Erin McKean on prescriptivism and descriptivism

Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press and editor of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, is one of the smartest and funniest people I've ever met. She's a whiz with metaphors and analogies, which I especially enjoy. I interviewed her in Evanston, Illinois, in March of 2004. Here's a portion of our conversation.

Isn't the precision that is idolized by prescriptivists truly a virtue?

Words don't have to be like a machine, engineered to 1/87th of an inch of tolerance in order to keep the works from gumming up. I think that the demand for precision often tends to be a screen for other things. It's nice to have precise language, but there's so much richness in language that if you slaughtered everything into neat little places in the name of precision, you would lose a lot of what makes language great.

People who are very prescriptivist also make a big deal about certain things not being logical. They make a big deal about things matching up 1:1, and I think if you're really set on having a language that does that, C++ [computer language] is the way to go. Go for the constructive language of computer language, because English is messy, because it's an organic language, and I think the messiness of English is one of the greatest things about it.

It's the difference between modeling clay and legos. There are thousands of different kinds of legos of every conceivable color and shape and size, but at the end of the day you've got little blocks that fit together. They're legos. There's a limit to what you can make. Now with clay, you just have this amorphous lump, there's no structure to it at all, but you could make anything. Prescriptivists, they want more legos. And the descriptivists are like, 'Hey, look at what they're doing with that clay over there!' I mean, I love legos, but there are some things you can't do with them.

Now, some of my dearest friends are prescriptivists. [laughs] But it's more fun to watch what people are doing than to tell them what to do, because you can't ever be surprised if you tell them what to do, and things can't change. Some results of change aren't that great, but you can't get that wonderful surprise if you don't let people do what they want, at least some of the time. And there is still a conservation of meaning that goes on. No one's going to change English so drastically in one generation that your grandma can't understand what you're saying.

What about kids listening to rap music? Can they communicate with their grandmothers?

If you're trying to use rap music words to communicate with your grandma, you're trying to make points other than your actual communciation. You're trying shock, or annoy, or make her laugh. You have other communicative goals than just saying, 'Wanna come over for dinner at 7?'

People want to be understood. That's why 10,000 teenagers have Live Journals.

I think it's important to understand that there's the goal of communicating your message and then there's the goal of communicating things that are parallel to your message, like what kind of person you are, what social circle you move in, whether you are hostile towards the listener or ingratiating towards the listener. And if you think that people should speak only high standard English all the time, than you're removing some of those messages.

Sometimes I do try and speak high standard English. But when I'm doing that it's because straight communication is my highest goal, and I don't want people to be distracted by the fact that I'm from Generation X, or a Southerner, or flippant. But most of the time I don't think it's that distracting, my Southernish-ness or my age, or the fact that I don't take very much 100 percent seriously [laughs].

And yet, prescriptivists say all the time that English is going to hell in a handbasket.

'Hell in a handbasket' is their favorite phrase! I mean, you can argue it's a beautiful time for language. It's always a beautiful day for language. There's that old Vaudevillian joke where the fat guy says to the straight guy, 'It's a wonderful day for a race.' And the straight guy says, 'What race?', and the fat guy says, 'The human race!' It's always a wonderful day for a race in language. Think how boring it would be if nobody's language pissed us off, not just what they said but how they say it.

I think that there needs to be a let-off of prescriptivist steam. I mean, I get annoyed by it too. I was in a movie theater watching those ads on the screen, those movie factoids. It was something about Owen Wilson, and they made a verb transitive that in my opinion is not transitive, and I was gettin' kind of grumpy about it. And my husband was sitting next to me and he said, 'Uh huh, see? Even you are prescriptivist.'

It was something like 'to further' verb 'his surfing skills.' I didn't think that that bending of the verb was done for a good reason. It was just trying very hard to reach that elevated language, and it's just like a missed slam dunk. There's nothing more painful than watching somebody grab for that kind of high language and then fall off.

Especially when it doesn't come naturally?

Especially when it's a slide in a movie theater. That shouldn't be the place for it.