At the beginning of an Editing class, the instructor prefaced the discussion of technique and style with one question: “Are you a prescriptivist or a descriptivist?” In response, I had one question for her. I asked her what was the difference between “living language” and the wholesale embrace of grammatical errors and subliterate improvisation.
She paused a moment, staring at me, and then informed the class there was a prescriptivist in the room.
There are two encampments in the secret war of our language, each waving the dictionary as its sacred text. Prescriptivists believe the dictionary prescribes the language: it is the navigational guide to correct speech. Its spellings are standard and its definitions are law. When the average joe whips out such linguistic violations as irregardless and expresso, it is the prescriptivist who breaks the offender’s nose with the spine of a stout Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. Language requires discipline, and strict adherence to it as well as a comprehensive grasp of all its nuance result in a display as beautiful and sublime as a Japanese tea ceremony.
On the other side, descriptivists believe the dictionary describes how the language is currently used. They see the dictionary as a sort of magazine that reflects popular trends in usage. News articles relating how Homer Simpson’s “d’oh” or the lately popular frenemy are inducted into the dictionary bring a cheery grin to the descriptivist’s face. Language is a playground for them and they wait with childlike curiosity for the next iteration to come down the pike.
So… which side is superior? Is the dictionary a book of rules or simply a contemporary usage index?
It’s both, obviously. It would be supremely naive to suggest that the language shouldn’t change. For that matter, one might question the existence of language altogether. One can suggest the United States’ national language is English, but it’s not the English spoken across the pond. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary represents our lexicographic Declaration of Independence from the Empire and the Oxford English Dictionary: it is the tome that proclaims how Americans speak, how we no longer include a “u” in the second syllable of words such as armour or colour, or how we use “er” at the end of their theatre. But if English is our language, where does it sit? Which state can insist it is the formal home of English? Is it where they say soda, cola, pop, or Coke (regardless of actual brand)? Is it where they drop the “r” as in Hah-vahd (Harvard) or add one in Warshington? Only five percent of our national language can point to its origins in Old English: everything else is a mulligan stew of concepts borrowed and stolen from around the world, throughout time. I’ve been given to understand there is no such thing as an actual standard language, only the most popular dialect of a given region. An extreme example of this would be to learn Chinese and then tour the mainland and Hong Kong and see how many people can’t understand a thing you’re saying.
And so, as a proofreader/copyeditor, I’ve undergone the transition from pointing at a sentence and saying that it’s wrong, to asking what its context is. Who’s the audience and how will they see it? What effect are we trying to achieve? There was a time when a split infinitive was grounds for corporal punishment, but now it’s completely acceptable: it turns out that Strunk and White, who literally wrote the book on technique and usage, frequently made up arbitrary rules of grammatical structure that were not even in practice at the time!
To have any value as an editor, I have to know the standards but also be aware of the trends. Being correct shouldn’t come at the price of alienating the people we’re trying to talk to. I may assert, “No, it’s absolutely unacceptable to use quotation marks for emphasis: it means the opposite of what you’re trying to say,” but there are times when I have to ask, “How do we want to write e-mail/email or Web site/website?” Sometimes the standards are up in the air and a trend is waiting to be set. The first rule of editing is, “It just has to look nice.”
The second rule of editing is, “Do not talk about editing,” especially at parties or any social setting.
