Reader beware:  today's posting has nothing to do with cancer and everything to do with language.  It's going to be long, pedantic, and overly detailed.  Skipping or skimming is definitely permitted.  My justification is that one, the May 14th issue of the New Yorker published a review by Joan Acocella of a book on the descriptive v. prescriptive language disputes.  Ms. Acocella is the magazine's dance critic.  I know absolutely nothing about dance and have read her dance reviews with great pleasure and enlightenment.  But just as I wouldn't be assigned a book on dance to review, she shouldn't have been assigned one on language, as her review is badly misinformed and, hence, misinforming.  I was infuriated by the review and have been brooding about it for the last month (better than brooding about cancer), so finally I'm going to have my say.  Second, I'm afraid that my comments about language in this blog suggest that I'm a fussy prescriptivist, when, in fact, I'm firmly on the other side.

The review doesn't get off to an encouraging start when Acocella says "purists" complain about people saying 'distinterested' when they mean 'uninterested.'  It's the other way around.  Her opening history isn't any more accurate.  She says that the "language wars" broke out fully in the 1950s, which, considering only English, is 200 years off.   In academia, she writes that one cause was the "newly popular" theory of structuralism.  No, after several decades, structuralism peaked in the 1950s and then virtually disappeared with the arrival of Noam Chomsky's theories in 1957.  (Chomsky is nowhere mentioned, though surely his distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' is related, though in a new way, to prescriptivist and descriptivist ideas.)  Moreover, there are two logical fallacies in just her one sentence: because all structuralists are descriptivists does not imply that all descriptivists are/were structuralists.  And simply because an interest in language usage continued in the 1950s and later doesn't mean that the structuralists caused the interest.  I doubt that popular prescriptivists like William Safire and Edwin Newman even knew who Saussure and Bloomfield were. 

Acocella consistently blurs the definition of "rules," confusing the constitutive rules (i.e., those parameters that enable language) with normative rules (i.e., pre- and proscriptions) that a small minority are always trying to impose on the half billion speakers of English.  Here's a constitutive rule that Acocella seems to think is proscriptive: in English, we do not put a single word adverbial between a verb and its direct object.  We do not say, "I read carefully the article" or "I rejected vehemently its conclusions."  If a grammarian says that it is a rule, he is not proscribing what to say; he is describing how English works.  Acocella also ignores the phonological and morphological components of grammar, an omission that would be acceptable if her examples didn't require explanations based on phonology and morphology.  Here are three examples (all used in Acocella's review) of what a descriptive linguist does--one of phonology, one of morphology, and one of syntax.

Acocella mentions (and implies that descriptivists would be accepting of) the word "drownded."  No academic is going to suggest that a Harvard Law School interview is going well if the applicant says, "My father drownded."  What he is going to say is this: at the phonological level (as at all others) language changes.  And then he might describe five common phonological changes that have taken (and are taking) place in English.  One is metathesis: the transposition of sounds.  In Old English 'bird' was pronounced 'brid' and 'third' was 'thrid.'  Over the centuries, those sounds were transposed, and the metathesis stuck.  A look at the OED shows that for centuries, some English speakers have said 'aks' for 'ask'; that change did not stick and is, of course, today highly stigmatized.  A second change is assimilation, making sounds resemble those around them to facilitate pronunciation.  That explains why the plural morpheme [s] is sometimes pronounced /s/ and sometimes /z/ and describes the regular and predictable pattern of choice; it explains what we say 'impossible' and not 'inpossible' but 'inconceivable' and not 'imconceivable.'  A third change is dissimilation, which explains why we don't pronounce the entire consonant cluster in 'cupboard' and normally omit the /t/ in a word like 'postponed.'  A fourth change is epenthesis, the insertion of an extra sound in a word.  It explains why Paula Deen always says 'paparika' and why all of us insert a /p/ in 'comfort' but not in 'combat.'  It is why the names Thomson and Samson are often spelled Thompson and Sampson.  And the last patterned change (which finally gets us to 'drownded') is epithesis, the insertion of an extra sound at the end of the word.  Again, some of these changes "stick"; some do not.  In Old English, for example, there was no /d/ in the verbs 'lend' or "bound.'  The present tense of 'bound' was, hundreds of years ago, 'boun' and 'bouned' or 'bound' was the past tense.   But people heard a /d/ at the end of 'boun' and the past tense eventually became 'bounded.'  Had there been any language purists around in 1300, they would have been upset by "the stock market rebounded" last week--at least linguistically upset.  The same happens with 'drown,' where some people hear the present tense with an epitehtic /d/, thus making the past tense 'drownded'--not standard English, but easily described, which is where a descriptive linguist stops.

Acocella mentions the use of 'hisself,' but fails to understand (because she doesn't even mention morphology) how that form evolved.  We all learn language by generalizing rules from specific examples.  A native speaker unconsciously learns how compound personal pronouns (those that end with -self or -selves) are formed.  The rule seems to be that we add the suffix to the genitive form of the personal pronoun: myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves.  All that someone who says 'hisself' or 'theirselves' has done is overgeneralize the rule because, for no apparent reason, when we get to the third person, the suffix is added to the objective case form.  Again, the descriptivist isn't going to tell a native speaker that his law school application will be enhanced if he adds, "My father drownded hisself."  He's only interested in describing the rules that constitute our language as it's now spoken and describing the patterns that exist and have existed.

Finally (at last!), Acocella, of course, mentions the who/whom distinction.  But again, she totally ignores the history of how English has evolved and hence misunderstands what's happening.  English used to be a highly synthetic language, i.e., one that depends on inflectional endings rather than word order for meaning.  Nouns and pronouns were inflected (as in Latin, Russian, and Finnish, for example) to show their function.  But over the centuries, those inflections almost entirely disappeared, and English is now (almost) completely analytic, i.e., a language that depends on word order.  If I enter the class and say, "Me your teacher this semester," you might doubt my competence and consider changing to another section, but you understand what I'm saying.  No nouns retain a distinction between nominative and objective cases, and only five or six pronouns do (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, and, in a few cases who(ever)/whom(ever)).  And with these choices, many native speakers are confused (language is always changing, and although there aren't many changes going on right now in English, except lexically, this is one logical place where distinctions are blurring).  And although I may cringe when I hear, "Him and I went to the movies," there's a logical reason why I do hear it and why I understand perfectly well that the speaker is trying to say.

As native users of English, descriptivists have just as many pet peeves as anyone.  But as linguists (or the more out-date grammarians), descriptivists don't think it's nearly as interesting (or productive) to pre- and proscribe as it is to describe and, where possible, explain.

I'll give props to Acocella for one thing: she pans the book under review.  And if she's learned as little from reading it as her review indicates, she must be right that it's truly uninformative. 

There.  Now I feel much better and can return to brooding about more important matters.