Sentence examples for prescriptive grammarians from inspiring English sources
It's like the Hunger Games, just for prescriptive grammarians.
One of the reliable pleasures of observing modern arguments over language is the schadenfreude of seeing the self-appointed prescriptive grammarians get things embarrassingly wrong.
Several generations of more or less "prescriptive" grammarians, from Johnson to H. W. Fowler to Ernest Gowers to Robert Burchfield, spent most of their careers battling utilized methodologies and their kin.
We say "He kissed the bride," so we ask "Who kissed the bride?" We say "Henry kissed her," so we ask "Whom did Henry kiss?" But even after a century of nagging by prescriptive grammarians, the "who whom" distinction remains tenuous in speech and informal writing.
It did not begin to be criticized until the 19th century, and despite all the efforts of prescriptive grammarians it has remained very popular in speech.
Spender takes the evidence for this claim to be far more than circumstantial, however, and to support it she discusses the efforts of prescriptive grammarians.
Loosey-goosey descriptive lexicographers, with their anything-goes passivity, deride prescriptive pop grammarians like me as control freaks, but I look bemusedly at those roundheeled dictionary writers as common-usage nuts.
Historical grammarians did not follow earlier prescriptive approaches but were interested, instead, in discovering where the language under study came from.
Depending on the grammarian's approach, a grammar can be prescriptive (i.e., provide rules for correct usage), descriptive (i.e., describe how a language is actually used), or generative (i.e., provide instructions for the production of an infinite number of sentences in a language).
Those shows are prescriptive.
