Eccentric Flower:199808/history repeating

twenty-eight august ninety eight eleven a m

history repeating

The Economist has a cranky columnist who specializes in issues of language - usage and such, like a William Safire, except instead of being a pompous pundit, one envisions a crusty old Brit gentleman of the Old School.

In fact, the columnist's pseudonym - all writers there are concealed, and in fact only the columnists have recognizable bylines at all - is "Johnson," summoning up images of that irascible biographer.

This column is about the New Oxford English Dictionary. The New OED has changed from the strictly prescriptive approach of the original, venerable OED to a descriptive one, and all hell is breaking loose.

Now, I wrote about this before in some detail, and I recommend reading that if you have the free time, but in brief:

A prescriptive dictionary tells you "This usage is correct; this usage is incorrect" and basically presumes to lay down the law.

A descriptive dictionary, on the other hand, describes usage as it is actually practiced at the time the dictionary was made. It will, in Johnson's words, neither instruct nor ban. Instead it makes observations like "Most people use the word this way; some people also use it this way on occasion; a very few people use it this way."

I won't go into which is "better," because that's meaningless. It's more of a "match the tool to the job" situation. (See the essay linked above for more on that.)

What amuses me is that in the 1960's, the preeminent dictionary of the US converted from a prescriptive to a descriptive approach, and there was a huge hullaballoo. (Again, see above.) Now the preeminent dictionary of the UK - and, some would argue, the ultimate authority of English, as if there could be any such thing - has gone the same route, and the hue and cry has begun all over again.

You'd think people over there would have learned something from the fight over here thirty-plus years ago, but no. History repeating.

It is true that there's a general shortage of prescriptive dictionaries, and some will regard this as the falling of one of the final bastions. On the other hand, I can sympathize with the dictionary publishers. Although it's true that sometimes you want to be flat-out told which usage is "right" and which usage is "wrong," it takes a lot of confidence - not to say hubris - on the part of the publisher to put on the Lawgiver hat.

And of course there will always be people who dispute the rulings anyway, no matter what.

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