Prescriptivism is frequently ridiculous and often results in worse writing and speaking. (I plan to write some posts about examples spotted in the wild.) But this post isn’t an advocation of the linguistic descriptivist position, succinctly explained here. (I do advocate it, but that’s not the main point.)
I preach the word of the descriptivist attitude.
Prescriptivism’s sins abide: bad writing, confused students, unwarranted anger, these three (at least); but the greatest of these is anger. As Pullum said in the post linked above: “[I]t's not just the the existence of ignorant authoritarian prescriptivism in this culture that needs an explanation, it's also the level of anger that accompanies its expression.”
I think the silly prescriptions people learn in school do something insidious: They teach people to hate language while making them believe that they love it.
“Which” hunters and the like often think they’re protecting the integrity of the language they love from the people who would butcher it. The opposite is often true. There is, instead, some fact about English which they don’t like. They ignore the evidence that it’s a standard part of English. They attack the people who speak it naturally.
And the sad part is, without some English teacher or cultural milieu telling them not to like it, they’d probably never have thought twice about it. It’s not like a romantic partner whose flaws you overlook or might grow to find endearing. They’re not even flaws to begin with. Someone just imagined that they were, and others followed suit.
I mean that literally! A lot of usage “rules” can be traced back to the opinions of one or two people from hundreds of years ago. Some examples:
“Less is exclusively for measurable amounts and fewer is for countables. 10 items or less is ungrammatical.”
The rule came from Robert Baker, writing in 1770, who used very subjective language. “…I should think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant… but more strictly proper.” Later usage guides took his preference as a hard rule.
“Between is used for two items and among is for more. Between the three is ungrammatical.”
Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary noticed that, etymologically, the tween part of between derives from an Old English word related to two. But he recognized that it wasn’t always used this way. Goold Brown in 1851 set the restriction in place. Even Noah Webster in 1828 noted that “between is not restricted to two.” Brown was going against popular dictionaries with no justification beyond the etymological fallacy.
“None is a contraction of not one, so it must follow the same number agreement and always be singular. None go is ungrammatical.”
The etymology was noted by Lindley Murray in 1795, who believed it had no plural when it first arose. He was only partially right; none comes from the Old English nan, which indeed is a contraction of ne (not) and an (one), but it was always used as both singular and plural even in our oldest recorded usages in Old English. Murray didn’t even say that it should be restricted to singular in modern prose, and nobody knows who turned a half-false etymological observation into an inviolable rule.
People take these opinions, imagine they’re rules, then fume when they’re not followed. It turns the English language into a BEC. How could English do any right when you decide that its rules are against the rules?
Peace I leave with you, peace I give unto you: not as English classes giveth, give I unto you. You can love language as it is actually spoken and written. When it clashes with your intuitions or preferences, you can investigate rather than get angry.
If it’s personal preference, well, you can’t be wrong about that. But you can be wrong about what sentences are ungrammatical and which word usages are incorrect. And you might be wrong about the basis for your preference. (Witness, for example, people in the UK being irritated by Americanisms, many of which are not Americanisms at all, and some of which are as old as English.)
I’ve seen both sides. I know what feels better, deep down. Join me, and learn to stop hating your language.