three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting)

JOAN C. BEAL Three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting) 1. Introduction When I began studying linguistics in the 1970s, one of the first lessons that I learned was that “linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive” and that I should unlearn any “rules” that I had half-learnt at school, such as that prepositions should not appear at the end of sentences, or that infinitives should not be split. These ideas came from the eighteenth century, and modern linguists were more enlightened and “scientific”. Some years later, when I began to teach the History of English, and came to specialise in the Late Modern period, I started to look at these “prescriptive” grammars more closely and found that the truth was more complex: they were not all unthinkingly dogmatic, and the motivations behind their texts were many and various. On the other hand, as the twenty-first century dawned, I became aware of a new spirit of prescriptivism abroad: the best-selling non-fiction book of 2003 was a guide to correct punctuation, and this ushered in a swathe of self-proclaimedly prescriptive texts by authors who made a virtue of their lack of training in linguistics. At the same time, elocution lessons, which began in the eighteenth century but had died out in the later twentieth, were making a comeback in the guise of “accent re-duction”. In this paper, I intend firstly to revisit the eighteenth century and consider why it has had such a bad press amongst modern ling-uists, then to examine the phenomenon of the “new prescriptivism” and compare it with that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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2. “A spectre that haunts linguistics”: twentieth-century views

Cameron points out that “prescriptivism … represents the threatening Other, the forbidden; it is a spectre that haunts linguistics” (1995: 5). Throughout the twentieth century, accounts of eighteenth-century attitudes to language reflect this attitude. The extract below, taken from Bryant’s Modern English and its Heritage (2nd edition 1962), is typical:

As progress was made towards a uniform standard in the English Language, freedom decreased. Rules began to be formulated, efforts began to be made to fix the language, to determine what was right, and what was wrong, to pre-scribe the goal to be attained. This attitude reached its height in the eighteenth century, the age in which reason and logic were uppermost. (1962: 89−90)

Taking their cue from Leonard (1929), whose seminal work The Doc-trine of Correctness in English Usage 1700−1800 was to prove hugely influential, scholars defined the eighteenth century in Britain as the “age of authority”, when the freedom enjoyed by writers such as Shakespeare in the Early Modern period was curtailed by grammar-ians such as Robert Lowth, who were accused of imposing arbitrary rules on the language. As Pullum (1974: 63) has pointed out, twen-tieth-century linguists often refer to Lowth’s grammar as an example of prescriptivism at its worst, but rarely show any indication of having read it. This has led to a number of myths about Lowth, which are perpetuated by academics and laypeople alike. In the age of the World-Wide Web, it is possible for anybody with an opinion to set up a website. If you Google “Robert Lowth”, you find that it is not only the published linguists who, as Pullum said, give opinions about Lowth without having read his works. The following is fairly typical:

TOMBSTONE: It’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. R.I.P. We can blame an eighteenth-century English clergyman named Robert Lowth for this one. He wrote the first grammar book saying a preposition (a positioning word, like at, by, for, into, off, on, out, over, to, under, up, with) shouldn’t go at the end of a sentence. This idea caught on, even though great

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literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton is bristling with sentences ending with prepositions. Nobody knows just why the notion stuck − possibly because it’s closer to Latin grammar, or perhaps because the word “pre-position” means “position before,” which seemed to mean that a preposition can’t come last. (“Grammarphobia”)

In fact, Lowth was not the first English grammarian to mention pre-position stranding, Greenwood (1711), Fisher (1750) and Mason (1749) all write about and warn against this “transposition” before Lowth.1 Nor did he exactly proscribe it: acknowledging tongue-in-cheek that “This is an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to’, Lowth suggests that “it suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style” (1762: 127−128) (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006). This is very different from saying that “a preposition … shouldn’t go at the end of a sentence” and “can’t come last”.

