"It Widens Out, I Promise"

     

        I find myself in a war with my brain while reading the debate from the New York Times about grammar rules. I had been warned by my friends that this was the hardest piece we had been assigned to analyze so far this year but I never thought it would be THAT hard. I mean, after Frederick Douglass or the multiple choice exams “hard” couldn’t be so bad. I was wrong and now I sit here, writing a blog post that will probably have as much sense as the debate did for me. Anyway, I’ll try my best.

     So after going over the debate for the third time, this is what I understand. Two guys, Robert Lane Greene and Bryan A. Garner, are formally arguing about different opinions people have about the way language should be used. Both experts are well, experts in their own topic and thanks to their great use of rhetoric, you feel like a complete idiot when reading their points. The debate starts with Lane, the descriptivist, telling Garner that he “preaches stodgy nonrules that most people don’t obey,” and that people like him “don’t understand that language must grow and change.” Then, Garner comes back to Lane with statements such as “the linguists have switched their position- without, of course, acknowledging that this is what they’ve done.” Now I feel like a baby that can easily be persuaded by simple things such as a toy that has a louder sound than another. Finally after reading another round of the Language Wars I decide to go with Robert Lane’s descriptivist side. It seems logical to explain what both terms mean and why I finally chose to go with one.

     Descriptivists, as Lane puts it, are those who “try to describe language as it is used.” Prescriptivists, on the other hand, “focus on how language should be used.” When you mix both, you get whats called a descriptive prescriber. Descriptive prescribers “tell people which usages they should prefer, but when a battle has been lost over several decades, they call it lost and suggest people they move on.” I relate more with being a descriptivist because as a teenager, I find many ways (or should I say many apps?) of how language is being used. I don’t believe there’s a certain way language has to be used. Each day, as language changes we “must acknowledge a new rule” as Lane states, “we must be descriptivists in other words.” Also I choose to be on the descriptivist side because like Lane, my blood boils when I see that prescriptivists call some people “ignorant” or even “illiterate”.

     To reach a conclusion for my war, I decided to gather some phrases from the debate that caught my attention. The entire debate caught my attention really but that’s for you to check out on your own.

“To a linguist or psychologist, language is like the song of the humpback whale.… Isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?” –“The Language Instinct” 1994

“The real point is this: We could go a long way toward reconciling the language wars if linguists and writers like you would stop demonizing all prescriptivists and start acknowledging that the reputable ones have always tried to base their guidance on sound descriptions.”

“For those readers who have stuck with me, here is the point: the rule has no root in great English usage.  But it’s simply not what great writers consistently do, not now or ever.”

Vocabulary:

maladroit- (adj.) inefficient or inept; clumsy