ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which writers, teachers, scholars, and public figures sought to describe and regulate English during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It looks at the orthoepists: writers who tried to characterize English pronunciation by locating sounds in the physical movements of the human mouth. It looks, too, at the rise of dictionaries, culminating in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755, and the challenges of doing etymological and literary work with words. It also shows how two different approaches to the study and teaching of language developed: (1) prescriptivism (an attempt to regulate how people should write and speak); and (2) descriptivism (an attempt to describe how people actually did write and speak). This tension between prescribing and describing informs the modern study and teaching of English, and its legacy is central to our own notions of standards and style.
