Ben Yagoda, author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse, has had a piece published by [i]The Chronicle Review[i] called "In Defense of Common English" (link).
quote:
Not long ago, I took part in a panel discussion at the Free Library of Philadelphia. My fellow panelists were two linguists and a lexicographer. Anyone who knows any linguists and lexicographers will be unsurprised to hear that their position on usage was descriptive rather than prescriptive: They were interested in charting and interpreting recent and historical changes in the way English is written and spoken, not interested in labeling those changes as "mistakes," and even less interested in decrying such so-called errors as evidence of a decline in American civilization.
Interesting, z. I have begun to see that prescriptivists are more like technicians...putting everything in its place; all is black or white. On the other hand, descriptivists seem much more scholarly because they have to go back into history to see how words were used long ago, and then how they've changed.
