Language: a living thing escaping the cage of over-definition

From time to time I get reminded of the over-prescriptive approach to language. On Friday, a colleague worried about split infinitives -I said I thought some infinitives should be split -you only have to see how ugly some attempts to avoid them can be to realised that. (Oh, and that is assuming that there is an English infinitive in the way presupposed by such grammars).
So I loved this article which alerts us to the 'political' function of these prescriptive grammars and dictionaries.

In those far-off days, linguistic authority was in the hands of a hieratic elite of lexicographers and grammarians whose sacred texts were the Oxford English Dictionary and handbooks of English style and usage. If my definition of "simplistic" was not in the dictionary, it did not exist. (In fact, the OED states that the modern meaning of the word dates back to the 19th century, but at the time of the incident the Concise version did not record this.)

That last parenthetical comment blows the lid off: quite often, the prescription falls foul of the actuality because it is merely the intuition or sense of Latinisation of the writer backed up by the usage of their particular group of language users and as such is a power ploy: an attempt to make their usage 'normal' for others or to make participation for others harder (to put a really negative spin on it). As the writer states earlier: the experience of that kind of red ink had a result in "undermining my faith in my own linguistic judgment.". There's the nub: a native speaker already knows their language; any native speaker has a perfect right to use the language as they wish: the battle is over which dialects get to be considered 'prestigious' or 'normal' for educated or powerful elites. The split infinitive is emblematic of an earlier -Victorian, I suspect, attempt to impose norms.

But language isn't something you legislate for: it is an ongoing negotiation ('conversation' if you will) between all those who speak it: words, usages, syntactic devices come and go in fashion, adoption by various groups, rejection by various groups etc. Language changes as a result. That's why we don't speak like Chaucer or Shakespeare any more. Get used to it people. By all means be aware of social and stylistic nuances and usages, select them appropriately according to context; but please do not say that anything a native speaker says is wrong: it may not be your dialect or stylistic preference, it may be inapppropriate to the context or it may disadvantage the speaker because of the prejudicial views of certain other, linguistically ill-founded prescriptivist, speakers. But it is not "wrong".

And if you are one of those people who is tempted to call some other native speaker of English's usage 'wrong', then may I invite you to reconsider? By all means talk about the way that a usage 'sounds' to you and what associations it has for you. But be prepared to hear things back about your usage. We all make social judgements on the basis of accent and dialect and usages: we could do with defusing some of the prejudices not stoking them up by trying to exert linguistic power plays.

I've noted before how Shakespeare and Jane Austen have split infinitives. ..