THE LEXICOGRAPHER’S DILEMMA

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English, From Shakespeare to South Park, by Jack Lynch: Carpool J gave this to me for Christmas, and he hadn’t read it; he just picked it off a shelf because it looked like something I would like. I was suspicious, but luckily, he was right. This look at the ongoing battle between prescriptivists (those who want to enforce “correct” language use) and descriptivists (those who simply want to analyze how language is actually used) recapped some stuff I dimly recalled from my college linguistics course, but threw in some new stuff and was entertainingly written enough to keep me engrossed. My main takeaways were: (1) The publisher must have come up with the subtitle, because Shakespeare is only mentioned in passing and South Park is used as a one-paragraph example. Sadly, Dryden, Swift, Johnson, and Webster, who play starring roles in the book, are less marketable. (2) People have been complaining about the decline of the language since we’ve had a language to complain about, and a lot of the bugaboos that used to drive them up the wall are now ordinary practices you wouldn’t bat an eyelash at. As someone whose job it is to be a critical reader and who tends to facepalm at least once per day over some horrific typo or grammatical error I’ve spotted, it is helpful to be reminded of this. The idea of “proper” English is a fairly recent invention, and the prescriptivists are fighting a losing battle, so I should probably relax a little. This is why I find reading history so comforting: you realize that people have always been certain that civilization is on the verge of collapse, and yet civilization keeps right on truckin’. (3) As much as I hate to admit it, the descriptivists generally have the right idea. Like me, Lynch has prescriptivist sympathies, but comes down logically on the descriptivist side. After all, language changes, whether we like it or not. However, it’s worth remembering that even if there isn’t one correct way to speak English, there are appropriate styles for specific contexts and occasions—most notably, formal written English—and knowing the rules of those styles is worthwhile. Because people are always going to judge you by how you use language. And let’s face it: I am one of those people.