On June 3, at 6:13 p.m., President Trump was evidently in a bad mood. He had heard or read one too many times that he uses bad grammar and eccentric capitalization. He tweeted:
The wits and scolds on Twitter pounced: The word is “pore,” not “pour.” Got him again!
The Trump presidency has turned many things upside down, and the politics of grammar is one of those things. For several decades now, the practice of reproaching people for using bad grammar and poor spelling has been thought mean, inegalitarian, regressive. You see it in the common term for reproachful grammarians: Grammar Nazi.
It’s true that a few “prescriptivists,” those who take the view that most grammatical norms are there for a sound reason and should be adhered to most of the time, achieved wide popularity during these decades—I’m thinking of John Simon, Jacques Barzun, the slightly more forbearing William Safire, and two or three others. But there are few like these anymore, and the trend has long been toward the “descriptivist” attitude: The grammarian’s job, if we must have grammarians, is merely to “describe” or analyze the language as scientists treat the phenomena of their fields, not to prescribe right and wrong uses. There is, after all, no divine or scientific arbiter of right and wrong in the use of language.
It’s unwise to assign too much political significance to attitudes on grammar and usage, but it’s fair to generalize that descriptivism has been commoner on the left and prescriptivism on the right. Academic linguists are universally in the descriptivist camp, and the descriptivist outlook is in some measure inspired by the desire for a society free of class prejudice and judgmentalism. “I am just as concerned about clarity, ambiguity, and intelligibility as anyone with a prescriptivist temperament,” the linguist David Crystal writes in his book How Language Works. “But I am not so stupid as to think that we shall achieve any gain in clarity by avoiding split infinitives or not ending sentences with prepositions. And I am not so insensitive as to blame others who do not have the opportunity I have had to acquire an effective command of standard English.” The remark nicely captures the way in which linguists caricature the prescriptivist attitude (I am not aware of any serious writer who argues that splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions inhibits clarity) and the way in which liberal egalitarianism is bound up with descriptivism.
Prescriptivists, by contrast, write about language as amateurs; they are non-academics or at least non-linguists; they care about standards and customs and believe that educated people have a duty to preserve the best of them for the sake of clarity and felicity. They are, in the broadest sense, conservative.
I am not sure what academic linguists think about Donald Trump’s unorthodox spellings and occasional bad grammar, but it is a frequent source of amusement to me that people who would in other circumstances incline to the more liberal descriptivist view are the quickest to deride Trump for the sort of mistakes their descriptivist instincts should have taught them aren’t mistakes at all. Twitter is rife with this form of insta-prescriptivism. When Trump types roll instead of role or loose when he means lose, a hundred educated wits are there to point out the mistake. “There always playing politics,” he tweeted about Democrats—he meant they’re . . . “Her and Obama created this huge vacuum,” he said of President Obama and Hillary Clinton—what a dolt . . . “No matter how good I do on something,” he said of the New York Times, “they’ll never write good.”
So invested are these unlikely scolds in broadcasting the president’s mistakes that a host of respectable media outlets—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS News, and many others—gave extensive attention to a retired South Carolina school teacher, Yvonne Mason, who marked up a form letter ostensibly from the president and sent it back to the White House with copious corrections in purple ink. She snapped a picture of her mark-up and posted it to her Facebook page, the image went viral, and it became a two- or three-day media sensation. Only there were few if any mistakes in the president’s letter. Chiefly, Mason pointed out capitalizations that (as the Times allowed, to its credit) are mandated by the federal government’s official style guide. The idea of a school teacher correcting Trump’s oafish use of language was, however, too good to pass up.
All this put me in mind of a marvelous book published last year, Struggling for Our Language by Mark Halpern. The book is a series of essays on language and linguistics by a non-linguist who believes, correctly in my view, that human language doesn’t lend itself to scientific study in anything like the way academic linguists think. And unlike most linguists and other credentialed experts on language, Halpern is a terrific writer.
It’s his essay “What Is Prescriptivism?” that I find especially helpful. The piece is eccentric and funny and generous toward those with whom the author disagrees, and it is to my mind a peremptory defense of prescriptivism. Halpern contends that descriptivist grammarians write about prescriptivism with shocking ignorance and usually fail even to try to understand the prescriptivist viewpoint. Prescriptivists do not, pace Crystal, Steven Pinker, and others, fail to understand that language changes naturally. Nor is it relevant that some prescriptivists have advanced specious positions over the centuries (Dryden’s hostility to stranded prepositions, Swift’s lists of barbaric neologisms) or that some prescriptivists are censorious jackasses. Every significant belief has had misguided proponents.
The question is not whether language changes—no one denies this—but whether capable and influential writers can stimulate changes that enhance clarity and felicity in the language. And they can, as attested by anyone who’s ever read a disapproving comment by an adept writer on an ill-advised usage (the use of infer to mean imply, say) and afterward abstained from that usage. “The efforts of Prescriptivists to guide (not stop) language change have sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded,” Halpern writes. “Descriptivists often point to lists of complaints that Prescriptivists have made about particular usages, like Swift’s lists, and count the survival of some of the complained-of usages as defeats for Prescriptivism, and proof that Prescriptivism is bound to fail, but never, to my knowledge, credit the disappearance of offending usages to the efforts of Prescriptivists.”
Of course it’s proper to prescribe good and denounce bad uses of language. That is how a vast and complicated language maintains its graceful shape when expressed by its best writers. Young writers learn to generate language fluently, not by writing however they want, but by heeding the prescriptions of older and more capable writers and fearing to do otherwise.
How strange that it took Donald Trump to remind our educated class of this plain truth. Our recent and probably unwitting converts to prescriptivism should learn to moderate their criticisms and not sound so much like clever show-offs and hypercritical schoolmarms. But their instincts are sound.
