If you see the phrase "10 items or less" in a supermarket and immediately cringe and complain
that it should be "10 items or fewer"... well, you are not going to like this week's video.
There are two types of linguists. Prescriptive and descriptive. Pretty much every academic
linguist -- those that study and analyse languages -- counts themselves as a descriptivist. This
means that they describe languages, but never say that they should be a certain way. They
look, they learn, and they work out how people communicate.
On the other side are the prescriptivists. Who prescribe, in much the same way as a doctor
prescribes a suppository. They're the people who say that this is how a language should
be, damn it, and how on earth are we supposed to communicate cleary---
Irony!
[OFF SCREEN LAUGHTER]
Can we roll back a little?
How on earth are we supposed to communicate clearly
when people keep blurring things and using slang?
I don't have much time for prescriptivists. They say that "this way to speak is correct"
and "this way is incorrect". To which I way: bollocks. I work on this rule: as long as
the recipient pays attention to the message and isn't trying to decipher what you're saying,
then talk however the hell you want.
That doesn't mean that you should start sprinkling apostrophes all over the place, or not caring
a damn for spelling rules in that essay you're writing -- they'll get in the way of people
understanding your message clearly -- but it does mean that the grammar police out there
can absolutely go and do one.
John McWhorter describes English as a "glorious bastard language". The British Isles have
been invaded so many times by so many different groups through history that we've got words,
and grammar, and spelling rules from all over the place. From French, from Latin, from Old
Norse, from Dutch. Then you've got all the words we've taken on and welcomed more recently.
Every language does this. But not all of them welcome it.
There is, for example, l'Academie Francaise: the French Academy. They are the authority
on the French language -- and though it's not legally binding, their view is very much
respected by the government and press. Members of the Academy are known as immortals.
No, seriously, they call themselves immortals.
They aim to halt the Anglicisation of French, to the point where they simply announced one
day in 2003 that, from now on, the French word for e-mail will be courriel, and in 2013
announced that, suddenly, the official French word for hashtag would be mot-dièse, or sharp-word.
You can probably guess how much either of these words is actually getting used in France.
Pretty much all major languages have an Academy. Apart from English. Which has gotten along
just fine.
Language changes. Regularly and often. The Oxford English Dictionary -- hailed as the
authority on the English language -- is descriptive, not prescriptive. And that's really important. They'll tell
you what's considered correct, but if popular opinion changes? So will they and so should
you. So the next time some pedant complains "that's not what the dictionary says" -- well,
then the dictionary probably needs updating. Or at least theirs does.
Next time: we'll have a look at some people who've tried to force changes into English...
and see exactly how well that went.
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