Steven Pinker’s 1994 The Language Instinct is a good and fairly literate example of this second kind of Descriptivist argument, which, like the Gove-et-al. version, tends to deploy a jr.-high-filmstrip SCIENCE: POINTING THE WAY TO A BRIGHTER TOMORROW- type tone:
[T]he words “rule” and “grammar” have very different meanings to a scientist and a layperson. The rules people learn (or, more likely, fail to learn) in school are called “prescriptive” rules, prescribing how one ought to talk. Scientists studying language propose “descriptive” rules, describing how people do talk. Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are simply different things. [35]
The point of this version of Descriptivism is to show that the descriptive rules are more fundamental and way more important than the prescriptive rules. The argument goes like this. An English sentence’s being meaningful is not the same as its being grammatical. That is, such clearly ill-formed constructions as “Did you seen the car keys of me?” or “The show was looked by many people” are nevertheless comprehensible; the sentences do, more or less, communicate the information they’re trying to get across. Add to this the fact that nobody who isn’t damaged in some profound Oliver Sacksish way actually ever makes these sorts of very deep syntactic errors 36 and you get the basic proposition of N. Chomsky’s generative linguistics, which is that there exists a Universal Grammar beneath and common to all languages, plus that there is probably an actual part of the human brain that’s imprinted with this Universal Grammar the same way birds’ brains are imprinted with Fly South and dogs’ with Sniff Genitals. There’s all kinds of compelling evidence and support for these ideas, not least of which are the advances that linguists and cognitive scientists and AI researchers have been able to make with them, and the theories have a lot of credibility, and they are adduced by the Philosophical Descriptivists to show that since the really important rules of language are at birth already hardwired into people’s neocortex, SWE prescriptions against dangling participles or mixed metaphors are basically the linguistic equivalent of whalebone corsets and short forks for salad. As Steven Pinker puts it, “When a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to order words into everyday sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential decorations.”
This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it’s still vulnerable to objections. The first one is easy. Even if it’s true that we’re all wired with a Universal Grammar, it doesn’t follow that all prescriptive rules are superfluous. Some of these rules really do seem to serve clarity and precision. The injunction against two-way adverbs (“People who eat this often get sick”) is an obvious example, as are rules about other kinds of misplaced modifiers (“There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better than others”) and about relative pronouns’ proximity to the nouns they modify (“She’s the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day”).
Granted, the Philosophical Descriptivist can question just how absolutely necessary these rules are: it’s quite likely that a recipient of clauses like the above could figure out what they mean from the sentences on either side or from the overall context or whatever. 37 A listener can usually figure out what I really mean when I misuse infer for imply or say indicate for say, too. But many of these solecisms—or even just clunky redundancies like “The door was rectangular in shape”—require at least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort, a kind of rapid sift-and-discard process, before the recipient gets it. Extra work. It’s debatable just how much extra work, but it seems indisputable that we put some extra interpretive burden on the recipient when we fail to honor certain conventions. W/r/t confusing clauses like the above, it simply seems more “considerate” to follow the rules of correct English … just as it’s more “considerate” to de-slob your home before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date. Not just more considerate but more respectful somehow—both of your listener/reader and of what you’re trying to get across. As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English “makes a statement” or “sends a message”—even though these statements/messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you’re trying to communicate.
We’ve now sort of bled into a more serious rejoinder to Philosophical Descriptivism: from the fact that linguistic communication is not strictly dependent on usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the traditional rules of usage and grammar are nothing but “inconsequential decorations.” Another way to state this objection is that something’s being “decorative” does not necessarily make it “inconsequential.” Rhetoric-wise, Pinker’s flip dismissal is very bad tactics, for it invites precisely the question it’s begging: inconsequential to whom?
A key point here is that the resemblance between usage rules and certain conventions of etiquette or fashion is closer than the Philosophical Descriptivists know and far more important than they understand. Take, for example, the Descriptivist claim that so-called correct English usages like brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these claims are 100 percent reasonable. Then let’s talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the so-called correct subthoracic clothing for US males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (US females get to wear either skirts or pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it’s got to do with certain traditions about gender and leg-position, the same reasons women were supposed to ride sidesaddle and girls’ bikes don’t have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; 38 pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the ’nads and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men’s leg-hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs; etc. etc.). Let us grant—as a thought experiment if nothing else—that these are all sensible and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us, in fact, in our minds and hearts say yes—shout yes—to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and motile as we want.
And yet the fact remains that in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a US male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a US male and also have a US male child, and if that child might happen to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100 percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Dr. Steven Pinker himself—you’re going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a total geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. 39 In our present culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is “making a statement” that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences for him.
