Fowler's three-colored flag?
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Liam Julian, "Putting Fowler back in Fowler's" (Hoover Institution, 2009) presents a perspective that used to be more common that it is today, I think: linguistic prescriptivism as (a particular kind of) cultural conservatism, in explicit association with right-wing politics. Julian wrote:
Burchfield, in his preface to Fowler’s third edition, called the first edition “this extraordinary book, the Bible of presciptivists.” But in the early 20th century, when Fowler was writing the extraordinary book, the trend was away from prescriptivism and toward a descriptive, academic linguistics that, like Burchfield himself, observed rather than decreed.1 Burchfield stressed the extent of “the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day” and highlighted “his heavy dependence” on English school textbooks and the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and post-Renaissance English literature. For Fowler, Burchfield wrote, these influences composed “a three-colored flag” that “was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as possible, everything it represented was to be preserved intact.”
I described “James Kilpatrick, Linguistic socialist” (3/28/2008) as a political conserative with a somewhat different idea about where linguistic prescriptions should come from. And there have been many other examples of right-wing prescriptivists (see e.g. "English Gramar: Not for debate", 9/11/2010).
Of course there have been plenty of famous prescriptivists from other regions of the politico-cultural space, like E.B. White and George Orwell. But the recent prominence of the Classical Learning Test suggests that right-wing-associated prescriptivism might be on the rise.
JPL said,
September 16, 2025 @ 4:46 pm
Burchfield's attitude of reverence for the past and disdain for modern moral and intellectual corruption seems to have something in common with the school of constitutional interpretation called "originalism", which is the subject of a new book by Jill Lepore called "We the People: A History of the US Constitution". She's apparently making the case for a view of the Constitution as a system of principles which is open-ended in its construction and thus open to adaptive modification through being applied by new generations of users, kind of like the speech-community norms for languages. The general principles of both systems are not complete, unchanging and dead, like fossilized remains, but part of life. So what are the intellectual foundations for originalism and prescriptivism, as opposed to the attempt to understand the dynamics of life-forms?
Mark Liberman said,
September 16, 2025 @ 6:24 pm
@JPL:
The "attitude of reverance for the past" in the Julian quote is Burchfield's description of Fowler, not Burchfield's own position. Juiian's idea is to rescue Fowler from Burchfield's revisions, by returning to Fowler's first edition.
That said, your suggested connection to originalism seems valid.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 17, 2025 @ 6:32 am
The political metaphor seems questionable. Fowler was not only or primarily objecting to then-recent innovations in usage. Rather, the stock-in-trade of Fowler-style prescriptivism is to condemn and deprecate an established and inherited usage on the grounds that it is, in the opinion of the critic, "illogical" or inelegant and should thus be replaced by a supposedly better rule of grammar that the critic has himself made up. This style of busybody moralizing reformism based on appeals to logic rather than inherited practice was quite common in the Victorian and post-Victorian eras in both the US and UK, but was broadly understood as politically "liberal" in the context of the time. And you can see the same lack of "cultural conservatism" in earlier prescriptivists like Dryden and Lowth who were happy to say that they knew better than Shakespeare.
Mark Liberman said,
September 17, 2025 @ 6:58 am
@J.W. Brewer: "The political metaphor seems questionable."
I agree, but Liam Julian and the Hoover Institution seem convinced and committed.
David Marjanović said,
September 17, 2025 @ 7:09 am
The intellectual foundations of all approaches to the big-C Constitution rest on the fact that the Constitution is insanely hard to amend, far harder than any other constitution in the world (since the end of communism in Yugoslavia 35 years ago). To the best of my knowledge they don't have analogs elsewhere. In other words, the size of the dataset to test any such hypotheses with is 1.
David Marjanović said,
September 17, 2025 @ 7:22 am
So… what does the metaphor "a three-colored flag" mean?
Mark Liberman said,
September 17, 2025 @ 9:26 am
@David Marjanović: "what does the metaphor "a three-colored flag" mean?"
I interpreted it to refer to "the classics of
— though there are other ways to parse the passage…
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 17, 2025 @ 10:39 am
David & Mark,
I also thought that the choice of the term "three-colored flag" might be suggesting something along the lines of a "revolutionary" "banner" (e.g. "le tricolore"), around which to rally supporters of the cause, e.g.:
"[S]es origines […] remontent aux trois couleurs de la liberté (14 juillet 1789). Le bleu et le rouge auraient pour origine les couleurs de la ville de Paris, celles de la Garde nationale, couleurs qui entouraient le blanc du royaume de France, donc identiques aux trois couleurs utilisées par les différents pavillons français d'Ancien Régime."
Mark Liberman said,
September 17, 2025 @ 1:36 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti: I also thought that the choice of the term "three-colored flag" might be suggesting something along the lines of a "revolutionary" "banner" (e.g. "le tricolore"), around which to rally supporters of the cause
That certainly could be true, although Liam Julian positions Fowler as a supporter of the ancien régime…
JimG said,
September 18, 2025 @ 9:11 am
In France and Mexico, for example, the national men's soccer team is sometimes called "the tri-", linking the flag colors to national pride. Americans sang of three cheers for the Red-White-and-Blue in George M. Cohan's "The Grand Old Flag".