Descriptivism Prevails

I was prepping for class today, and this Huffington Post article just tickled me. It explains that Merriam Webster’s Twitter account featured a brush-up with a stickler for traditional pronoun usage:

The dictionary’s temporary social account manager then explained that they were using the singular they, and that the dictionary adheres to descriptivism. “We follow language, language doesn’t follow us,” they tweeted. 

“Language rules are all that separate us from the animals,” Smarick then said, via a social media platform on the internet, a technological feat that wrests upon thousands of years’ worth of progressively advanced scientific discovery.

This was not just a win for grammatical descriptivism (an approach to grammar that embraces all linguistic communities as valid, acknowledging the power relations embedded in evaluations like “correct” and “proper” English). It was also a win for scathing irony.

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