The author of “grammarphobia” may have misinterpreted Lowth, but at least the latter had something to say about preposition-stranding. Perhaps the most unfounded myth about Lowth is that he invented the rule that it is wrong to split an infinitive, as alleged in the following extract (see also Tieken-Boon van Ostade forthcoming):

Hot linguistic debate often occurs over a number of normative usage rules. One example which leaps instantly to mind is the foolish “one must never split an infinitive.” In Lowth’s grammar infinitives cannot be split. It is not possible for Lowth because it is not possible in Latin to split an infinitive. Well, of course not. In Latin, an infinitive is one word. However, it is not in English. English infinitives are two words, such as “to split,” and there is little logic to keeping them fused together, except that it cannot be done in Latin and Bishop Lowth decided, quite on his own, that English should emulate Latin, and the world followed suit. Thus, one foolish man has made a messy mockery of the rich and dynamic English language. Because of Lowth’s erroneous decision, users of English have no end of confusion and difficulty sorting out these illogical rules. (“Bishop Lowth was a fool”)

In fact, Lowth has nothing to say on the matter: the proscription of the split infinitive first appears in an article by “P” in the New England 1 Thanks to Nuria Yañez-Bouza for this information.

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Magazine (1834) (Beal 2004: 112). What is very worrying for those of us who teach the history of English to undergraduates is that this website “Bishop Lowth was a Fool” is one of the first listed on a Google search, and students are drawn to it like moths to a flame. The entry on Lowth in Wikipedia included this statement at one time, but it has since been edited and is now much more reliable. We can warn students about websites but, unfortunately, this particular myth about Lowth also appears in respectable text books. I would suggest that the backlash against prescriptivism in the late twentieth century has led to a knee-jerk reaction against eighteenth-century grammarians, and an unwillingness to engage with the texts which is inexcusable now that they are accessible via ECCO. Students are very surprised when they read what Lowth and his contemporaries have to say, and find that some of these eighteenth-century grammarians are no more “prescrip-tive” than the style-guides issued by their own departments.

More recently, a number of scholars have revisited these eigh-teenth-century texts and attempted to give a more nuanced reading of them. At the forefront is the major research project “The Codifiers and the English Language”, currently in its fourth year, led by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade at the University of Leiden. A major object-tive of this project is “that the eighteenth-century normative gram-marians are put back on the linguistic agenda, with the aim of creating a better understanding among linguists of normative grammar as such and prescriptive grammarians, their methods and motivations, in particular” (“The Codifiers project”). Publications resulting from the project so far include a collection of papers on Grammars, Grammar-ians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England. (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). There have also been two international conferences on the theme “Perspectives on Prescriptivism”, the first held at the University of Sheffield in 2003, and the second at the University of Catania in Ragusa, Sicily in 2006. Papers from the latter have been published as Beal / Nocera / Sturiale (eds) (2008).


3. After the “age of correctness” If eighteenth-century grammarians such as Lowth were not as baldly prescriptive as many commentators have insisted, the same cannot be said about the many handbooks of usage that were produced espe-cially from the nineteenth century onwards. Here there is no attempt at explanation, no suggestion that some usages are more appropriate to informal style, just bald statements of what should, or more likely, should not, be done. The prescriptions listed below are taken from an edition of the nineteenth-century best-seller Enquire Within Upon Everything (1894).2

Do not use double superlatives, such as most straightest, most highest, most finest. Instead of “We travel slow”, say “We travel slowly”. Instead of “There’s fifty”, say “There are fifty” . (1894: 161)

In this text, such ipse dixit statements about grammar and usage sit alongside many other pronouncements on any activity that “has relation to the necessities of domestic life”, such as “bird-keeping, bee-keeping and poultry keeping” and “destruction of vermin”. What happens in the nineteenth century is that, whilst, as Finegan (1998) points out, “the empirical findings of comparative philology were coming to be well understood” (1998: 574), and “descriptive” gram-mars such as Sweet’s A New English Grammar, Logical and Histori-cal (1891−1898) were being published, there was still a market both for the grammars of the eighteenth century, especially Lindley Murray (1795), and for the more prescriptive handbooks of usage such as Enquire Within.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most successful and influential texts were those that steered a middle path between prescription and description. The trickle-down of scholarly interest in philology and the history of English meant that authors of

2 This edition is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg. Page

numbers here and elsewhere refer to the e-book.

