Descriptivism Vs Prescriptivism

pre`scrip´tiv`ism:n. 1. The doctrine that acceptable grammatical rules should be prescribed by authority, rather than be determined by common usage.

Ain't nothin' wrong with Descriptivism. --PhlIp

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Remember to read 'I' as the author and 'you' as the reader. But most of all, remember that you are both reader and author in this place.

I occasionally spell incorrectly. If I'm saying something important, it may have little to do with how well-organized or how well-polished the spelling is. I will rework it and make it easier to read if I find the ideas worth working into a more accessible form. Language is fluid; it lives in the minds of those who communicate with it. Most important to language is that it facilitates the transmission of any idea capable of being conceived. While it's nice to have an efficient language, or a pretty language, when these things interfere with the transmission of ideas they are performing a disservice to those who are simply trying to use the language.

Poor spelling and grammar also perform a disservice when they interfere with the transmission of ideas. Which is better: spending a few minutes polishing your writing, or may king eazh uv hyoreedurs spendt uh fyoo minnuts fig yuring owt watt hyumeen?

It should be understood that language changes, and by that is meant that spellings change, our accents change, the words we commonly use change, and even the rules of what is good grammar change. Wiki should reflect that fact and embrace it. So long as you have understood with sufficient accuracy and with sufficient precision there really has been no mistake in language.

Yes, that is all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that every subjective grammatical error in a sentence doubles the time it takes to read it. Although one can still understand what the author meant (by subconsciously translating the text to a grammatical version), the communication problem is still there. That's why we have what we like to refer to as 'right' and 'wrong'. They are there to help people find and use a common set of grammatical rules, which minimizes the number of little distractions that are ungrammaticalities.

Isn't prescriptivism dead yet?

As I understand it, it's pretty indisputable that people can understand each other perfectly well without laying down rules - the rules are emergent (c.f. creoles). People who try to specify "correct" rules are both getting above themselves and wasting their time IMO (LudditesAlwaysLose?). This maps to the "dictionaries should be descriptive, not prescriptive" view held by the majority of modern dictionaries, described well here: http://englishplus.com/news/news1100.htm.

Difficulty in understanding is common, so the fewer changes, especially to the mainstream grammatical rules, the better.

(These last two paragraphs seem to contradict each other.)

I don't think so. For any large group of people to successfully understand each other, particularly when discussing topics of significant complexity, they need to agree on a set of rules to abide by in their communications, and those who follow the rules will have a higher likelihood of being understood. That's not to say, though, that those rules cannot (and should not!) change over time, according to the needs and desires of that group. The users of a language set the rules (consciously or unconsciously) for that language, but it is still beneficial to document the state of those rules at any given time. -- MikeSmith

But from the point of view of descriptive linguistics, the average adult is always competent in their native language (although everyone makes mistakes). Standards for informal dialects are communicated informally, and change over time informally, and need not be explicitly taught. Otherwise, obviously language wouldn't exist.

Prescriptivism arises, not because people can't understand each other without it, but because:

• There are methods for communicating better than the average ways, which were discovered or invented over time, and which can be taught. English classes try to teach us to write clearly by using prescriptive forms.
• Every culture with more than one language dialect has at least one prestige dialect (the one spoken by a group that is perceived as being the socially prestigious group). The prestige dialect is then labelled "correct" by prescriptivists, and alternate dialects are labelled "incorrect". Such labelling is sheer elitism, but it is nonetheless advantageous to know the prestige dialect of any language.
  • There are some interesting complexities to this, as witness the reverse-elitism in historical "Thieves Cant".