![]() Every language existing today is fantastically expressive. Prescriptivists cannot point to a single language that became unusable or inexpressive as a result of people’s failure to uphold traditional vocabulary and grammar. It is just not something that happens – literally. There is another fact to bear in mind: no language has fallen apart from lack of care. So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. I know that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and many others used a figurative literally, but as a mere intensifier it’s not particularly useful or lovely, and it is particularly useful and lovely in the traditional sense, where it has no good substitute. So when people use literally to say, for example, We literally walked a million miles, I sigh a little sigh. It is a delight to be able to use a good literally: when my son fell off a horse on a recent holiday, I was able to reassure my mother that ‘He literally got right back in the saddle,’ and this pleased me no end. Or take literally, on which I am a traditionalist. People who use it the old way and people who use it the new way can also confuse each other. If decimate eventually settles on this latter meaning, we lose a unique word and gain nothing. Decimate doesn’t have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of), and it has lots of company in its new meaning: destroy, annihilate, devastate and so on. The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that’s how ocean surfaces must look.īe that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. You’ll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching ‘to wipe out utterly’.ĭescriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. ![]() Now we don’t often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something – this is the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci- root). Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. ![]() Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Is this a split personality, or can the two be reconciled into a coherent philosophy? I believe they can. But when it comes time to write my column, I study the weird mess of real language rather than being a scold about this or that mistake, I try to teach myself (and so the reader) something new. When people file me copy that has mistakes of grammar or mechanics, I fix them (as well as applying The Economist’s house style). These two jobs more or less require me to be both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive.īut it doesn’t have to be this way. ![]() Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists’ facts – this makes you a descriptivist. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language.
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