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anything more substantial than the handbooks of usage were obliged to acknowledge the inevitability of linguistic change and the facts of usage. This did not prevent them from exercising a more subtle kind of prescription. Alford’s The Queen’s English (1864), the Fowler Brothers’ The King’s English (1906) and H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) all steer this middle path. Alford here reluctantly accepts a construction that had been in use since the late eighteenth century, the passive progressive:

I am now going to speak of a combination of words which is so completely naturalised, that it would be vain to protest against it, or even to attempt to disuse it one’s self. I mean, the joining together of a present and a past parti-ciple, as we do when we say “The letter was being written”, “The dinner is being cooked”. Such combinations were, I believe, not used by our best and most careful writers, until a comparatively recent date… The objection to “being written” for “in the process of writing” is this, − that “written” is a past participle, indicating a finished act. When I say “I have written a letter”, I mean, I have by me, or have as my act accomplished, a letter written. So that “being written” properly means, existing in a state of completion. “My letter being written, I put it in the post”. And, strictly speaking, we cannot use the combination to signify an incomplete action. Still, as I have said, the inaccura-cy has crept into the language, and is now found everywhere, in speech and in writing. The only thing we can do in such a case is to avoid it, where it can be avoided without violation of idiom, or giving harshness to the sentence. (Alford 1864: 153−154)

Although he does not condemn the usage outright, stoically accepting the inevitability of linguistic change, Alford makes it clear that he dis-approves, using words such as “inaccuracy” and “crept”, and sugges-ting that readers “avoid” the usage if possible.

Perhaps the most celebrated exponent of this “middle way” is H.W. Fowler, whose Modern English Usage (1926, 3rd ed. Burchfield 1996) is the most successful text of its kind in the twentieth century. The extract below, referring to the use of like as a conjunction, gives a flavour of it:

Every illiterate person uses this construction daily; it is the established way of putting things among all who have not been taught to avoid it; the substitution of as for like in their sentences would sound artificial. But in good writing this particular like is very rare. (Burchfield 1996: 458)


In the preface to his revised third edition, Burchfield asks: “why has this schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic and somewhat vulnerable book … retained its hold on the imagination of all but professional linguistic scholars for just on seventy years?” He goes on to relate that “People of all kinds continue to tell me that they use it ‘all the time’, and that it ‘never lets them down’. In the space of three weeks a judge, a colonel, and a retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum told me on separate occasions that they have the book close to them at all times” (1996: 121). A judge, a colonel and a retired museum curator don’t really constitute “all kinds of people”, but they do exemplify precisely the class of person who would swear by Fowler. Note that Burchfield excludes “professional linguists” from Fowler’s readership, which is made up of educated, middle-class people who are not experts in linguistics: precisely those who would be most concerned with “correct” usage in the twentieth century. They are certainly not the people whom Fowler describes as “illiterate” and those “who have not been taught to avoid it”. Fowler’s use of terms such as this unites him with his readers as “those who know better” because they have had a better education. Usage and linguistic change are acknowledged, but the reader is encouraged to distance him- or herself from the “illiterate”, i.e. the lower classes.

This opposition between “professional linguists” and the educ-ated non-linguists who are readers of Fowler’s Modern English Usage evokes the prescriptive/descriptive dichotomy mentioned at the beginning of this paper. In its entry for “descriptive”, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a special subsection for the use of the term in linguistics:

Describing the structure of a language at a given time, avoiding comparisons with other languages or other historical phases, and free from social valua-tions; as in descriptive grammar, linguistics, etc. (Opp. normative, prescript-tive, historical). (OED Online, s.v. descriptive 3b)

The first citations in this sense oppose “descriptive” to “historical”. Otto Jespersen is the first linguist cited in the OED entry who uses “descriptive” in opposition to “prescriptive”. The full citation is as follows:

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Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descrip-tive grammar [which] aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated. (Jespersen 1933: i. 19)

