The Language Wars have been waged in the realm of English Literature, Language and Linguistics for years. Both sides of the argument are staunch believers in their position, but are more than willing to concede points to the other sides’ favour. In Bryan A. Garner’s essay, “Making Peace in the Language Wars”, he describes himself as a ‘descriptive prescriber’ (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008, 270), and offers a truce that fulfils both sides of the argument as the crux of his essay. While the separate sides of the argument are relatively easy to define, it seems that no one sticks to them religiously, and the argument is between individuals fighting over individual points. The two sides are that of the descriptivist and that of the prescriptivist.
David Foster Wallace has coined the term SNOOT, which correlates directly with what prescriptivism at its most strict is: “SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose ideas of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column” (Wallace 2005, 69). Garner, on the other hand, makes a very simple definition for prescriptivism: “Prescribers seek to guide users of a language…on how to handle words as effectively as possible” (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008, 266). Descriptivists are not the ‘opposite’ of prescriptivists, but they are at loggerheads with the ideals of prescriptivism since descriptivists simply seek to describe language as it is used. Garner, again, is succinct in his definition of descriptivists: “Describers seek to discover the facts of how native speakers actually use their language” (Garner, Making Peace in the Language Wars 2008...
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... this essay, however, it seems like there will never be a truce between prescriptivists and descriptivists because status and perceptions of self are inflammatory and extremely emotional.
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