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(This is a Little Orphan Essay, written in 2013, un-recorded, left to languish for a decade, I am clearly no Daddy Warbucks.)
As you’ve probably guessed by now (that’s if you’ve listened to many of these damned essays, you poor dears) I have surprisingly eclectic, if not downright weird tastes and interests. So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that of late I have been spending my time online not Twittering¹, nor Facebooking, nor even following porn like a normal person, but instead wallowing in a blog called Language Log in which some professors, linguists and others post on language.
One of the least favourite bêtes noires of the Log, or at least of some of its Logistas, is what they in their disliking call ‘Prescriptivist Poppycock’
Ah! Well! Let’s see: they are what are called ‘Descriptivists’. That is, that as scientists of the study of language, they observe how it appears and they accept that in general people know how to use their own language², and this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do because if people weren’t pretty competent with their own language they’d order a lot more fried bicycles on toast for lunch and have a hell of a job getting directions to the hospital afterwards.
But!
But, with dreadful frequency, certain folks pop up in the media, like moles in a Whac-a-Mole, to make rules, often illogical and stupid rules, for the misguidance of poor fools who would otherwise be pretty happy with what they say and would hardly ever have fried bicycle for lunch.
These folks are the Prescriptivists and Language Log, or at least of some of its Logistas, like to whack them as quickly as possible.
These awful Prescriptivists are often writers (who, since they themselves write, should know better). For example a few weeks ago there was certain British newspaper columnist called Simon Heffer³ who wrote a book about grammar and got on the BBC and everything. Mr Heffer heffed and peffed and blew a lot of nonsense (at least in the few bits I’ve seen—I’d never actually buy the book, it might encourage the bugger!), nonsense that I won’t waste your time on, apart from his insistence that the history of a word, especially if it has a history in Latin is vital to how you use it today.
Now the etymology of a word, its earlier (even its earliest) meanings and form, is fascinating stuff, and in these essays I love to stick in erudite jokes using such historical gleanings, but that’s decoration, the gilt on the linguistic gingerbread, not a yardstick to fault usage, and to beat the young or inexperienced with.
Trouble is, Heffer stops with what he knows, for example that the Latin Collidere involves “the collision of two objects, both of which are moving” so that if you collide with a tree (presumably one that isn’t moving) according to him you misuse the word. Now of course Hefflepuff doesn’t realise that by his logic the Romans too should have based what they did on earlier forms of the word in the Old Italic and Proto-Indo-European ancestors of Latin.
You see, if you take his etymological argument to its logical conclusion, like the fleas in the poem with lesser fleas and so on ad infinitum⁴, all languages have ancestors that had ancestors that had…
So that by the strictest application of Heffism all words should mean something like "Look out!", "Want sex", "Want food!"—or maybe I too am stopping too soon, and the history of all words should be taken back to the primordial amoebic expression of complete silence (and not, as I'm sure you are thinking, one amoeba saying to another "Do you believe in binary fission before marriage?)”
So that’s the Prescriptivist bit, but I can’t resist taking a short detour around the etymology of ‘Poppycock’ simply because it’s so delightfully disgusting: according to the OED this is vague but may have something to do with the Dutch poppekak, meaning ‘doll's excrement’ (apparently only in the phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak; showing excessive religious zeal, literally ‘as fine as powdered doll's poop’
And anyway the Language Logistas have missed the whole point of prescriptivism (whether popycockish or not)... You see language is only the tiniest part of the Prescriptivist’s prescription and his only real purpose is to feel superior to everyone else and the way you speak or write is merely a cheap target.
Finally it has been said (mainly of course by plumbers) that if you give a carpenter a hammer, everything will look like a screw, and similarly if you give some highly trained Linguists a twit who says you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition (because the Romans couldn’t) or split an infinitive (ditto) and that it somehow has something to do with current language they will screw you!
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Notes:
1 Nowadays I suppose I should say Xing (is it pronounced Ex-ing, tsing or khing, or even check-ing?)
2 Descriptivists seem to hang out a lot with Norma Loquendi, a charming girl if rather common.
3 Language Log » Mr. Heffer huffs again BBC News—Today—Schools urged to get strict on grammar:
4 Siphonaptera by Augustus De Morgan
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
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