Description and Anti-prescription
Much of Umberto Eco’s book The Limits of Interpretation is preoccupied with the idea of “correct” and “incorrect” readings of texts. The various essays of his of which the book is a recension focus chiefly on this subject as well. As the title implies, Eco insists that, while there is no such thing as an obvious right reading, or interpretation, of a text, there may be any number of obvious wrong ones.[1] This is an unfashionable idea in many circles and is possibly even more unfashionable when extended to all linguistic acts. I believe that we should, nevertheless, extend it to all linguistic acts, and not only to interpretation, but to use, mention, and citation as well. Here I will be using Eco’s book as a vade-mecum for my assessment of broader issues in the way we now understand language.
These days it is difficult to express any kind of opinion on how language “should” be used, especially if that opinion agrees with those of past conservative grammarians, without being treated to a little homily on the evils of prescriptivism. This is reasonable to an extent. Prescribing language might not prescribe thought, but it clearly shapes what thoughts can be expressed, how, and to whom. For this reason insisting on particular, and peculiar, lexical and grammatical choices has been the bread and butter of certain styles of political authoritarianism. We don’t even have to cite the classic studies of totalitarian language here—Orwell’s monumental body of work on the subject; Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich;[2] accounts of Mussolini’s relationship with the pronoun lei like Germino’s in The Italian Fascist Party in Power[3] and Alinei’s in “Anomalie della lingua italiana.”[4] It suffices to note that at the height of the Pax Britannica a professional resource disseminated in apparent seriousness to British schoolteachers claimed without irony that “It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed.”[5]
And that’s terrible. I lead with this by way of showing that I’m well aware of the problems with a naïvely prescriptive account of what people should say and how they should say it. Yet I don’t think this is the only possible problematic, or even the only possible tyrannical and controlling, way of formulating the relationship between the “is” and the “ought” of language and communication. A “descriptive” account of language is remarkably easy to hijack if one happens to be whoever is speaking loudest. For that matter, it is almost never actually applied consistently. I can think of at least three specific problems that a too-stern opposition to “prescribing” the use of language introduces or worsens in public intellectual life.
The first problem is that refusing to impose any “ought” limits on the way people communicate means that their communication ultimately becomes self-referential and impenetrable to others; maybe not necessarily a Wittgensteinian private language, but not exactly a public one either. While Wittgenstein’s private language would have existed (if it could exist) for reasons or purposes unrelated to communicating with other people, real ways of using language that serve only to gratify the incidental preferences of the speaker do something worse. Language actively impedes understanding; as Calvin excitedly tells his dad in a comic strip from September 1992, “by giving words new meanings, ordinary English can become an exclusionary code!”[6] A certain style associated with this code-cultivation is familiar to most English-speakers who read deeply in the humanities and social sciences; Judith Butler is the usual sin-eater for the things people hate about this way of communicating (or refusing to communicate), but I can think of other writers who are just as bad. Yet in some times and places it has actually been more common to do this by insisting on “commonsense” locutory practices that leave important terms undefined and refuse to entertain any technical, specialized, or idiosyncratic arguments, even pellucidly expressed ones. Two British philosophers of the early twentieth century, G.E. Moore and G.K. Chesterton, stick out in my mind as especially egregious offenders. The point is not that “thick” language (Butler; someone like Homi K. Bhabha perhaps) or “thin” language (Moore; Chesterton) is inherently bad, but that we should have ways of telling one another that we should avoid these kinds of frankly deceptive word-forging.
The second problem is that an opposition to any kind of prescription in language use carries an anti-historical subtext. I say anti-historical because I do not really think “anti-educational” or “anti-pedagogical” works here; specifically what I think is being attacked is the idea of teaching language in a way that provides formal tools to understand its historical developments and registers. This is more of a practical problem than a conceptual one, since it is possible to imagine a descriptivism or pop-descriptivism that does not do this; nevertheless, the pop-descriptivism presently abroad in American English does. This also relates to never-fully-resolved anxieties intertwined with the roots of “linguistics” as a discipline separate from “philology.” It becomes, quite frankly, needlessly difficult to interact with what comes from us from our forebears—to work and play in the wake of the barque that carried them to eternity—if we don’t pay adequate attention to a pedagogy that instructs people in how that wake behaves. In this context we have to teach language “prescriptively” so that people will have some understanding of the rules they might later choose to break; indeed, it is intrinsically “prescriptive” to teach anything at all, at least in the sense that actually works for language—phonics drills, spelling bees, sentence diagrams, and the like.
I’ve been trying to think of examples to illustrate this but it is difficult because it is a whole milieu, or at least it was until about five years ago, in certain sectors of English education in this country. I taught either as substitute or as an Americorps person from 2017 until 2021 and I remember sentence-level parsing and decoding being especially thorny. You saw the dense allusive verbal thickets of the nineteenth century actively deprecated at the high school level and, at the elementary school level, basic syntax being barely taught at all, simply because it doesn’t happen to particuluarly resemble how most young people prefer to communicate nowadays. This isn’t the fault of the “kids these days” themselves or even really of the teachers. In any case this problem has largely been solved in American schools because the pandemic made what wasn’t working so obvious. One still sees it, though, as a hot take in certain online milieux; “Shakespeare isn’t ‘relatable’ so we should teach the Percy Jackson books instead of Macbeth,” but also “kids can learn syntax based on vibes as long as ‘syntax’ is the way they text with their friends rather than the way Henry James would construct a sentence.”
