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In a 1953 essay published in College English, Morton Bloomfield advocated for the value of prescriptivism in the teaching of English. At the time of the essay’s publication, descriptive linguistics was quickly becoming mainstream and Bloomfield was an early critic, pointing out the potential pedagogical follies that come with adopting a completely

descriptive view of language. Bloomfield framed his argument in terms of facts and values, emphasizing the idea that questions of pedagogy should take both into consideration.

Bloomfield acknowledged the importance of the facts (i.e., the observations about language made by descriptive linguists), but suggested that values (i.e., the social weight that proper English carries) should not be lost in the mix.

Ultimately, the question which we must basically consider in dealing with the teaching of English is what kind of men [sic] we want to make of our students. This cannot be solved by a knowledge of the history of the English language. (p. 34) In this way, Bloomfield argued that values should be prioritized over linguistic facts in language pedagogy.

Almost half a century later, Curzan (2002) made similar arguments for students to understand prescriptive language, pointing out that

It is possible to teach Standard English [i.e., the prescriptions that make up Standard English –JS] while at the same time creating a meta-awareness of that educational process, so that students are empowered to examine the system and its language hierarchies critically, so that they can challenge that view if they should choose to—

with full control of the language variety of power. (p. 342)

While Curzan did not advocate for teaching Standard English as strongly as Bloomfield did, she did recognize the need to teach the politics of Standard English because it can have important effects on the social status of students and it can help them consider issues related to Standard English critically.

The ideology that Bloomfield feared—the one that prized facts about language over values—is the ideology espoused by most academic linguists. These scholars disparage prescriptive attitudes toward language use, opting instead to adopt the more scientific approach of describing language variation without placing value judgments on these variations. McWhorter (1998) succinctly summarized how he views the harmful effects of prescriptive ideologies on grammar in this way: “Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of

linguistic style in writing” (p. 62). Because of its harmful effects, as many linguists see them, prescriptivism has largely been ignored or shunned in linguistic research. Milroy and Milroy (1999) cataloged some of the dominant attitudes on the topic, stating that many linguists (Milroy and Milroy not included) see prescriptivism as “irrelevant to linguistics” (p. 4).

Chapman described the common conception of prescriptivism among linguists as “the ugly stepchild in the scholarly community” (personal communication, October 17, 2017), as evidenced by the fact that there is not yet an association devoted to the study of

prescriptivism’s influence on language, there is no journal dedicated to publishing articles about prescriptivism, and conferences centered on prescriptivism are still sparsely attended.

Universal prescriptive usage rules are even challenged in applied fields (Boettger & Wulff,

2014; Connatster, 2004; Mackiewicz, 2003), demonstrating that the legitimacy of many of these rules is widely contested.

One reason linguists and others may bristle at the concept of prescriptivism lies in the fact that prescriptive imperatives are not arguments; that is, they do not seek to gain their authority through evidence or systematic inquiry. Chapman (2010), making reference to etiquette manuals, the forerunner of usage guides (discussed in Section 2.5), likened prescriptive rules to those rules that dictate polite manners, calling them part of a canon in which “their tenets are inherited and received, rather than questioned and proved” (p. 142).

Earlier, Cameron (1996) pointed to a similar characteristic of prescriptive edicts, saying that

“linguistic imperatives are really moral imperatives” because “the ‘force’ of a linguistic prescription has little to do with persuasion in the sense of rational argument” (p. 8) and is instead based on appeals to speakers’ inherent sense of right and wrong. Linguistics as a discipline views language from a scientific standpoint and as such is primarily interested in evidence and argument. It is not surprising then that such an uncritical view of language would seem groundless to anyone interested in the serious study of language.

Despite these prevailing attitudes, scholarship devoted to the serious study of prescriptivism has been steadily increasing among linguists—primarily those interested in discourse analysis, the history of English, and sociolinguistics—over the last several decades.

Milroy and Milroy (1985/1999) were perhaps the first to undertake a serious book-length study of the relationship between prescriptivism and language variation and change. In their study, they argued that “[a]lthough it is necessary to insist on the priority of description, it does not follow from this that prescription should never be studied at any point” (p. 4). They see prescriptivism as an integral part of language standardization, occurring after codification

(the emergence of grammars and dictionaries of a language) and thus as the final stage in the implementation of a standard language. Cameron’s (1995) heavily cited work took the concept of prescriptivism beyond the notion of enforcing rules codified in grammars and dictionaries and extended it to the broader concept of what she calls verbal hygiene, or “an urge to ‘clean up’ language” (p. 1). In doing so, she pointed out that the popularly anti-prescriptivist approach to language taken up by most (if not all) academic linguists—an approach in which natural, spontaneous variation is seen as good while efforts to encourage language users to consciously change their language are deemed bad—is itself a prescriptive ideology and that it “in a certain sense…mirrors the very same value-laden attitudes it seems to be criticizing” (p. 3) because it suggests that there is a right way to think about language change and a wrong way to think about language change. Where other commentators have likened English to an irrepressible natural phenomenon with implications that it changes on its own (see Curzan’s [2014] analogy of living language as a river), Cameron underlined the fact that language is inherently a social force used by humans for human communication.

This idea is important when considering verbal hygiene—and prescriptive language ideologies in general—because “[a]rguments about language use are not between man and nature, they are between groups of people with differing opinions and interests. It is not ‘the English language’ that verbal hygiene attempts to subdue, it is particular users of that language” (pp. 22–23).