ABSTRACT

The prescriptivists are usually highly educated and literate, trained in the humanities, and often temperamentally conservative; the descriptivists are usually academic linguists and lexicographers, trained in linguistics or one of the social sciences, and temperamentally "progressive". The descriptivists, for their part, display nasty triumphalism, and show they ready to take advantage of immaterial errors on their opponents' part in order to evade rational and civil consideration of their arguments. To such considerations Geoffrey Nunberg may be indifferent, but linguistic activists are quite different. Linguists profess to be practicing a scientific discipline whose object is to learn the laws that govern a department of nature, linguistic behavior. And the nature under investigation by linguistic science is man's nature, of which a desire to erect standards, and use them to correct practice, is an essential element, not an aberration. Linguists find unacceptable in prescriptivism is the conscious, planned nature of its influence on language.