Descriptive grammarians ask the question, ‘What is English (or another language) like - what are its forms and how do they function in various situations?’ We can take my favourite linguist, David Crystal (1996:39) as an example: ‘I firmly believe that the really interesting question is not ‘Is our language sick’ but ‘Why do we want to think that our language is sick?’ Or, ‘Why is language sickness thought to be so serious a disease anyway? And serious a disease anyway? And why is it chronic?’ ’ Crystal is very set on the idea that language pedants need to look at change in a different light instead of having the opinion that language is going to crash and burn. In contrast to this, we have the descriptivist. This is just a logical step you need to take to jump through the hoops of academia. If you are writing an essay, or even a blog, steps must be taken to ensure you are a little more careful with your grammar use. Not everyone is of the opinion that the language is sick and needs to be given a dose of grammacillin. I put it down to a fact of life not everyone is caught up in the idea that all grammar must be perfect.
I cannot state outright that I recoil in horror when this happens in a sign, nor would I want to, contrary to popular belief. She writes of how rogue apostrophes in sign writing make people with ‘the seventh sense’ recoil into themselves with utter distaste. Her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) is subtitled ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’. Lynn Truss is one of the most notable prescriptivists of modern times. On the one hand we have the prescriptivists, or as some people like to call them the ‘language pedants’, and on the other side we have the descriptivists. All jokes aside, this ‘war on language’ is a topic that has been raging between people for hundreds of years.
Even if I was pointing this out as a joke, it still points to the fact that, deep down, I was being prescriptive about spoken language. This little story links in to Cameron (1995:9) who suggests ‘we are all of us closet prescriptivists or, as I prefer to put it, verbal hygienists’. In the end, instead of saying ‘humour’, she would verbally spell it out ‘H-U-M-O-U-R’ whilst giving me the famous ‘teacher glare’. So, I would always take great delight picking her up on her h-dropping, much to her annoyance.
In case you had not noticed, or never met me, I love to be the outspoken northerner.
In keeping with this, she naturally dropped her ‘h’ from the word ‘humour’. When reading Verbal Hygiene (1995) by Deborah Cameron, I find myself harking back to my days in sixth form.
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