[(myl) I'm afraid that you seem to be the one who didn't read DFW carefully. His trademark irony aside, he was completely serious about being a "SNOOT"; and like all too many language peevers, he was badly informed about the positions that he opposed and satirized, and also amazingly careless in his own broad-brush assertions about Proper Usage. See Language Hat's 2002 critique for chapter and verse, or see this 2009 LLOG post for some discussion of the slipshod scholarship in his strawmanification of Philip Gove and Webster's Third.]

I agree. I think this whole kerfuffle is symptomatic of deeper misunderstanding about the scientific goals of linguistics as a field. People don't understand the purpose of linguistics. Because it's more entangled with social behavior, it's harder to study it dispassionately as a scientific enterprise, no different than, say, biology. A common theme on this blog, granted.

Of course. As many, many people have said, descriptivism does not mean "Hey, anything goes, spell and talk and write however you like, there are no rules!" It means languages should be described as they are and not as random moralists think they should be. One basic fact often (in fact, virtually always) ignored by prescriptivists setting up their "descriptivist" straw men for another bashing is that descriptivism in the linguistic sense has nothing to do with spelling or style (in the "do commas go inside or outside quotes?" sense); those things are arbitrary/conventional and are decided by reference to dictionaries and style guides, respectively. That does not mean they are set in stone — they are subject to change, as are all human things — and eventually those changes are reflected in the dictionaries ("base ball" becomes "base-ball" which becomes "baseball"), but any linguist will agree that if you are writing for the public eye you should spell words in the conventionally accepted way. That issue has nothing to do with grammar and spoken usage, which is what descriptivism addresses, and it's a disservice to clear thinking and honest discussion to pretend it does.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool descriptivist who despises attempts to tell people how to talk their own language, and I am also a copyeditor who enforces Webster's spelling and Chicago's style rules. There is no contradiction whatever, despite what idiotic New Yorker writers might think.

According to two recent comments on Bloom's piece, and an item on one of the WSJ's blogs, Bloom has posted an update. The WSJ item says that the update "pretty much nullifies the [original] post" and one of the commenters at the New Yorker quotes the update as referring to "the nit-picking displayed in certain mainstream essays that promote extreme descriptive values while simultaneously demonizing the prescriptive 'rules.'” (The other comment reads, "Thanks for the "Updated". I think I understand. You're saying that by 'descriptivists' you actually meant 'half-wits'. Or what the rest of us would call 'straw men'.")

But when I go looking for the update, I can't find it. I get a google hit for it, but when I click on the link I get directed to the Bloom's un-updated post…at the foot of which are two comments referring to the update.

Either there's some strange voodoo shit happening, or Bloom posted the
update and then took it down.

[(myl) I have the same experience: at least two of the comments refer to an update, but no update seems to be present.]

For example, if a newspaper published the word sentence spelled sentance, a descriptivist could point out that it "should" be spelled with an e

Can a true descriptivist could make such an unequivocal claim? I don't think so — and your use of quotation marks around "should" reveals that.

… there is an enormous number of peculiarities in current American use that do not follow the rules of English grammar.

This is based on the (mistaken, IMO) notion that the subject(?) is the singular number.

Like astrology, linguology is the study and application of a theory dreamed up in more superstitious times when the ancients were thought to be the only reliable source of knowledge. Both have survived into modern times, practised by armchair kooks without any formal training, despite being thoroughly discredited by scholars.

I'm inclined to call Poe's law on the second letter, too — not least because of this bit:

"there is an enormous number of peculiarities in current American use that do not follow the rules of English grammar"

Very arch.

Quite so. Surely they realise that it is bad grammar to use "enormous" to mean "very large".

Alacritas: The older construction, still alive and well in many parts, is "Have you finished your homework (yet)?" with refers to a current situation, while "Did you finish your homework?" would not be used with "yet" but could refer to any time in the past.

I'd thought it was something even stupider than that - I'm pretty sure that some people object to "have you finished your homework yet" on the grounds that "yet" means "still" and so "have you finished your homework yet" means "have you still finished your homework".

there is an enormous number of peculiarities in current American use that do not follow the rules of English grammar

Very arch.