book about that topic, this desperate need to be the reviled underdog even in situations where one clearly aligns with the interests of power, but I’ll spare you for now. Let’s also set aside the empirical question of whether grammar instruction is ever useful for teaching writing, or ever useful in general. I want to simply lay out two basic points about the fundamental tensions within a purely descriptivist stance.

The first is that descriptivism is always meta-discursively prescriptivist.

That is to say, when prescriptivists and descriptivists get into arguments, you can inevitably decompose those arguments down into two sides that are yelling at each other about which kind of language is right to use. That is, what looks like a second-order meta-argument about how to think about language is ultimately always revealed to be a first-order argument about which language to use, which amounts to dueling prescriptivist perspectives. As I wrote a couple years ago, prescriptivists are often dinged for their attachment to some sort of transcendent rule of correct language use, which we (as groovy postmoderns) know to be an appeal to an illusory authority. And, yes, it’s true that the unreconstructed prescriptivist tends to see transcendent and objective language rules where there are only customs and contexts. But the descriptivist position does not stem solely from this correct observation about the world. They tend say, “Better to just let everyone use language however they want, and to never police anyone else’s language.” But the prescriptivist is, of course, trying to use language the way that they want, and the way that they want entails having more respect or admiration or professional esteem or, yes, academic blessing for people who use language in a proscribed way. In other words, they have a way of using language that the descriptivist objects to. Thus the descriptivist is ultimately just trying to enforce a particular use of language like everyone else - like I said, they are meta-discursively (or meta-linguistically or meta-pedagogically) prescriptivist too.

If you click through to that link and check the comments, you’ll see that there’s a very lively debate about whether I’m making a real point or merely engaged in semantic games. Look particularly for AJKamper’s exchanges with Tytonidaen. I thought this from Tytonidaen expressed my position well.

I think the descriptivists who say people should use language however they want and that traditionalists should not object are hiding the ball, at the very least. The idea is that the traditionalists shouldn't mind, and that it's all good and inclusive, because the traditionalists can still use language traditionally, if they want to. But in this specific case, for instance, the figurative usage of "literally" directly erodes the utility of the traditionalist usage. Traditionalists are invested in the traditional usage not dying, whereas descriptivists, by definition, are not. In reality, it is not in traditionalists' interests to submit to the descriptivists' demands.

It’s like the debate about gay marriage. Obviously, I’m a lifelong supporter of the right to marry a same-sex partner. But there was a line on the issue that I always thought was a little weak, a little fake, something like “hey, you have your straight marriage, I’ll have my gay one, nobody’s curtailing anybody’s freedoms.” But of course what the anti-gay marriage people wanted was to preserve the traditional man-and-a-woman sacrament, to be in marriages that by their very existence reaffirmed marriage’s heterosexual exclusivity. And I don’t think anything was wrong with holding that belief, as a belief, nor with gay marriage opponents expressing it; I just thought they were wrong and wanted them to lose. I had different values, and so did a lot of other people, and we all got together and fought it out, and gay marriage won and its opponents lost. This is what I mean by a will to power: if you think people should be free to say “literally” figuratively and I don’t, then we’ll just have it out and see who can exert power over whom. (And I’m losing in a rout, on that one.) What bothers me is that the descriptivists seem to think that they’re somehow not engaged in that kind of fight, that they float above it. The truth is that they’re down here in the muck with the rest of us.

If you are a prescriptivist, though, don’t get too cocky, because I think in a certain sense and to a certain degree, I’ve denied your most essential commitment. “This divide is really all about who has the power to enforce whichever vision of language” actually amounts to conceding to the core descriptivist contention - that language rules aren’t “real,” aren’t transcendent or objective or something that exists out of context, but are rather conventions, habits. I make my point as a critique of descriptivists but in doing so I concede that they have the goods on the core truth claim. You have to believe in, uh, pre-postmodern visions of reality to think that “never split the infinitive” describes some objective reality rather than simply a convention shared between a lot of people. My beef with the descriptivists is the pretense that they’re somehow laying down their arms in the war over how to use language, when in fact they’re just a different set of combatants with a somewhat different set of goals. My contention, that everyone involved in these debates is ultimately trying to get people to use language a certain way, is antagonistic to the discursive practices of descriptivists, but undermines the foundational principle of many prescriptivists. So it cuts both ways. What we’re left with is context and power, context and power.

