English Language Prescriptiveness

From LanguageOnItsWayDown :

I once heard the story of a radio talk show host that received a call from some nutjob talking about how people were misusing English, how the meanings of words were changing and people weren't using the proper expressions anymore. The talk show host decided to play along, and agreed with the caller completely, but didn't think the caller went far enough. The host then called on the listeners to reverse the GreatVowelShift?.

Can I still get annoyed at nonsensical expressions like double-negatives, or "I could care less"? Please?

[I read a (possibly apocryphal) story once about an English professor lecturing, and commenting that while the use of the double negative to indicate the positive was widespread, there didn't seem to be any use of the opposite, where a double positive was used to indicate the negative. He was cut short when a voice from the audience sarcastically shouted out "Yeah, right".]

Unlike with, say, French, authorities in EnglishLanguage tend to be descriptive ("This is how the language is used") rather than prescriptive ("This is how the language ought to be used"). It is widely accepted that the language will continue to evolve.

(Unlike with?? There's a plank in your eye, buddy.) - Cheers. More on this below.

Is there then a role for prescriptiveness in English? In some circumstances, I think so.

The most important thing about English today is that most of the people who use it are not native speakers. As a friend of mine once announced: "I speak the world language -- broken English" (Or, as BruceWillis? said in TheFifthElement?, "I only speak two languages -- English and Bad English"). If you are writing for the web, or if you work in an I.T. department, you will spend a lot of your time communicating with non-native English speakers. (This is discussed in EnglishIsTheNewLatin)

My principles for using English in these circumstances are:

Avoid needless complexity (related to YAGNI, I suppose). NEVER SHOW OFF. The most confusing English occurs when the speaker is demonstrating their cleverness by deliberately using obscure phrases. It doesn't matter if they're slang, archaisms or just obscure. "My alarm clock having been adjusted correctly, I got up on time this morning" is perfectly correct, but it's a rare construction in English, (nominative absolute, actually)) and it would be better to phrase it more naturally.

Aim for correctness. If someone has learned English in a classroom or from a book, then common errors might confuse them ( things like there/they're/their ). They will need more clues to resolve the ambiguity than a more fluent speaker would.

I think idioms like "I could care less" are common enough not to need avoiding. In England we are more likely to use the more logical "I couldn't care less", but globally that's probably dying out. The things to avoid are stupid errors like effect/affect. That's the one that really makes me want to hit people, because I suspect that people know that if A has had an effect on B, then A has affected B, but they think that "A has effected B" means the same thing and they use it because it is less common. So even if they were right, it would be a bad thing to do, and in fact they are not only wrong, they are saying something that has a different meaning from what they intended, but is close enough to cause confusion.

The things that aren't important are features that have more or less died out, and style questions. As a card-carrying pedant, I know that if you have three dice and lose two of them, you have one die left, but more people would understand "roll a dice" than "roll a die". It is good literary style to avoid repeating the same word by choosing different synonyms each time you need it, but it's hard work on the poor English speaker.

The main issue is an attitude of mind. You have to remember that the person you're talking to or writing for has gone to the trouble of learning your language, and the least you can do is make it easy for them.

Finally, proofread, and don't rely on spelling checkers.

-- AndrewMcGuinness

Changes that lose information are worth railing against. When even putatively well-educated commentators on public radio use "may" for "might" (e.g., "If authorities had taken the proper precautions, the catastrophe [which actually took place] may have been prevented."), there's a serious degradation. -- TomRossen

Common errors like may/might, less/fewer, lose information as TomRossen says, but there is a tradeoff in that losing the distinction reduces what an English speaker has to learn. I think it is reasonable to ask how often, for instance, changing "might" to "may" affects the meaning of the sentence.

The criticism of my second paragraph (The "Unlike with..." bit) has set me off on a new line of thought. The sentence is so clear in meaning that I can hardly see a way of fixing the grammatical error without losing meaning. I regret the error despite that. The argument I had not previously considered is that, while plain enough itself, sloppy use of grammar like that damages the expectation that the same words will be used in a precise way elsewhere. There could be a kind of collateral damage or externality which affects the language as a whole. Tom Rossen's example is another one where a sentence is completely clear, but erodes the distinction between "may" and "might" which is frequently significant.

(Fictionally, "The Chancellor may decide next year that the five convergence tests have still not been passed": Has Tony given him permission, or does the speaker think he might anyway?)

So let it be "Authorities in the English language, unlike those in French, etc."

-- AndrewMcGuinness

How about just Unlike, say, French, authorities in EnglishLanguage tend to be descriptive. Just a case of an unnecessary word making it sloppy. In response to your explanatory paragraph just above, I would agree. The problem is that when somebody uses English incorrectly, the listener is supposed to be able to interpret what was really meant based on something besides the content of the words themselves. Naturally we all use context, body language etc. for that, but many times what the speaker thinks is the obvious interpretation of an incorrectly worded statement isn't as obvious to every listener, hence the need for ClarityOfExpression: Say what you mean, and mean what you say. -- MarkTilley

My pet peeve is lack of parallelism, and I find that such lack can make things sound *very* awkward or difficult to understand. May I suggest:

"Unlike those in French, authorities in EnglishLanguage..."

(though I suppose it should be 'FrenchLanguage' ;) and AndrewMcGuinness' reordering of the clauses seems like a good idea too.)

Here, "authorities" are the things being compared, so we require a phrase which alludes to authorities in the French language. To say "unlike, say," compares the English authorities with the French *language*; and to say "unlike with"... well, I'm not entirely sure what can be made of that at all. -- KarlKnechtel

Re: parallellism - you're absolutely right Karl, that was the pan calling the pot calling the kettle black. The only thing lost in your correction is the sense that French is just one example of a language where authorities are prescriptive, therefore:

"Unlike say, those in French, authorities in EnglishLanguage..." -- MarkTilley

A key question is: Are we teaching English (to children, or to non-native speakers), or are we describing it (as a linguist would do?) Prescriptiveness is entirely appropriate in the first case (obviously drift in the language should be expected, but a language that is sufficiently divergent that its speakers have difficulty understanding one another is not a GoodThing). Descriptiveness is appropriate in the latter case--it is questionable scientific practice for a scientist to attempt to modify the thing being studied to match theory, methinks.

And of course, it should be pointed out that there are many mutually unintelligible dialects of English about. The "standard" national dialects of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all mutually intelligible for the most part (factoring out regional slang); but many smaller communities within these countries have dialects that are difficult for residents of other countries to understand. Many Americans have difficulty with certain Scottish dialects (Trainspotting -- a film out of Scotland -- was shown with subtitles in one scene in the U.S., despite being in English); an Aussie might have trouble understanding someone from Newfoundland or Cape Breton, and I'm sure lots of Brits get utterly confused by Ebonics. (OTOH, most Americans can understand Ebonics; the English can generally understand the Scots, etc.) Throw in numerous pidgins and creoles from around the world, and there are numerous languages that call themselves "English".