Jespersen distances himself from prescriptive grammars by stating that a descriptive one is “of greater value”. By the mid twentieth century this split between professional linguists and prescriptive grammar is complete, due to the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics. If “gram-mar” is innate, then we don’t need grammarians to tell us what is grammatical: the native speaker is the only judge of whether a sentence gets an asterisk or not.3 In a later citation in the OED entry, Crystal notes that “linguistics has been wholly critical of the ‘prescriptivist’ approach … on the whole, the term prescriptivism is pejorative in linguistic contexts” (1980: 282−283). So the twentieth century saw an absolute rejection of prescriptivism on the part of linguists, which, as I have argued above, led in turn to a reluctance to engage with eighteenth-century texts. 4. “Shamed by your English?” The dichotomy between the works of “professional linguists” who espouse a descriptive view of language, and the authors of manuals of “correct” usage continues, because, despite the broad agreement amongst linguists that any native speaker instinctively knows what is grammatical, there is still a market for prescriptive guides to usage amongst those who are, to use Labov’s phrase, “linguistically insecure”. At least twenty-five years ago I noticed an advertisement in a broadsheet newspaper, illustrated with a picture of a smirking,

3 Of course, there is far more to Chomskyan linguistics than the idea that gram-

mar is innate. My point here is that this was what led to the end of prescriptive grammar teaching in British schools. In practice, the only “native speaker” consulted was often the linguist him or herself, leading to a different kind of ipse dixit pronouncement.


Brylcreemed man and headed “Shamed by your English”? This is almost certainly the text referred to by Crystal when he notes:

Manuals of English usage have sold well for generations, and they all make the same claims … Millions feel linguistically inferior. And their inferiority complex is reinforced by the muggle who stares out at us from many a newspaper advertisement. (2006: viii)

This advertisement has continued to appear sporadically in a range of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers covering most points of the political spectrum (it certainly appears in The Guardian, The Indepen-dent and The Telegraph). If the company can afford to place adver-tisements in such a range of newspapers, we might assume that they are making a profit, so there is clearly a market for the commodity they are offering. Fromkin / Rodman (3rd ed. 1983) use the phrase “new prescriptivists” to refer to authors such as Edwin Newman, whose Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English, first publish-ed in 1974, was a best-seller in the USA. Just as, in the nineteenth century, manuals of usage existed alongside scholarly historical and descriptive grammars, prescriptivism has always been with us, even in the post-Chomsky age. However, I felt moved to investigate this phe-nomenon by the appearance of a number of texts in the early twenty-first century, “texts” in the broadest sense, because the latest mani-festations of prescriptivism are not confined to published books but also appear in the press, the media and on the internet. One text above all exemplifies this “new prescriptivism”, the text which inspired Crystal to write The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left (2006).

The best selling non-fiction book in the UK in 2003 was Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation. Truss is a journalist with no linguistic training, but she clearly tapped into the zeitgeist with this book, which takes a humorous approach to teaching the “correct” rules of punctuation. On the matter of the “incorrect” use of an apostrophe in possessive it’s (sic), she writes:

I want the greatest clarity from punctuation, which means, supremely, that I want apostrophes where they should be, and I will not cease from mental fight

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nor shall my sword sleep in my hand … until everyone knows the difference between “its” and “it’s”. (2003: 27)

This seems to be a fairly recent preoccupation: It’s as a possessive is common in eighteenth-century texts, and Addison in The Spectator (1711) uses an apostrophe in the plural of Opera’s, just like the much-maligned “greengrocer’s apostrophe” of today. Truss’s approach is humorous, and she claims to “combine a descriptive and prescriptive approach”, but the rhetoric is prescriptive. She uses military and legal terms such as “zero tolerance”, “take up arms”, “apostrophe war” and “punctuation vigilantes”. She even writes:

Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punct-uation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. (2003: 44)

Even though it is tongue-in-cheek, this is a rather extreme reaction to what is, after all, a very common mistake even amongst the best-educated. Whilst writing this paper, I received a document from a well-respected research organisation which included one instance of this very “solecism”: should I demand the head of whichever admini-strator drew up the document? Truss’s jocular approach is typical of the “new prescriptivism”: the reader is drawn into Truss’s point of view by her focus on shared annoyances, by humour and by self-deprecation. She refers to herself as a “stickler”, and, invoking the dichotomy between “professional linguists” and self-appointed guides to usage discussed above, she states:

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not a book about grammar. I am not a grammarian … A degree in English language is not a prerequisite for caring about where a bracket is preferred to a dash, or a comma needs to be replaced by a semi-colon. (2003: 32)

The implication is that non-linguists such as Truss and the reader have more “common sense” than professional linguists.