Leading to the next point: any accurate descriptive account of real language use must admit to the fact that many people and institutions are prescriptivists.

At various stops in my academic days, I would make what seemed like the operative point: we as a community of teachers at a large college could simply decide not to police grammatical issues, but we couldn’t decide (to pick a couple examples that were very salient to undergraduates) on behalf of employers or graduate programs. In our teaching spaces at URI or Purdue or Brooklyn College we could decide what to mark down and what not to. But drafting a statement of purpose for an application to Harvard Law with a descriptivist “if it feels good, do it” approach to language is simply to invite disaster, just like using a lot of casual expletives in court is a good way to get yourself fined for contempt. There are many real-world institutions and scenarios where language rules are enforced with genuine consequences. Descriptivists are free to try and reform those institutions, but it seems unlikely that they’ll succeed in getting many of the places that enforce formal language codes to evolve. And of course we do eventually get to the point that, whatever else is true of language, the rule can’t be that anything goes, because if anything goes there’s no language. Take that logic to a certain extreme and you arrive at these contexts where formality is inevitable.

Here again people try to wriggle out - “well, yes, you should use language appropriate to court while in court, use formal language in a cover letter for a job, and so on.” Descriptivists aren’t opposed to matching language to context! But you can see my dilemma as a writing instructor: I couldn’t tell my students to use the appropriate formal register for a task that requires formality if they don’t know how to do so and I’m not supposed to teach them. So, so much of the academic side of this debate involves people fretting about those awful prescriptivists, imagining a better world where they hold no sway, and then conceding that of course our students need to know how to write an appropriate business memo to a superior, for their own good. The trouble is that they don’t know how to do that, and modern writing syllabuses afford precious little time in which to teach them. Too many days teaching about the rhetoric of Dr. Who and podcasting. And of course a prescriptivist may squint at this a little and say, if it’s to be expected that there are certain rules that apply in specific formal situations and contexts, why can’t that context be “all the time”? Wouldn’t it benefit students to learn in the more formal mode so that they become conversant in it, and switch back to the informality they know naturally when they want to? Because it doesn’t work the other around. You can’t take advantage of language as an instrument to get what you want if no one ever taught you how.

In language, as in many other contexts, there is only a will to power. While I am not a prescriptivist, I do prefer the fundamental honesty of prescriptivism, in that prescriptivists are much more likely to say “my way or the highway,” to appeal to authority, which at least lays the power dynamics bare. Either they have the power to enforce their approach to language or they don’t. Descriptivists, on the other hand, are forever trying to couch their position in non-coercive terms, to be the groovy free love types. But if Paul Giamatti’s character from The Holdovers Paul Hunham is trying to be prescriptive about language in his classroom, and the descriptivist is trying to prevent him, then of course you’re in a scenario where there’s just competing visions of how language should be used - competing prescriptive visions of language use. He who prevails shall not be the one with the most progressive vision of language, but rather he who wields power. If we’re students in Paul’s fictional classroom, he wins. If we’re in any other scenario, he doesn’t. Linguistic freedom, or organic language use, or language as a living system - none of that really enters into it. The traditionalist teacher has his preference for languages, other people have theirs, and what breaks the tie is the contextual application of power.

In one of his diatribes against that older piece, AJKamper wrote

… no one is telling people they can’t personally use “literally” in the traditional way anymore. This is what Freddie mistakenly calls “both-sides” talking, but it isn’t. It’s merely saying that the nontraditionalists’ use of the word is capacious enough to contain both definitions, and that traditionalists aren’t wrong for using it to mean only one thing - they’re just wrong when they sit on their Substack lawn to shake their cane at people going by when they trespass.

While I disagree overall, I acknowledge that this is a compelling paragraph. I must also observe, though, that it’s written in perfect English.

Update: This would be useful for understanding my particular context, which is where my particular thinking and language use in this regard comes from. Also, while you’re free to say that I’m using the terms prescriptivist and descriptivist wrong - in much the same way that you might say, oh I don’t know, that someone is using the word “literally” wrong - you must admit it’s pretty funny to do so in this context.