Practicing Prescriptivism Now and Then

Claudio: Nay, but I know who loues him and in despight of all, dies for him.
Prince: Shee shall be buried with her face vpwards.

--Much Ado about Nothing

Come let me love you . . . let me die in your arms.

--"Annie's Song" by John Denver

In a class I once took we were asked to identify a scholarly reference work that reported the sense of die intended by Claudio in Much Ado. Admiring the riches of the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1933), I checked it and was puzzled not to find the Shakespearean sense. The OED cited Claudio's line but assigned die the meaning 'to languish, pine away with passion; to be consumed with longing desire'. I thought perhaps I'd too cursorily skimmed the entry and lamely offered OED as my answer anyway. To a knowing and probing instructor I then had to admit that the greatest dictionary of English had diddl> was the obvious answer, but the right answer was Shakespeare's Bawdy (Partridge 1948), published in the twentieth century. Aiming perhaps to influence thinking and behavior, the OED's editors had fudged their descriptivist principles, and on sexual matters Victorian morality trumped Victorian scholarship.

In 1989, boldly identifying the sense 'to experience a sexual orgasm', the OED2 illustrates this die with Claudio's line and others from Donne, Dryden, Pope, D. H. Lawrence, and John Denver. Modern lexicographers and modern linguists, like their Victorian counterparts, proclaim descriptivism as a fundamental principle but, unlike the Victorians, on sexual matters have no difficulty honoring it. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, to critique or prescribe language use on most matters was to court ridicule, as in a 1990s best-seller that mocks "language mavens." The author, a linguist, invites readers to imagine a nature documentary in which the narrator reports trouble: "White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. . . . the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years" (Pinker 1994, 370). Predicting that viewers would reject such claims (asking, "What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an 'error'?"), the linguist is perplexed that people who would reject even the possibility of mistakes in animal communication so readily endorse judgments of good and bad in human language. Human language is "like the song of the humpback whale," he says, and the way to decide grammaticality is "to find people who speak the language and ask them."

Alas, this linguist is less the naturalist than he supposes. And, like many in our profession, he admits disappointment with people's answers about grammaticality. In fact, he finds people's insecurity about linguistic judgments "a nuisance in doing linguistic research." Plainly, if he believed that determining grammaticality were a matter merely of asking speakers, he could hardly lament their replies. For linguists, languages may be natural phenomena to be observed and analyzed, much as naturalists describe animal behavior. Truth to tell, though, human language differs profoundly from sparrow calls and whale songs, as everyone understands, and if judging and insecurity characterize human language use, they too should be observed and analyzed.

Even while adhering to a basic descriptivist philosophy, distinguished linguists of the twentieth century sometimes confessed to prescriptivist language sentiments. Otto Jespersen, a Dane and author of a superb description of English, acknowledged "a higher linguistic morality than that of recognizing the greatest absurdities when they once have usage on their side" (1925, 112). C. C. Fries, ardent descriptivist, accomplished grammarian, and president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), conceded that "much as we condemn the purist's view . . . we cannot help feeling that there may be something entirely valid behind his protests" (1927, 103). Leonard Bloomfield, a founder of structural linguistics and another LSA president, reported that the Native American Menominee of Wisconsin were aware of who among them were the good...