ABSTRACT
Prescriptivism is often assumed to be a major influence on language change, but this is one of the most difficult topics to analyse. For all that, it is constantly around us today, in different forms – exploited for commercial purposes or being made fun of online in the form of memes – and it is drawn upon for literary or popular entertainment purposes. Awareness of prescriptivism among the general public is consequently higher than even before. One case study shows prescriptivism drawn upon by British novelists whose personal history is steeped in class consciousness (Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Len Deighton) and another discusses the typically British tradition of letters to the editor, here inspired by John Honey’s controversial pamphlet The Language Trap (1983). Linguistic criticism, as found in letters to the editor but also in the metalinguistic comments in modern literature, is evidence of a strong linguistic awareness that is closely tied with age and – in the UK – social class membership. The chapter ends by discussing the influence of usage guides on language use, illustrating the lack of such influence by the most iconic of usage guides, Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
