the problem with hardcore descriptivism. If anything goes, anything goes.Oh, sigh. John McIntyre (director of the copy desk at The Sun, a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, and an adjunct instructor in journalism at Loyola College in Maryland) has this to say about that:
"It is wholesome for him to point out that the caricature of the descriptivist viewpoint — that anything a native speaker of English says or writes is by definition legitimate — is a straw man. No serious linguist thinks that." (
link).
And lest you think that McIntyre is some closet descriptivist, he does point out the flip-side:
"Unfortunately, in describing the “militant grammarians” such as David Foster Wallace, the author of a well-reasoned critique of the philosophical underpinnings of descriptivism, Mr. Greene presents the other straw man, the prescriptivist as the blind follower of nonsensical rules about not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions. "
Descriptivist posit that the only way to determine what is grammatical and what is not is by describing how people actually use the language. This is as far from
anything goes as
all get out.
