A role for the language police

My mother felt that any educated person should understand the fine points of grammar, and that those who failed in that regard showed laziness and lack of education. "Irregardless" was worthy of derision because of the double negative. Tom Paxton got a derisive laugh from the "Marvelous Toy" line that his son "loves it just like me", as it necessarily meant that the boy loved the toy in the same way he loved his father. Knowing the conjugations of "lay/laid/laid" (transitive) and "lie/lay/lain" (intransive) was vital. Growing up in Durham, New Hampshire, the town was a mix of those with more standard US accents and the local New England accent. When my English teacher at parents' night said she tried to make sure her students' use of language was "akkuhrat" and "cahful" my mother thought she was not being provincial -- she was wrong.

Then I was introduced in college to the serious scientific study of language and the distinction between prescriptive linguistics (how people should speak or write) and descriptive linguistics (how people actually speak or write). Prescriptive rules were silly, because language is constantly changing. Black English was the example of choice (not the Boston accent) of how different dialects of English had their own rules that weren't those of standard English -- different, but just as sensible.

Not so many years ago older folks were concerned that young people used "like" so much, putting it in places it never would have belonged in the past. I read a linguistics paper describing the phenomenon, and finding four or five specific functions that the word served in that sort of speech, with specific rules governing where and when it could appear.

At the level of descriptive linguistics, language is full of generalizations that hold for everyone -- they are invisible to us because we all agree on them. Compare,

Although he was tired, Bill kept on walking.

*He kept on walking although Bill was tired.

You can sometimes introduce a pronoun before the word it refers to, but not always. The leading asterisk is the linguist's notation for saying it is ungrammatical. No dialect of English on earth is going to allow the second construction, no grammar book is going to bother to tell you it's not allowed, and no one ever gets it wrong. The second sentence makes sense only if Bill is some other person entirely. This is part of descriptive linguistics, finding generalizations that we humans are simply not aware of.

Enlightened linguistics recognizes that language changes, so that yesterday's hard-and-fast rule is relaxed, and yesterday's convention isn't true any more. I myself have been surprised that things I was raised to believe were completely forbidden are now accepted usage. As this view is more generally accepted, it tends to give rise to "anything goes". As long as people can understand what you mean, who cares if it violates some longstanding rule?

I have a slightly different vision. The language police serve the role of slowing down language change. When they tell people they are using language wrong, they make sure people realize when they say things in a new way that in recent history they didn't. It nudges them back into line with past usage if there isn't some good reason to change it. Sometimes language has to change. New technology is an obvious cause. Other times it isn't clear why language has to change, but it does. There is some underlying force that makes it happen. And when that happens the language police will lose. But in the mean time they push back against whimsical language change.

I'm not an avid language policer myself, but it can of course be done different ways. I might be inclined to say, "You know, until recently that would have been considered wrong" rather than, "What you're saying is bad English!" But I'm still open to the idea that that latter formulation might be serving a useful purpose.