This is also why I think we should continue teaching people how to read and write cursive, especially since it is not actually difficult for most people to learn. This is not about crankish conservatism; it is about being able to read old cadastral records, or our grandparents’ love letters. Regardless, it is difficult to discuss this at length without coming across as (that old chestnut!) crankishly conservative. This is a problem in itself; we have to be able to discuss these things if anything worth remembering is going to survive the Simplification. What we need here is, I would submit, an attention to usage, both current and historical and on the part of both speaker or writer and hearer or listener, in connection with what Eco lauds as “a return to the very roots of the philosophy of language.”[7] Exactly when and how much to pay attention to these things remains to be argued out; that of course is exactly the aforementioned anxiety about the distinction between “linguistics” and “philology” that both linguists and philologists have always harbored deep in the cockles of their, or our, hearts. In this context I would also note that an attention to the historical roots of insulting or abusive language, slurs and the like, properly produces a moral or ethical prescription against using it, at least unironically.
The third problem is more social and observational than technical and structural, and it has to do with the situations in which prescriptive arguments are still widely made. Those who firmly and loudly oppose any policing of what people say will often themselves constantly police why people say the things they do. Many of us have encountered, for example, the rather stilted and moralizing prescriptive understanding of humor, in which that which “is funny” is that which “punches up” rather than “punching down.” This is as may be, and it makes a good moral argument, especially because it guards against the drearily common use of humor to reinforce social norms by ridiculing people who break them.[8] But descriptively it’s hogwash (there’s a reason the “who’s we, kemo sabe?” joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto is funny both to racists at mid-century and to antiracists now, for different reasons). Even prescriptively it misses something that, according to Eco-our-Virgil, Pirandello among other theorists of humor understood very well. It is not, to these people, at all obvious that humor has to be or should be “punching” anyone at all. Pirandello is perhaps not the best messenger here, since he was a fascist, but for once I would agree with him on this, and Eco at least partially agrees with him as well. “Who,” demands the character of Mac in a well-known scene from the sitcom in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “versus? Who are we doing it versus?”[9] Pace Mac, Pirandello believes in, says Eco,
[M]ov[ing] from the Comic to Humor….in order to take this step, one must give up detachment and superiority—the classic characteristics of the Comic. Pirandello’s best example is that of Cervantes; all that Don Quixote does is comic. But Cervantes does not limit herself to laughing at a madman who mistakes windmills for giants. Cervantes lets you understand that he too could be Don Quixote; in fact, he is….[10]
In fact Pirandello sees humor as something that can establish communion and fellow-feeling between people (implicitly even between erstwhile enemies). We can probably all think of real examples of this from our own lives. And so the idea of “punching down” rings false, at least to me, because “who are we doing it versus?” is the ideologized and prescriptive language of, well, the sorts of regimes that Pirandello unfortunately ended up supporting.
(Eco finds it astonishing that Pirandello wrote so perceptively and authoritatively on humor, because he considers Pirandello a consistently dead-serious and unfunny playwright. I disagree with Eco on this. I think a lot of Pirandello is hilarious.)
So much for my examples. I think I have made my point: we have to tell people how they should use language at least some of the time, because inevitably language is how we understand all other shoulds.[11]
I have written several times in the past about the need to make sure our locutory practices have some connection to a “world” in which we live together. My “Polemic on the Rectification of Names” deals with this need at especial length.[12] The foregoing examples should be read through the lens of that broad project, which for me is a deeply held moral belief that, just as for Confucius and Mencius, is a keystone to any moral vision of society and relationships. We should all, with Fowler, acknowledge that there are good reasons why “the moralizer [his term for a prescriptivist] insists on telling people not what they do and how they came to do it, but what he thinks they ought to do for the future.”[13] We should also go where Fowler does not go here and acknowledge that the “moralizer” looks at the future similarly to how the philologist looks at the past, i.e. as a potential moral and civic resource in a sense that Confucius or Mencius might recognize but most practicing academic linguists might not. We ought to be Janus-faced moralizers and philologists when it comes to the normative, “should” dimension of how to speak and write.
We are discussing for the most part questions of what can be fairly demanded of a writer or a speaker. The position of a reader or a hearer remains important as well. A reader or hearer is obliged to make a good-faith effort at understanding what is being put forward. I have been a critic of, and remain opposed to, an entitled style of reading in which one insists on only “hearing” in ways that one personally likes or prefers or wants.[14] I am also guilty of this myself, as, for instance, when I jerk my knee against affected Southern accent or dialect features as used by non-Southern speakers or writers. To put it tautologically, just as words mean what they are used to mean, communication is an interchange between people or places or things. There are pragmatic—to use another Econian term, or a term that Eco exposits from the traditions of the semiotics field—reasons for all parties involved to take care of one another’s sensibilities and modes of understanding or being understood.[15] When this is not possible, there has to be some basis on which clarification can be provided. A linguistics thus may be thoroughly descriptive, but a semiotics must contain a prescriptive pragmatic component, even as its semantic and syntactic components may be as descriptive as could ever be hoped or dreamed by the most strident defender of misusing “it’s” in professional signage. This semiotics should thus be philological and moralizing. We can never escape morality as thoroughly as we might wish, anyway.