You can probably see where this is headed. I’m going to describe the intended point of the pants analogy in terms that I’m sure are simplistic—doubtless there are whole books in Pragmatics or psycholinguistics or something devoted to
unpacking this point. The weird thing is that I’ve seen neither Descriptivists nor SNOOTs deploy it in the Wars. 40,41
When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It’s a function of the fact that there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. “I was attacked by a bear!” to “Goddamn bear tried to kill me!” to “That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!” and so on. Add the Saussurian/Chomskian consideration that many grammatically ill-formed sentences can also get the propositional content across—“Bear attack Tonto, Tonto heap scared!”—and the number of subliminal options we’re scanning/sorting/interpreting as we communicate with one another goes transfinite very quickly. And different levels of diction and formality are only the simplest kinds of distinction; things get way more complicated in the sorts of interpersonal communication where social relations and feelings and moods come into play. Here’s a familiar kind of example. Suppose that you and I are acquaintances and we’re in my apartment having a conversation and that at some point I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore. Very delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to handle it: “Wow, look at the time”; “Could we finish this up later?”; “Could you please leave now?”; “Go”; “Get out”; “Get the hell out of here”; “Didn’t you say you had to be someplace?”; “Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend”; “Off you go then, love”; or that sly old telephone-conversation-ender: “Well, I’m going to let you go now”; etc. etc.n And then think of all the different factors and implications of each option. 42
The point here is obvious. It concerns a phenomenon that SNOOTs blindly reinforce and that Descriptivists badly underestimate and that scary vocab-tape ads try to exploit. People really do judge one another according to their use of language. Constantly. Of course, people are constantly judging one another on the basis of all kinds of things—height, weight, scent, physiognomy, accent, occupation, make of vehicle 43—and, again, doubtless it’s all terribly complicated and occupies whole battalions of sociolinguists. But it’s clear that at least one component of all this interpersonal semantic judging involves acceptance, meaning not some touchy-feely emotional affirmation but actual acceptance or rejection of someone’s bid to be regarded as a peer, a member of somebody else’s collective or community or Group. Another way to come at this is to acknowledge something that in the Usage Wars gets mentioned only in very abstract terms: “correct” English usage is, as a practical matter, a function of whom you’re talking to and of how you want that person to respond—not just to your utterance but also to you. In other words, a large part of the project of any communication is rhetorical and depends on what some rhet-scholars call “Audience” or “Discourse Community.” 44 It is the present existence in the United States of an enormous number of different Discourse Communities, plus the fact that both people’s use of English and their interpretations of others’ use are influenced by rhetorical assumptions, that are central to understanding why the Usage Wars are so politically charged and to appreciating why Bryan Garner’s ADMAU is so totally sneaky and brilliant and modern.
Fact: There are all sorts of cultural/geographical dialects of American English—Black English, Latino English, Rural Southern, Urban Southern, Standard Upper-Midwest, Maine Yankee, East-Texas Bayou, Boston Blue-Collar, on and on. Everybody knows this. What not everyone knows—especially not certain Prescriptivists—is that many of these non-SWE-type dialects have their own highly developed and internally consistent grammars, and that some of these dialects’ usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense than do their Standard counterparts. Plus, of course, there are also innumerable sub- and subsubdialects 45 based on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with locale or ethnicity—Medical-School English, Twelve-Year-Old-Males-Whose-Worldview-Is-Deeply-Informed-by-South-Park English—that are nearly incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t inside their very tight and specific Discourse Community (which of course is part of their function 46).
INTERPOLATION
POTENTIALLY DESCRIPTIVIST-LOOKING EXAMPLE OF SOME GRAMMATICAL ADVANTAGES OF A NON-STANDARD DIALECT THAT THIS REVIEWER ACTUALLY KNOWS ABOUT FIRSTHAND
I happen to have two native English dialects—the SWE of my hypereducated parents and the hard-earned Rural Midwestern of most of my peers. When I’m talking to RMs, I tend to use constructions like “Where’s it at?” for “Where is it?” and sometimes “He don’t” instead of “He doesn’t.” Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not get rejected as an egghead or fag (see sub). But another part is that I, SNOOT or no, believe that these RMisms are in certain ways superior to their Standard equivalents.
