Post 152

I was completely unaware of the Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist debate at the beginning of 2008: I (like this web browser's spell check) hadn't even heard the terms before. But then, sometime in the fuzzy period between winter and spring (I forget when exactly), one of my roommates gave me a copy of David Foster Wallace "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" to read, and I found myself diving headfirst into this glorious new can of worms.

(I regret that I do not, at this very moment, have my copy of that essay handy; perhaps on some future day, I will give you some lovely excerpts.)

That essay changed me: when I started it, I had no idea what Prescriptivism was; by the time I gave it back to my roommate, I considered Prescriptivism foundational, a quintessential part of my being, and I was horrified to realize that the dictionaries that take up such a large portion of my bookshelf were mostly compiled by hell-bound Descriptivists who were leading the language to ruin. I was a bonafide Snoot (Wallace's word, not mine).

(At this point, I really wish I could tell you that I'm exaggerating, but for once in my life, I feel I'm extreme enough without exaggeration. I suppose that completely honest would encourage me to say that, rather than changing me, "Tense Present" really just opened my eyes to an issue that I already had a solid opinion about even though I had no idea that an actual debate was raising, but having empowered me with such awareness, it also ignited my indignation against the evil Descriptivist.)

Not very long at all after this intellectual epiphany, I began taking my first course in Linguistics. Were I to pull out the notebook I used in that class and show you the first page, you would see where I wrote on the first day of class BEWARE: LINGUISTICS IS STRAIGHT UP DESCRIPTIVISM and circled it several times.

But then the unthinkable happened: I fell passionately in love with linguistic descriptivism, and I realized that, from a strictly historical standpoint, language did just fine for a few thousand years before the advent of Prescriptivism a few hundred years ago. Nevertheless, I remained ideologically aligned with the Prescriptivist camp because I felt we had to have an academic standard, a right and wrong for every question, and I clung tenaciously to these notions while immersing myself in my linguistics class--sorta like trying to swim with a 25-pound weight (I've done that before; it's excellent exercise but hard to do for very long).

Then summer came, and I enrolled in a Philosophy of Language class, and that's why I am the way I am now. Despite the fact that my professor was a self-proclaimed Prescriptivist, the course made me realize that utterances can only have meaning so long as a community agrees on some kind of association between sounds and intentions, and I came to the conclusion that, though I really like clear-cut right and wrong, language is a very liquid thing, which is why (I think) it's so effective (and also why it's so hard to nail down).

This semester is my first in the English Language program here at BYU. I left summer term a repentant Prescriptivist, now solidly rooted in the Descriptivist camp. Looking at my schedule that included classes such as "Modern American Usage" and "The Grammar of English," I was afraid that I'd be alone in my major: a newly converted Descriptivist in the midst of a hundred Snoots. I felt a little leary as I looked ahead to a couple of years of headbutting with closeminded Prescriptivist.

I have been pleasantly surprised: not only is the ELANG department's allignment decidedly Descriptivist, they also unilaterally hate Chompsky--and I'm all for that! Whereas I feared I was going to war in this new major, I now find myself feeling quite at home.

I have finally found my intellectual niche.