{"id":39621,"date":"2018-08-13T07:31:05","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T12:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=39621"},"modified":"2018-08-13T07:49:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-13T12:49:28","slug":"draconian-dictionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=39621","title":{"rendered":"Draconian dictionaries?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachel Paige King (\"The Draconian Dictionary Is Back<\/a>\", The Atlantic<\/em> 8\/5\/2018) suggests that lexicographers might be (re)turning to prescriptivism:<\/p>\n

Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

The standard way of describing these two approaches in lexicography is to call them \u201cdescriptivist\u201d and \u201cprescriptivist.\u201d Descriptivist lexicographers, steeped in linguistic theory, eschew value judgements about so-called correct English and instead describe how people are using the language. Prescriptivists, by contrast, inform readers which usage is \u201cright\u201d and which is \u201cwrong.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

King's historical sketch of lexicography's past century concludes that the descriptivists have won, but that<\/p>\n

oddly enough, Merriam-Webster is doing a great deal to promote the idea that sounding educated and using standard\u2014if not highbrow\u2014English really does\u00a0matter. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

The company has a feisty blog and Twitter feed that it uses to criticize linguistic and grammatical choices. Donald\u00a0Trump and his administration are regular catalysts for social-media clarifications by Merriam-Webster. The company\u00a0seems bothered<\/a>\u00a0when Trump and his associates change the meanings of words for their own convenience, or when they\u00a0debase the language<\/a>\u00a0more generally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s not the dictionary that has become outmoded today, but descriptivism itself. I\u2019m not implying that Merriam-Webster has or should abandon the philosophy that guides its lexicography, but it seems that the way the company has regained its relevance in the post-print era is by having a strong opinions about how people should use English.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

King's discussion seems to me to mix up at least three different aspects of the descriptive\/prescriptive issue: the goals<\/em> of producers and consumers of reference works; the methods<\/em> used in pursuit of those goals; and the stance<\/em> taken towards different socio-cultural groups and issues.<\/p>\n

Consider the difference between an etiquette manual and an ethnography. They have different goals<\/em>, by definition — the first one aims to tell its readers what customs to follow in certain social contexts, while the second one claims simply to describe what those customs are.\u00a0 With respect to methods<\/em>, either kind of work might summarize years of\u00a0 careful observation, or might simply present the author's idiosyncratic prejudices as fact. And with respect to stance<\/em>, both works are likely to take a respectful attitude towards the culture they discuss while implying quite different attitudes towards other groups. The etiquette manual might describe as boorish or uncultured the behavior of people that an ethnography values; and an ethnography might offer its own negatively-evaluated terms for the behavior of the people the etiquette manual sets up as models. (Though there's more to be said about why ethnographies generally study deprecated or marginalized groups rather than elites…)<\/p>\n

But readers are free to use an ethnography as an etiquette manual, and vice versa. Most people would agree that\u00a0 careful observations are a better guide to action than idiosyncratic prejudices. And the linguistic aspects of social stance are always both relevant and contested, across divides of class, ethnicity, geography, and generational change.<\/p>\n

The historical controversies that King cites — e.g. over Webster's Third<\/a> — were about whether dictionaries should include entries for non-standard forms like ain't<\/em>\u00a0or off-color slang like horny<\/em>,\u00a0 should take note of the past century of usage in the case of shall<\/em> and will<\/em>, and so on.\u00a0 These issues were less about goals and methods than about stance, though all three dimensions certainly played a role in the discussions. But no one was arguing that common typos and misspellings should be accepted as correct, for example.<\/p>\n

And if we take \"descriptivism\" to mean \"paying attention to the facts of usage\", then there are plenty of examples of descriptivist prescription. A couple of examples from past LLOG posts:<\/p>\n

\"Still no subject postposing at the The New Yorker<\/a>\", 6\/9\/2010
\n\"Economist still chicken: botches sentence rather than split infinitive<\/a>\", 6\/11\/2013<\/p>\n

(FWIW, note that in terms of social stance, those posts happen to be punching up rather than down.)<\/p>\n

Some other LLOG discussion of related ideas:<\/p>\n

\"'Everything is correct' vs. 'Nothing is relevant'<\/a>\", 1\/26\/2005
\n\"Prescriptivist science<\/a>\", 5\/30\/2008
\n\"A test kitchen for stylistic recipes<\/a>\", 6\/1\/2008
\n\"Logical prescriptivism<\/a>\", 5\/25\/2009
\n\"Peever politics<\/a>\", 11\/20\/2011
\n\"The politics of prescriptivism<\/a>\", 11\/20\/2011
\n\"Rules and 'rules'<\/a>\", 5\/11\/2012
\n\"Scientific prescriptivism: Garner Pullumizes?<\/a>\", 5\/8\/2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Paige King (\"The Draconian Dictionary Is Back\", The Atlantic 8\/5\/2018) suggests that lexicographers might be (re)turning to prescriptivism: Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. […] The standard way of describing these two approaches in lexicography is to call them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,278],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-the-media","category-lexicon-and-lexicography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39621"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39631,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39621\/revisions\/39631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}