Language is a toolkit to communicate ideas, and a toolkit frozen in glass is a useless toolkit.
You need to swap out that hammer when it starts getting damaged, or put back a screwdriver when you find out you need it again, or add new tools when you find that the tools you have now aren’t fit to purpose.
And sure, there’s some loose screws at the bottom of the bag, but they don’t harm anything, and very occasionally they come in useful.
I think there are two different sorts of “prescriptivism” that need to be distinguished.
One is based on the idea that every language has one ideal form that must be elucidated by experts and enforced across the rest of the language community. This was never a real part of linguistics—it’s a popular misconception from people imagining that linguistics is an extrapolation of grade-school grammar.
But the other form of “prescriptivism” is just fluent speakers correcting people acquiring the language when they perceive a mistake—this is a natural function that occurs in all language communities, starting with parents teaching their children. And it’s a necessary function: learning is orders of magnitude more efficient when the learner has both positive and negative examples.
The problem comes when speakers miscategorize speech in other dialects as incorrect examples of their own dialect, and attempt to correct them accordingly.
The latter comes from a place of good, but it’s still misguided. If the message was understood, then it was good enough to not need a “correction” to it
Eye urgree, ass lng ass yu Ken rid thz wy dos eet madder howl iz zpelt?
To go back to my metaphor, the difference between someone going “you should use a 2.4mm posidrive for that 2.4mm posi-head screw” when a 2.5mm will work, and someone going “you should use a hammer, not the back of your screwdriver, to hammer a nail”
Like, former one is not gonna affect anything and it’s being pedantic, the latter one you’re actually being helpful.
Ain’t nobody gonna decipher your nonsense
I understood it just fine. Does that make it good English?
Excuse me sir, are you impugning my English?Xkus mi sar, arr yoo impunning mai Englees?
Don’t be daft