Prescriptivism and the drive to fix English

Prescriptivism and the drive to fix English describe an influential eighteenth-century project: to define the language’s limits, standardize its forms, and preserve a supposedly perfected English from decline. The project treated linguistic authority as a means of national order, but the history of dictionary-making in the book also exposes its central difficulty: a living language changes through use, and recording that change is not the same as controlling it.

A language to be defined

By the eighteenth century, the conviction was growing that England needed a fuller account of its own language and a way to raise its standing. English literary figures complained that the language lacked adequate instruments for its study. Their concern was not only practical. They believed English had become sufficiently refined and pure that it should now remain stable; without intervention, it might deteriorate. Fixing the language meant establishing its boundaries, taking inventory of its vocabulary, and deciding what English was.

The ambition was to turn that definition into a standard with authority behind it. A national language, in this view, should be measured and laid down, and later changes admitted or rejected by those qualified to judge. The model resembled the language institutions established elsewhere in Europe, although the English advocates were reluctant to acknowledge that resemblance. Their imagined authority was a home-grown body of cultural arbiters: a group empowered not merely to describe usage but to determine which forms deserved recognition.

Rules for words and speech

Swift was the fiercest advocate of linguistic regulation. He objected to words such as bamboozle and uppish appearing in print, and even took issue with couldn't. Such examples show how the demand for stability reached into ordinary vocabulary: words in circulation could be treated not as evidence of English in use but as intrusions to be excluded. The aim was not simply to make a reference work more comprehensive. It was to establish rules that would separate acceptable language from what its authorities considered offensive to good sense.

The proposed regulation extended to both writing and speech. Swift wanted spelling fixed through a firm orthography and pronunciation governed by an equally firm orthoepy. Underlying these demands was a hope that the language could be secured against variation: once correct forms had been laid down, speakers and writers could be directed towards them. The project thus joined description to prescription. An inventory of words was expected to do more than show what English contained; it was also supposed to help decide what English should contain.

Samuel Johnson and the limits of fixing

The need for a dictionary and the aspiration to fix the language converged in the work of Samuel Johnson, but his position did not remain aligned with the programme of strict linguistic purity. The book describes an unresolved scholarly debate about whether he initially intended to fix English. Its account gives a development over the course of his six-year undertaking: around halfway through, he came to understand fixing as both impossible and undesirable.

That change matters because it separates the labour of making a dictionary from the claim that a dictionary can arrest linguistic change. Johnson may have begun with the ambition to establish a standard, but the project brought him face to face with the limits of that ambition. To compile a record of English was not to gain power over the custom on which English depended. The dictionary-maker could organize and explain the language; permanence was another matter.

Benjamin Martin had stated the problem plainly: language depends on arbitrary use and custom, and therefore cannot remain permanently the same. What one age regards as polite and elegant may be judged uncouth and barbarous by another. This account of changing judgement unsettles the prescriptivist belief that a single moment of refinement can supply an enduring measure. If standards themselves shift over time, rules that claim to preserve correct usage may instead preserve the preferences of a particular age.

From critic to historian

Richard Chenevix Trench gave this alternative a clear formulation in his lecture on deficiencies in English dictionaries. His central principle was that a dictionary should be an inventory of the language, not a guide to proper usage. The lexicographer, in his account, was an historian rather than a critic: it was not the dictionary-maker’s task to select words according to whether they were good or bad, or for one authority to decide which words people should use.

For Trench, an English dictionary should record words that had a recognized life in the standard language. Its work did not end with admitting a word into the record; it should also show the history of that word’s life. Some words had existed for centuries, some were new, and others rose and disappeared quickly. Their differing prospects did not make them less valid evidence of the language. A word’s age, obsolescence, or uncertain future was part of its history, not a reason to exclude it from a work of reference.

This principle directly reverses the prescriptivist test. Where the drive to fix English asks an authority to distinguish legitimate forms from errors, Trench argues that a dictionary fails if a reader cannot find a word because its makers disapprove of it. The lexicographer’s responsibility is therefore to document the language’s changing record, not to make change stop. The contrast between these positions marks a shift in the purpose assigned to dictionary-making: from defining and policing an ideal English towards representing the historical life of English words.