Such is the power of Truss’s prescriptions regarding the correct use of the apostrophe that Marks & Spencer (the supermarket which


actually changed the sign on its quick-service tills to read “10 items or fewer” rather than “less”) withdrew a whole range of children’s clothes because they had the word Giraffe’s printed with an apostro-phe before the plural -s, as related in the following extract from The Guardian:

A Marks & Spencer customer has just been offered a refund, M&S vouchers and a full apology after the store conceded that there was a grammatical error on one of its products. Emblazoned on a children’s pyjama top, above a picture of two giraffes, were the words “Baby Giraffe’s” (sic). Where did that apostrophe come from? Suzanne Walker, from Stockport, who bought the pyjamas for her three-year-old son, discovered the blunder and wrote to the store to complain. “I just thought how stupid it was that a large company like that could get it so wrong,” she told the Manchester Evening News. “Surely, they should have people who check things like that.” Walker, the daughter of an English teacher, added, “I do not care to dress my child in a top containing a glaring grammatical gaffe.” (“The Guardian”)

The Guardian article goes on to tell us that the angry parent “was told that the matter would be raised with the company’s “childrenswear technologist”. In the event, the grammatically-toxic product was immediately withdrawn from all stores. “We apologise for any incon-venience or dissatisfaction Mrs Walker felt with this product which is no longer on sale,” declared a company spokesperson, abjectly.

Although Truss is the most prominent of the “new prescripti-vists”, she is not alone. John Humphrys (2004: 28) exemplifies the new “complaint tradition” as can be seen from the following remarks about younger journalists:

What few have is any grounding in grammar. To many of them punctuation and syntax are enduring mysteries. They are not remarkable in this. It is true of almost all the young people I have worked with for many years. They simply weren’t taught these disciplines at school. And that’s because it was deemed that they needed protecting from people engaged in a terrible conspiracy.

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Where Truss adopts the persona of the “stickler”, Humphrys is the “grumpy old man”,4 horrified at the lax linguistic behaviour of the young. Humphrys, like Truss, is a journalist. He is one of the main presenters on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and is renowned for his brusque style of interviewing. He also appears regularly on a humorous TV programme entitled Grumpy Old Men in which a variety of ageing celebrities bemoan the various ways in which life in twenty-first-century Britain is “going to the dogs”. The humour of the programme, as with its companion Grumpy Old Women, is in the recognition on the part of the audience, the middle-aged, middle-class viewers who are at home watching BBC2 at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, that the same things irritate them. In Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language, Humphrys deplores the lack of “grammar” teaching in schools and paints a bleak picture of a lost generation unable to express themselves clearly. In the sequel to this volume, Beyond Words (2006), Humphrys specifically aligns him-self with this generation when he says of young people’s use of what has variously been labelled “High Rising Tone”, “Australian Question Intonation” and “uptalk”, that “grumpy old men like me are appalled by it” (2006: 2). The “grumpy” generation: those now in their sixties, are precisely those who were the last cohort to experience formal and prescriptive grammar teaching in schools: Crystal dates the “death” of grammar teaching to 1965, “the year that the grammar and usage questions were finally dropped by the Ordinary Level and Certificate of Secondary Education Boards” (2006: 203). These examinations would normally have been taken at age 16, so anybody born after 1949 will not have been examined on “grammar and usage”. Humphrys here presents the rejection of formal grammar teaching as a result of a conspiracy theory on the part of linguists when, in fact, it was the Secondary Schools Examination Council Report of 1964 that explicit-ly criticised the outdated method of teaching “traditionally prescribed rules of grammar which have been artificially imposed on the language” (cited in Crystal 2006: 202). There is no time here for me to go into the ideological debates surrounding the changes in the English curriculum which raged in the 1980s, but Humphrys is echoing Honey 4 I am grateful to Paul Cooper for alerting me to this persona.


