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The Descriptivism–Prescriptivism War, Part 1: Battlelines

On September 6, 2016, Merriam-Webster tweeted the following: 

It’s fine to use mad to mean “angry”—even if doing so makes some people mad.

And boy did it make one person mad—er, angry! 

To this day Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account is full of information about words and how we use them. It posts a word of the day, giving the pronunciation and definition from their files. It identifies words that people are suddenly looking up more, usually because of a prominent use in media. And it discusses usage, often linking to a well-researched article. The post on mad is an example of the last. 

Thoughtful editors might expect the criticism to focus on using mad to mean “angry” because it also means “crazy,” which leads to associating a normal feeling (anger) with a mental imbalance and then describing that imbalance in a derogatory way. 

If that was what Slate’s former senior editor Gabriel Roth (tweeting as @gabrielroth) meant, he sure didn’t say so. Instead, he criticized the dictionary for creating “arbitrary and unfair rules” (contains strong language); for having “checked out,” one presumes from being a responsible dictionary (however he defines that); and for engaging in “narcissistically gratifying” actions. 

It seems as though Roth didn’t read the linked article before he responded to the tweet. The article covers the history of mad: From the beginning, it has meant “crazy,” “foolish,” “enthusiastic,” and “angry,” but its age makes it impossible to know which definition came first.

The “angry” meaning has been controversial since 1781, according to the article, though not on behalf of those who suffer from mental illness—it was acceptable for them to be labeled “crazy” or “mad”—but on the grounds that it was inaccurate and too colloquial.

The article concludes that:

Like so many usage controversies, this one was made up by people who confused their own taste with the way language actually works. It’s fine to use mad to mean “angry”—even if doing so makes some people mad.

(Today’s conscious language trend would urge us to respect people with mental illnesses by not using mad and crazy to describe them.) 

Roth’s strong reaction produced a predictable result: people strongly reacted in kind, mostly in favor of Merriam-Webster. To be fair, Roth called his own criticism “muddled” in a follow-up Slate article, but the article shows that he still doesn’t understand what dictionaries do or what descriptivism is, though he essentially accused the dictionary of being descriptivist. 

“But, wait!” I hear you saying. “I thought dictionaries were descriptive!”

They are, but not in the way Roth and many others believe. And therein lies a big problem for copyeditors. 

What Descriptivism and Prescriptivism Are Not 

Roth, who claims to have descriptivist tendencies, seems to hold the popular notion that descriptivism is a “throw the rules out the window, anything goes” attitude: people can say anything they want, and it’s acceptable. With this definition, dictionaries are, by nature, not descriptive but prescriptive: they tell you what to do. To Roth, Merriam-Webster was practicing descriptivism by stating people could use mad to mean “angry.” And for him, the dictionary was there to Set Down Rules. To Prescribe. To Tell Us How To Use Words. 

According to this logic, prescriptivism is the opposite of descriptivism. If descriptivism is the “chill parent,” prescriptivism is the militant parent: do what I tell you, and accept my authority without question. Prescriptivism is applying your personal preferences, with no supporting scholarship/evidence/facts/proof, to language. Prescriptivists make rules to suit themselves and demand everyone else follow them. Both of these beliefs are real and, at least for prescriptivism, there are many people with too much influence who practice it this way and keep increasing the damage 

What Descriptivism and Prescriptivism Really Are

True descriptivists don’t throw out all the rules; they describe the rules they identify from studying the language. They share that information, and their conclusions about it, with others. Descriptivists don’t make the rules; language users do—but not the way false prescriptivism does. 

Dictionaries are a visible, influential example of real descriptivism. Following the Twitter war, Merriam-Webster published “How a Word Gets into the Dictionary” on its blog. According to the article, a word is added to the dictionary when “it is used by many people who all agree that it means the same thing.” Dictionary editors “read actively, looking for changes in the language.” They collect words in a database. They search other word databases. They collect data and analyze it. They must determine whether this word, this usage, they’ve been stalking through the jungle of published words should be added to their dictionary. Senior colleagues will review this work as part of the editing process, but according to the article:

There’s no committee, no advocacy, no meetings for new word inclusion. If a word seems promising but shows insufficient evidence for inclusion this time around, those citations will be reviewed for the next edition, at which time the word may have flourished—or vanished.

 It’s not “anything goes” at a dictionary. Nor are decrees made from on high. Dictionary editors collect data—that is, they watch what we all do with the language—and describe what they see in that data. True prescriptivism is more complex, too, though I think it gets less press. 

By definition, editors are prescriptivists: We prescribe. We tell authors what to do. But we don’t prescribe based on personal feelings (or we shouldn’t). We prescribe based on what Mark Liberman calls “a rational analysis of the facts,” which we might conduct by reviewing the project dictionary and house style guide, the author’s writing style, the desired audience’s language predilections, the author’s and publisher’s goals, and so on. 

But how does this affect your work as a copyeditor? In part 2, we’ll explore the practical implications of these approaches and how to strike the right balance in your editing practice. 

Stay tuned!

A version of this article originally published in the October–November 2016 issue of Copyediting newsletter.

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