For a dogmatic Prescriptivist, “Where’s it at?” is double-damned as a sentence that not only ends with a preposition but whose final preposition forms a redundancy with where that’s similar to the redundancy in “the reason is because” (which latter usage I’ll admit makes me dig my nails into my palms). Rejoinder: First off, the avoid-terminal-prepositions rule is the invention of one Fr. R. Lowth, an 18th-century British preacher and indurate pedant who did things like spend scores of pages arguing for hath over the trendy and degenerate has. The a.-t.-p. rule is antiquated and stupid and only the most ayotolloid SNOOT takes it seriously. Garner himself calls the rule “stuffy” and lists all kinds of useful constructions like “a person I have great respect for” and “the man I was listening to” that we’d have to discard or distort if we really enforced it. Plus, the apparent redundancy of “Where’s it at?” 47 is offset by its metrical logic: what the at really does is license the contraction of is after the interrogative adverb. You can’t say “Where’s it?” So the choice is between “Where is it?” and “Where’s it at?”, and the latter, a strong anapest, is prettier and trips off the tongue better than “Where is it?”, whose meter is either a clunky monosyllabic-foot + trochee or it’s nothing at all.
Using “He don’t” makes me a little more uncomfortable; I admit that its logic isn’t quite as compelling. Nevertheless, a clear trend in the evolution of English from Middle to Modern has been the gradual regularizing of irregular present-tense verbs, 48 a trend justified by the fact that irregulars are hard to learn and to keep straight and have nothing but history going for them. By this reasoning, Standard Black English is way out on the cutting edge of English with its abandonment of the 3-S present in to do and to go and to say and its marvelously streamlined six identical present-tense inflections of to be. (Granted, the conjugation “he be” always sounds odd to me, but then SBE is not one of my dialects.)
This is probably the place for your SNOOT reviewer openly to concede that a certain number of traditional prescriptive rules really are stupid and that people who insist on them (like the legendary assistant to Margaret Thatcher who refused to read any memo with a split infinitive in it, or the jr.-high teacher I had who automatically graded you down if you started a sentence with Hopefully) are that very most contemptible and dangerous kind of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong. The injunction against split infinitives, for instance, is a consequence of the weird fact that English grammar is modeled on Latin even though Latin is a synthetic language and English is an analytic language. 49 Latin infinitives consist of one word and are impossible to as it were split, and the earliest English Prescriptivists—so enthralled with Latin that their English usage guides were actually written in Latin 50—decided that English infinitives shouldn’t be split either. Garner himself takes out after the s.i. rule in his miniessays on both SPLIT INFINITIVES and SUPERSTITIONS. 51 And Hopefully at the beginning of a sentence, as a certain cheeky eighth-grader once (to his everlasting social cost) pointed out in class, actually functions not as a misplaced modal auxiliary or as a manner adverb like quickly or angrily bu
t as a sentence adverb (i.e., as a special kind of “veiled reflexive” that indicates the speaker’s attitude about the state of affairs described by the rest of the sentence—examples of perfectly OK sentence adverbs are clearly, basically, luckily), and only SNOOTs educated in the high-pedantic years 1940-1960 blindly proscribe it or grade it down.
The cases of split infinitives and Hopefully are in fact often trotted out by dogmatic Descriptivists as evidence that all SWE usage rules are arbitrary and dumb (which is a bit like pointing to Pat Buchanan as evidence that all Republicans are maniacs). FYI, Garner rejects Hopefully’s knee-jerk proscription, too, albeit grudgingly, saying “the battle is lost” and including the adverb in his miniessay on SKUNKED TERMS, which is his phrase for a usage that is “hotly disputed … any use of it is likely to distract some readers.” (Garner also points out something I’d never quite realized, which is that hopefully, if misplaced/ mispunctuated in the body of a sentence, can create some of the same two-way ambiguities as other adverbs, as in e.g. “I will borrow your book and hopefully read it soon.”
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, most of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in several subdialects and are probably at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of course, on whom you’re addressing. More to the point, I submit that the dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and on whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group. An obvious example is that traditional upper-class English has certain dialectal differences from lower-class English and that schools used to have courses in elocution whose whole raison was to teach people how to speak in an upper-class way. But usage-as-inclusion is about much more than class. Try another sort of thought experiment: A bunch of US teenagers in clothes that look several sizes too large for them are sitting together in the local mall’s food court, and imagine that a 53-year-old man with jowls, a comb-over, and clothes that fit perfectly comes over to them and says he was scoping them and thinks they’re totally rad and/or phat and asks is it cool if he just kicks it and chills with them here at their table. The kids’ reaction is going to be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy—most likely a mix of both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two hard-core young urban black guys are standing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and greet them with “Yo” and address one or both as “Brother” and ask “s’up, s’goin’ on,” pronouncing on with that NYCish oo—-o?249-215? diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going to think that I am mocking them and be offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?