When I was a kid, there was this joke that I often read in one of those magazines for children (I think it was Champak). It was rather lame, but I realized a few days ago that it presented a rather nice analogy of the raging debate between prescriptivism and descriptivism that goes on in academic circles (about language) and so I present an adapted version:
One day, two friends (a prescriptivist and a descriptivist) are walking inside a forest, when they suddenly realize that a fierce looking lion has been stalking them and looks like it’s about to attack them. Knowing that they would be easily outrun by the lion, the descriptivist says to the other—”Let’s quickly climb up a tree. I have read in a book about lions that they can’t climb trees. We’ll just climb up and wait for it to to go away.”
The prescriptivist replies—”Wait. YOU have read the book. But are you sure the lion has read that book?”
Linguistics is descriptive, which means that it attempts to describe languages and analyze them as they are. Dictionaries and good grammar books, likewise, are descriptive, in that they attempt to reflect language usage. That’s the reason dictionaries need to be continuously updated. Word senses change, new words are made, and old words adopt new meanings. Thus, when I say that “The boy was having lunch” is correct in Standard English while “The boys was having lunch” isn’t, it’s not because your grammar book says so; It’s because that is how English speakers speak, and hence that is what is reflected in a good grammar book.
In school days, language is synonymous with having to learn grammar rules and doing seemingly pointless transformations (convert a complex sentence into a compound sentence, or convert to/from passive voice, or insert appropriate clauses etc). What this also does is convey the impression that language is about correctness. Nobody’s denying that a language has utterances that are grammatically correct, and others that aren’t, including some of dubitable grammaticality (Prof Geoff Pullum prefers to call them correctness conditions in his brilliant essay Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory). But these correctness conditions need to be derived from actual observations about language usage, instead of pontificating about how sentences shouldn’t end in prepositions or begin with conjunctions, or how infinitives should not be split, ‘rules’ which are never systematically observed in the works of respected authors from any period, nor in everyday communication.
The inability of lions to climb trees isn’t a consequence of this being declared in a zoology book. On the contrary, the zoology book gets it content from the zoologist’s observation of how lions really behave. And when dogs behave in slightly different ways than wolves despite being related to them, no one considers that incorrect. But when English exhibits behavior dissimilar to Latin, prescriptivists get uncomfortable, or, to use the phrasing Eminem used in his great song ‘Cleaning Out My Closet’—they get their panties up in a bunch.
In every scientific field, observable facts are given a lot of importance. When a chemist expects a green colored compound on mixing two reagents and gets a red one instead, he goes back to his books and tries to figure out what went wrong. And if an astronomer suggested in a conference that the reason his data didn’t match with his predictions was that there was something wrong with the universe, he would be asked what he had been smoking.
Real-world observation, then, is the basis of any scientific inquiry, and any description of any field would be considered inaccurate if it didn’t match with what actually exists. This is not a democratic issue then, nor is it a question of authority. It’s not a place where ‘every opinion is valid’. It is about being faithful to the world that you are trying to describe. Instead of a million people signing a petition that apples shouldn’t fall from trees, the million should invest that time in investigating why apples behave this way, because apples will continue to drop to the ground with impunity whether they like it or not.
Prescriptivists would do well to remember this the next time they doubt lions’ ability to climb trees based on whether those lions have read a book.
Disclaimer: I have no idea whether lions can or cannot climb up trees. Nothing said about lions in this article should be taken as an assertion of fact. Linguistrix is not responsible for any injuries or accidents that may occur as a consequence of your having used the contents of this post to decide the best way to tackle a lion.