Much of this essay has been both self-focused and self-critical. In particular there is “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass” in my description of Butler, Bhabha, Chesterton, and Moore.[16] As a courtesy to the reader, I have made an effort to avoid, in this essay, the kind of intuitive leaps and alluded-to connections between ideas that are, sadly, my bread and butter most of the time. (A major series of essays in moral theology that I wrote over the past several years leaves a key lynchpin connecting multiple arguments almost entirely implicit. This is the idea that “what separates us from the animals” is the moral double bind in which we are individually as well as collectively moral subjects, and thus accountable for our misuse of our powers, but still operate under most of the same natural pressures and necessities as a predatory or promiscuous animal that is not capable of sin.[17]) It may surprise some repeat offenders (the offense being reading my essays) to know that I do cultivate a style that prioritizes not being misunderstood. By this I mean that, while (for instance) a dear friend and frequent collaborator of mine prioritizes making herself generally understood to a wide audience, I instead prioritize making it as difficult as possible to misconstrue my beliefs, arguments, and opinions. I don’t always succeed, and I wish it was only because I don’t always succeed that her writing is so much easier to read than mine! She might, if she had written an essay like this, have accordingly preferred to focus on other issues in the morals of communication; then again, she might not have.
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[1] Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 148. The idea appears elsewhere in the book as well but is stated very firmly and with, in my opinion, much sound supporting argument here.
[2] Victor Klemperer, transl. Martin Brady, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000; translation of LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1947), passim.
[3] Dante L. Germino, The Italian Fascist Party in Power: A Study of Totalitarian Rule (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1959), 26.
[4] Mario Alinei, “Anomalie della lingua italiana: il voi fascista e il voi postfascista, nel quadro dello sdoppiamento dei pronomi soggetto e del suo significato socio-culturale.” In Quaderni di semantica, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2002): 211-222.
[5] Arthur Burrell, Recitation: A Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary Schools (London: Griffith Farran & Co., 1891), 24. Burrell grew up in Gloucestershire.
[6] Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes, September 1, 1992.
[7] Op. cit., Eco, 213.
[8] I discuss this in N.M. Turowsky, “What Was It Like to Be Carlos the Bewitched?”, hitherto unpublished, which deals with ridicule directed at children born of incestuous relationships.
[9] It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, season 4, episode 13, “The Nightman Cometh,” directed by Matt Shakman, written by Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, and Rob McElhenney, featuring Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, and Danny DeVito, aired November 20, 2008, FX.
[10] Op. cit., Eco, 167. Did you notice my deliberate retention of a typo in my transcription of this passage? If so, do you think I “mean” anything “by” retaining it?
[11] Cf. Dōgen Zenshi’s discussion of the inherently sense-based nature of Buddhist practice in “108 Gates of Dharma Illumination.” Dōgen, transl. Chodo Cross and Gudō Nishijima, Shōbōgenzō: The True Dharma Eye Treasury, Volume IV (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 349.
[12] In Turowsky, Poachers in the King’s Domain and Other Sacred and Profane Non-fiction (Greenfield, MA: Cymbidium Press, 2025), 183-192.
[13] H.W. Fowler, “On -Ing: Professor Jespersen and the ‘Instinctive Grammatical Moralizer,’” S.P.E. Tract XXVI (1928), 194.
[14] Turowsky, “Must Art Be Good?” In Poachers in the King’s Domain, 217-221.
[15] Op. cit., Eco, 203-204. What, Eco asks, or invites us to ask, is the difference between knowing what a sleeping car on a train is and knowing whether and how one might avail oneself of one? However, I should note that three pages later Eco says that a signification/communication distinct is not the same thing as a semantics/pragmatics distinction. I disagree with him at least inasmuch as I am using the latter dyad as a direct way of expounding the former—and we see that here I have prescribed (to myself) the duty of explaining to the reader what I am (and Eco is not, at least not necessarily) describing by using these words.
[16] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London/New York/Melbourne: Ward, Lock & Co., 1891), vi.
[17] To cut a long story short, “causation tunnels like a mole under the surface of our free will.” Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them (New York: New York Review Books, 2019; originally published London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 28. Warner furthers tells us: “There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made an unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam.” Ibid., 81. The series of essays that I am discussing here provides Poachers in the King’s Domain with its title and appears at op. cit., Turowsky 2025, 71-135 and 248-257. Causation, will, reason, necessity, freedom, boundedness, conscience, individual identity: poachers poaching from poachers poaching from poachers, under a sovereignty that wild beings and their ecosystems need never worry about violating. But that is all beyond the scope of this essay.