[lg policy] Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in the New Yorker: A bad week for Joan Acocella

[Harold Schiffman]

A bad week for Joan Acocella



By John E. McIntyre The Baltimore Sun

9:28 p.m. EDT, May 12, 2012

Since Joan Acocella of The New Yorker reviewed The Language Wars by
Henry Hitchings, which she appears not to have understood, she has
been subjected to a rare old pounding.

Jan Freeman disparaged the shallowness of her article at Throw Grammar
>>From the Train, and I could not resist chiming in myself.

Since then, the heavy artillery has been limbered up. At Language Log,
Mark Liberman concluded that "the topic was not felt to be important
enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one
at the magazine with any competence in the area involved."

When one speaks of "rules" in language, he patiently explains, one has
to realize that there are two types, "the emergent regularities of
living language, including vernacular varieties of language," which
linguists study, and "invented stipulations about allegedly proper
usage, promulgated by explicit instruction," the area in which editors
and style guides operate.

Warming to the subject in a second post, "A half century of usage
denialism," he suggests that Ms. Acocella's willful misreading of the
texts she cites and her snide tone about what she imagines
descriptivists to be are representative of the culture of her
magazine. He quotes a 1958 letter from E.B. White to his publisher
with remarks about "the modern liberal of the English Department, the
anything-goes fellow," and "the Happiness Boys, or, as you call them,
the descriptivists." He finds the same attitude in Ms. Acocella's
weird "view that publishers are conspiring behind the scenes to
placate hypocritical liberal descriptivists, 'little men' who believe
that 'anything goes.' "

Commenting at length on the post, Deniz Rudin says, "Descriptivism and
prescriptivism are not the same type of thing. Descriptivism is an
investigatory approach to the formal study of language, and it is
uncontroversial in linguistics departments because it is the only sane
approach—nobody opposes descriptivism in biology, or argues for a
prescriptivist physics. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, is a branch
of etiquette columnry—prescriptivists advise us of what the more
embarrassing solecisms are, so that we can in avoiding them be judged
by the cultured to be one of their own."

Not that I am wild about seeing my career as a professional editor
dismissed as "etiquette columnry," but there is a point to that.
Editing, though a prescriptive activitmy, is not a matter of merely
following The Rules. It encompasses judgments of taste and register
and audience and occasion. I enforce stylebook guidelines without
granting them the status of Newtonian physics. I cut and reword texts
unapologetically, without imagining that the preferences for this
particular occasion should govern all writing in English everywhere.

Besides, scorning the vernacular is bad policy; the vernacular has a
peculiar tendency to infiltrate the formal.

It is deeply regrettable that The New Yorker allowed such a shoddy
piece of work to see print. And it is no favor to the memory of E.B.
White, an admirable, thoughtful, and humane writer, to enshrine his
mistaken attitudes about language and usage.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-a-bad-week-for-joan-acocella-20120512,0,1562408.story?track=rss

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-a-bad-week-for-joan-acocella-20120512,0,1562408.story?track=rsshttp://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-a-bad-week-for-joan-acocella-20120512,0,1562408.story?track=rss

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