>Traditionally, Prescriptivists tend to be political conservatives and Descriptivists tend to be liberals. But today’s most powerful influence on the norms of public English is actually a stern and exacting form of liberal Prescriptivism. I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become “high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” and a sentence like “White English and Black English are different, and you better learn White English or you’re not going to get good grades” is not blunt but “insensitive.” Although it’s common to make jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as “aesthetically challenged” and so on), be advised that Politically Correct English’s various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government agencies, whose institutional dialects now evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.
>From one perspective, the rise of PCE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution — namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement) — have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it’s true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.
- David Foster Wallace, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001
>From one perspective, the rise of PCE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution — namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement) — have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it’s true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.
- David Foster Wallace, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001
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