(1997) who in turn invokes his own elaborate conspiracy theory by which sociolinguists such as Peter Trudgill, Jenny Cheshire and James and Lesley Milroy are “named and shamed” as responsible for holding back the progress of working-class children by denying them access to Standard English. Honey’s work is given no credence by linguists, but pundits like Humphrys and Nigella Lawson (a journalist and TV cook) cite it favourably precisely because it tells them what they want to hear: that language is “going to the dogs” and that it is the fault of linguists. In other words, anybody who actually knows enough about language to comment on it is disqualified from doing so, because they are either engaged in a conspiracy, or too far removed from the “real world”. Crystal writes of “those who regularly send me hate mail because I see nothing wrong in split infinitives”, dismiss his work as “totally irrelevant to the real issues of the day” and describe him as “‘one of those permissives’, an ‘anything goes’ man” (2006: 217). The book cited here has on its front cover a rather double-edged en-dorsement from none other than Humphrys himself: “David Crystal is a national treasure”. We must bear in mind here that “national treasure” is a patronising term usually employed with reference to an ageing celebrity who is looked on with nostalgic affection but no longer treated seriously. 5. The “New Prescriptivism”: why now? The examples cited above are, I hope, sufficient to convince readers that prescriptivism is not merely alive and well, but resurgent, in the twenty-first century. In seeking explanations for this phenomenon, I would like to compare today’s society in Britain with that of the eighteenth century.

First of all, now, as in the eighteenth century, there is clearly a market for prescriptive texts amongst those who wish to climb the social ladder and succeed in business. The “blurb” below describes the potential market for Withers’s Aristarchus (1788):

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The importance of a correct Mode of Expression in Business is sufficiently obvious. Shopmen, Clerks and all who are engaged in the Transactions of commercial Life, will find innumerable Improprieties noticed, in the subse-quent Numbers, which it will be their Interest to avoid. (Withers 1788: 31)

In the first years of the twenty-first century, there has been an upsurge of interest in elocution lessons, often advertised as “business commu-nication” or “voice development” (see also Beal 2008). An article in The Guardian identifies the market for these:

A recent study by the Aziz Corporation, a firm of image consultants … found that 46% of company directors believe that having a strong regional accent is considered a disadvantage to business success. (The Guardian Jobs and Money Section, 20/12/2003)

The potential clients now, as in the eighteenth century are those who, in the words of the Aziz Corporation’s website, wish to “communicate more effectively in both business and social environments”, and “impress at interviews”, i.e. white collar workers. In the twenty-first century, elocution lessons are pitched precisely at the modern equi-valent of Withers’s “shopmen, clerks and all who are engaged in the Transactions of commercial Life”, those who believe that their liveli-hood relies on their being able to conform to the corporate image of those who might hire them. In twenty-first-century Britain, these are the people whose jobs are insecure, and who might see the acquisition of the right accent as giving them an advantage.

This leads to the second factor which the Late Modern period and the twenty-first century have in common: a culture of “self-improvement”. In the nineteenth century, publishers supplied the market for “self-help” guides with volumes like Enquire Within upon Everything, which has been quite rightly described as a precursor to the World-Wide Web. By the 113th edition, 1,500,000 copies had been published (“Enquire Within”). Enquire Within has a substantial secti-on on “Errors in speaking” covering everything from “provincialisms” to errors in punctuation. The tone is authoritative and utterly prescrip-tive: Marks & Spencer’s customers, for instance, will be pleased to see that section 181: 61 states “Instead of ‘Less friends,’ say ‘Fewer friends.’ Less refers to quantity” (1894: 161). Works like Enquire


Within answered the need felt by those who aspired to a genteel and respectable life to be told in no uncertain terms what was or was not acceptable, whether this concerned grammar, pronunciation or plan-ning a dinner for a large party. Today, we “enquire within” via the internet, but there is a booming market for texts and courses which will help the reader or client to correct any perceived defect or short-coming which is preventing him (or more likely her) from succeeding. In this context, elocution lessons and texts such as Eats, Shoots and Leaves sit alongside a range of “self-improvement” offerings from life-coaching to cosmetic surgery, claiming to provide the client with “confidence” and a competitive edge.

