Peter Kirk has started an interesting debate at Better Bibles Blog regarding Acceptable English Is What People Actually Use. This is a great topic and unfortunately can be very divisive. There are normally two camps:
The Prescriptivists:
They think that we should all agree on a set of rules for English and follow them. And they usually think that they should write the rules! My grandmother was a prescriptivist. Your English teacher is a prescriptivist. In fact, anyone over the age of fifty is probably a prescriptivist and looks on in horror at what young people are doing to the beautiful English language.
The Descriptivists:
They think that English is what it is. If it’s the way you talk then it’s OK. In fact, they don’t usually talk about “English” but about “englishes.” The only way to determine acceptable English is to get out on the street and listen to people talk, or analyze pages of text to see how people are using the language. Most linguists are descriptivists.
So you can probably guess that I’m a descriptivist, right? When I was a kid, I hated it when my grandmother corrected my “bad grammar.” She would patiently explain when to use “whom” and how not to dangle a participle, and the difference between “lay” and “lie.” I have to admit that I am turning into an old fuddy-duddy and have trouble with the way the young’uns talk these days. For example, the way they, like, insert the word like, in between like every other word about puts me over the, like edge!
Are you a P or a D? And what language “rules” drive you, like, crazy?
Isn’t it possible to be a descriptivist but to think that for pragmatic reasons it’s still good in formal settings to follow the sort of English that people in formal settings are generally expecting? Even that formal English is changing, of course. We no longer expect people to use the royal ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and even find it arrogant nowadays, and we pretty much have outlawed non-inclusive language in most formal English while allowing people to end sentences with prepositions, use singular ‘they’, or start sentences with conjunctions that connect back logically to previous sentences or paragraphs and not to some clause later in the sentence, as I’m about to do right now.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction between ordinary, spoken English with its generally well-formed grammar and standard, formal English with its sometimes more precise rules and more restricted style. ‘Lie’ and ‘lay may have become confused in ordinary, spoken English, but I wouldn’t say that it’s ok in standard, formal English to use them the way they are confused in spoken English. There are correct and incorrect uses of those words in formal settings, and it is correct to call it wrong in such contexts. This is not prescriptivism. It’s descriptivism, because the descriptive study of what those words mean in formal English leads me to conclude that it’s incorrect in that version of English to say that you are laying on the floor unless you’re laying an egg or something like that (and even that should have a direct object either in the sentence or understood from context).
I like to think there is a kind of happy balance. We should discover the rules of a language, including English, by observing how people speak and write. But we also need to find out from them what they consider good quality speaking and writing. So with this latter process I’m with Jeremy Pierce. I think that descriptive linguistics can help us discover what are considered the most widely used rules of English. It can also help us discover what rules should be followed if one wants to be considered, by speech and writing, to be a good speaker/writer of the language. We still should not tell people *how* they should speak and write based on rules found in English grammar books, *unless* those rules were developed from observing usage. But I think we can actually find out what language speakers consider good usage and poor usage.
Oy! I’m over 50, just, and so is Wayne, but we’re not prescriptivists! Well, I accept that some English usage bugs me, but it is usually not so much the prescriptivists’ rules being broken as them being wrongly applied. For example, I used to hear “you and me” regularly used in conversation as the subject of a sentence. The prescriptivists insisted on “you and I”. Now I quite often hear “you and I” being used as an object or after a preposition. So people have learned the prescriptivists’ rules but are now applying them in quite the wrong places. But I’ll get over this one, I won’t sign petitions against it!
Jeremy, I agree with your observations. In Bible translations we should generally use what is actually considered acceptable good quality written English. But, as you point out, that is not always what the prescriptivists say it is. Their rules tend to be based on 18th century English and in some cases on Latin grammar. But English has changed and is continuing to change. People need to recognise and accept that.
Jeremy,
You’ve hit on most of the major issues surrounding this controversy. First, the distinction between speaking and writing. Second, the distinction between formal and informal prose. Regarding Bible translations, I was fascinated to read once about a Bible translation into a previously unwritten language. What they discovered was that readers weren’t happy with a translation that sounded like speech and they had an intuitive idea about what a “good writing style” looked like in their language.
So, I’m afraid looking for “Acceptable English” is going to be like chasing a mirage. Unless we carefully define the audience and purpose of a particular communication.
Good comments, Wayne. As a poet you probably take a great deal of enjoyment in pushing the boundaries of what our language can “acceptably” do.
Peter, your example of “you and I” is so true! The other example is the “lay” versus “lie” distinction which people are so afraid of breaking that they overuse “lie.” Personally, my mother told me never to lie, so I choose to lay down.
“Lie,” descended from Old English *licgan,* while “lay,” descended from Old English *lecgan,* so the distinction is original (for once). But they apparently started to fall together in the Middle English period, and “heroic measures” have been undertaken since the late eighteenth century to keep them apart.
As “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” (tenth edition) sums it up: “LAY has been use instransively in the sense of “lie” since the 14th century. The practice was unremarked until around 1770; attempts to correct it have been a fixture of schoolbooks ever since.”
And it points out “the confusing similarity” of their principal parts as a contributing factor.
It goes on to warn that some people “will judge you unfavorably” if you decide that a usage that has been current in actual English for most of the last 500+ years (and produced no objections for more than 300), is good enough for you, too.
IMS,
Hilarious quote! Thanks for that.