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"You are a Linguistic Prescriptivist"

It’s fashionable nowadays to declare oneself a linguistic descriptivist, declare that no grammar doesn’t has any mistake, and then triumphantly wander over bad uses of linguistic prescriptivism.

Typically, the enlightened descriptivist might mention how those pedantic prescriptivists will tell people not to split the infinitive, and insist that Captain Kirk should have said ‘to go boldly, where no man has gone before’. The enlightened internet-linguist will then change subject and mention how Star Trek the Next Generation improved the famous statement with ‘where no one has gone before’, without half a thought that they have just prescribed one way of speaking over another.

Returning to their point, they might opine about how the upper-class, typically white, usually men, prescribe their own grammar, and declare other people’s grammar and vocabulary wrong. Having made this excellent point, they fail to notice that opposition to racist language (such as declaring one speech ‘slang’, and another ‘an accent’) entails prescribing anti-racist speech.

And so, they conclude, one should not correct people, or tell them how to speak (they tell you).

The only people who really describe language neutrally are linguists who are on the job, at that moment. It’s something they do to study language, but the second they clock out, I have no doubt that they all share strong opinions on how people should speak, just like everyone else.