Thirdly, in both periods the middle classes of Britain have a fear of the underclass. From the eighteenth century onwards, the mar-ket for prescriptive texts was largely made up of those who aspired to social advancement. One of the keywords in eighteenth-century texts is “vulgar”: these readers did not want to be taken for, or associated with, the urban working class. Crowley (2003: 133) points out that attitudes towards urban vernaculars hardened in the nineteenth century as a reaction to the strikes and rioting in Britain’s industrial cities. In 2005, the “word of the year” in the UK was chav, defined in the OED as “a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish beha-viour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status” (OED, s.v. chav). In a society where prejudices and jokes about gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation are thankfully no longer acceptable, social class is the last bastion of bigotry. The old social class system is no longer relevant when a plumber can earn more than a professor, but the largely unemployed, non-home-owning “chavs” are the new under-class. The mother who complained to M&S about the “Baby giraffe’s” pyjamas was, above all, anxious not to be taken for a chav by being seen with a child wearing ungrammatical nightwear. The extract be-low is from “The Little book of Chav Speak”, which parodies the dict-ionary genre, poking fun at the language of “chavs”.

Aun’ie noun – a kin-term used in Chav speak to describe the female friends of any Chav parent.

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Nuffink adverb – can be used interchangeably in place of either “anything” or “nothing”. Wiv preposition – “wiv” is a mutation of the English term “with”. When a Chavette is the girlfriend of a Chav (or pregnant by him), she can be said to be “wiv” him. It is similar in meaning to the English expression “the partner of”. (Bok 2004: 95−96)

Note that the features of pronunciation singled out here: glottalisation and th-fronting, are precisely those which sociolinguists such as Kerswill (2003) and Foulkes / Docherty (1999) have found to be spreading throughout Britain, particularly amongst young, working-class males. Bok is here doing exactly what Crowley describes as typ-ical of nineteenth-century authors: portraying working-class speech as “defective” and associating those who use these features with the feral underclass of our nightmares.

Lastly, despite the advances made by the feminist movement in the second half of the twentieth century, there are signs that at least some young women are, now as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expected to behave and speak like “ladies” in order to make themselves acceptable. Mugglestone cites the nineteenth-century text How to Choose a Wife as warning the reader that “perpetual nausea and disgust will be your doom if you marry a vulgar and uncultivated woman” (1854: 51, cited in Mugglestone 1995: 186). In 2005, a new reality TV programme appeared on our screens in the UK: Ladette to Lady. This programme, back for a second series in 2006 and a third in 2007, harks back to the “good old days” of debutantes and finishing schools, and starts from the premise that it’s better to be a lady than a ladette.5 In the blurb for the second series, we are told that “during the course the young women will learn deportment, elocution, floristry, dressmaking and sexual etiquette, and their progress will be assessed weekly by the staff through a series of challenges and tasks. The girls must excel to avoid elimination” (“Ladette to Lady”). One of the “re-wards” offered to these young women is the chance of a date with an

5 The OED defines ladette as “A young woman characterized by her enjoyment

of social drinking, sport, or other activities typically considered to be male-oriented, and often by attitudes or behaviour regarded as irresponsible or brash; (usually) one of a close-knit social group” (OED, s.v. ladette).


eligible, upper-class bachelor. Nineteenth-century guides to “correct” pronunciation, especially when aimed at women, were often em-bedded into texts such as Enquire Within Upon Everything, in which readers could also learn etiquette and household management. In Ladette to Lady are we once again seeing a “good” pronunciation along with other aspects of “ladylike” behaviour as an asset on the marriage market? 6. Conclusion According to Milroy / Milroy (1999) prescriptivism is the final stage in the process of standardisation, and never goes away, as linguistic change, whilst inevitable, will always meet resistance. So am I mistaken in identifying a “new prescriptivism” at large in Britain (and elsewhere) in the twenty-first century? Whilst there has been a continuity of prescriptive texts, the massive success of Eats, Shoots and Leaves and its imitators suggests that there is a “new” pre-scriptivism at large. In this context, linguists who fear contamination by prescriptivism so much that they refuse to read eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammars and usage guides and dismiss their twenty-first-century equivalents as irrelevant could rightly be accused of failing to engage with the “real world”. Whatever we think about the innateness of linguistic competence, there are many native speakers of English who feel anything but “competent” and turn to prescriptive texts for help. Some linguists have attempted to provide better-informed and less prescriptive usage guides, notable examples being Crystal (1988), Trask (1997) and Peters (2004). Perhaps more of us should follow their example. At the very least, I would recommend that we engage critically with prescriptive texts from all periods, including the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in order to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon.

Joan C. Beal 18

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three hundred years of prescriptivism (and counting)

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