Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: which is worse?

Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism: which is worse?

These two words are used to describe one's attitude towards language usage; at its very simplest do you prescribe or describe how you speak, what are people supposed to do vs what people actually do, 'should' vs 'is'. When these terms are thrown around (and I do mean thrown, like mud pies) it's almost always meant to sting.

Objectively, prescriptivism is usually understood to mean keeping strictly to the formal rules of a language and descriptivism is more about discovering and recording the rules of language however people say things (whether they match the formal version or not). Newspaper editors and school teachers are often the supposed standards of prescriptivism and linguists as that of descriptivism. Your secondary teachers are teaching you the rules of good grammar, and the linguists are being scientific about what the rules actually are.

M-W's third edition dictionary (1961) is often cited as a classic of the descriptivist abyss, putting in words of dubious provenance, all the good profanity (which at least got some kids to crack it open at least once). The dictionary was decried by many as the nadir of pandering to idiocy, the last gasps in the decline of western civilization.

Informally, from the prescriptive point of view, descriptivists are 'anything goes'; whatever people say is what is allowed, nothing and no one is wrong, there are no mistakes, 'ain't' and 'between you and I' are now OK and that is just wrong and descriptivists are avatars of the decline nay the destruction of western civilization, regression towards the mean, the twilight of the idols, the idiotocracy, the worst are full of passionate intensity.

From the descriptive point of view, prescriptivists are stuck up old school marms, who make up arbitrary style rules, say 'you can't do this-you can't do that', split infinitives, prepositions at the end of a word, singular they, when people have been saying it that way forever and you just made that rule up because you are warped, frustrated old man. P's try to enforce their made up rules, when it's just their own repetition of some one else's peevish peeving on personal style. Descriptivists say that prescriptivists single way of speaking is reprehensible elitism and that they think they're are morally superior to others, and any other patterns are slack jawed, uneducated, lower class.

But that's just the tendentious version.

From the prescriptive point of view, there really are mistakes that people make, infer for imply is just wrong, 'literally' for not literal things is just wrong and native speakers just do not say it that way. A common error is not necessarily a common alternative.

From the descriptive point of view, there are many patterns out there for the same thing. Different contexts have different rules. People will say different things in different situations, one way speaking at the press conference and another in the bar, and neither is wrong (or the differences show up in different contexts).

People may very well avoid a split infinitive and prepositions at the end of a sentence in writing for stylistic or esthetic reasons, but in speech there's hardly getting around it what with all the phrasal verbs in English. The double negative ain't no (= "isn't a") problem as a perfectly everyday way of speaking for some varieties of English (that are, as the linguists say, not highly socially respectable (= redneck or AAVE)) or grammatically and logically appropriate either, two negatives making a positive or a form of understatement (that was not an uncomplicated sentence).

And this is where it comes down to the real difference.

Descriptivists are really prescriptivists at heart. Descriptivists just recognize many more varieties than prescriptivists, and those varieties tend to be much more informal or used by socially non-pinnacle subpopulations. People who are called by others prescriptivists do seem a little judgy, and people who are called descriptivists do seem a little too accepting of things that are  (i.e. errors). But if you just label large groups of patterns as varieties, Prescriptivists are just talking about (mostly) a single variety, the newspaper/college paper variety, and descriptivists allow for a wider range of varieties, informal or regional or inarticulate (well, maybe not the last one). There are still mistakes. It just depends on the context or variety you're in.