By Robert VerBruggen
Thursday, August 09, 2018
A “descriptivist” is someone who studies how language is
used. A “prescriptivist” is someone who tells other people how to use language
correctly. And while these are often framed as opposing camps, they need not
be: A thoughtful descriptivist realizes that strongly established usage
patterns should generally be treated as rules by someone who wants to
communicate effectively; a thoughtful prescriptivist realizes that the rules
emerge from constantly evolving usage patterns.
There’s a certain strain of prescriptivism, though, that
merely seeks to impose rules on other people’s language, often on nothing more
than one’s own say-so. Overwhelmingly, these folks are harmless-if-annoying
self-appointed “sticklers” who insist, for example, that you must not split
infinitives or start sentences with conjunctions. But ill-founded
prescriptivism also rears its head with political terms, and we’ve been seeing
a bit of that lately from the woke left.
Some academics who study racial matters use the word
“racism” to mean not “dislike of people on the basis of race,” which is how
most people use it, but rather something like “prejudice plus power” or what is
more clearly called “institutional” or “systemic” racism — meaning,
conveniently, that members of minority groups by definition cannot be racist.
And as Scott Alexander noted at Slate Star Codex back in 2014, parts of the
Left are no longer willing to admit that this is a departure from standard
usage by saying something along the lines of, “I suppose a group of black people
chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’
qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define
it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write.”
Instead, as Alexander writes, “we have a case where
original coinage, all major dictionaries, and the overwhelming majority of
common usage all define ‘racism’ one way, and social justice bloggers insist
with astonishing fervor that way is totally
wrong and it must be defined
another.” I am not entirely sure if this is a conscious effort to redefine the
word — and by pretending it’s already
defined this way they’re “gaslighting” us — or if they have drunk so much
Kool-Aid that they can say this in all sincerity. When called on it, many
simply point to academic definitions, as though academia had the power to redefine
words for the rest of society; that, of course, is not how language works.
There was a similar (if much smaller) kerfuffle in 2015
regarding the word “baby.” As I demonstrated at the time, “baby” and its
predecessor “babe” have been in use for centuries, and English speakers have
never shied away from describing pregnant women as having “babies” or “babes”
in their wombs. And yet during that year’s Planned Parenthood controversy, some
insisted it was incorrect to say that “baby parts” were at issue, because the
medical community likes to call unborn babies the “products of conception.” (Or
at least part of the medical community: In my experience, the folks conducting
ultrasounds use the word “baby” all the time.)
To be sure, people are free to try to change the language
by brute force if they want. Sometimes it even works: The word “which” was
commonly used restrictively (as in “the game which they are playing”) when the comically overrated
Elements of Style announced that this
was an error, and nowadays adherence to the rule is a reasonably standard
aspect of American English. But our words’ definitions are ultimately decided
by the community of English speakers, not just by academia.
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