Perhaps the descriptive camp has an advantage in that the prescriptive camp hasn't produced as many leaders on par with Fowler. Of course American publications are very conscious of their style. The New York Times, for instance, is one of our best written newspapers in terms of style. So there seems to be a universal agreement concerning prescriptivism and fine writing on the American side despite a lack of scholarly people presiding over or shepherding the prescriptive "movement."fluffyhamster wrote:I'd be interested to know what sort of Advisory Committee you'd rate above the leading authorities (Quirk, Crystal, Leech, Biber, etc) on Longman's Linglex one, Jotham.
Presently, I can only think of Bryan Garner as a modern leader who I believe can take the place of Fowler, if he hasn't already. He's written the grammar section for the Chicago's Manual. Recently, he's written a book with one of our federal judges, Antonin Scalia, which encourages lawyers to write better.
Justice Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner - "Law Book of the Year" Award: 2009 Burton Awards
He's interviewed our Chief Justice about being prescriptive in our words
(as mentioned in this video, our former Chief Justice Rehnquist was even more a strict prescriptivist -- he was known to stop people in an argument for using an expression wrongly):
Chief Justice John Roberts on the topic of writing
This one's kinda funny:
David Foster Wallace on "Prior To"
I think he's written many resources tailored for the law profession and videos like these emphasizing prescriptivism:
Better Grammar Part Four with Bryan A. Garner
A Crash Course in Legal Writing by Bryan A. Garner
I didn't coin the phrase, but another American did. It was cute, and it just caught on. (The other editors and writers were Australian, British, and South African.) In fact, we had frequent meetings concerning one of our publications with about 4 or 5 editors and writers. I was probably acting as a leader for prescriptivism in general, (which means I was the most careful and picky about words)but we had experienced obvious printing errors in Longman that has nothing to do with the language wars. (But that was part of it also.)And I wonder if by 'we had a standing joke at work concerning Longman', it was actually just you who made a standing joke of it, and your colleagues were too polite or busy to disagree with you much. (I mean, if you were teaching English then I find it hard to imagine certainly every native-speaking teacher agreeing with you - then again, ELT can be a pretty uniformed business, eh...that, or were you and your colleagues all Americans, brought up on only the sternest prescriptive fare or something). That isn't to say that the Longman will suit every user (and there are obviously competing titles, most notably the OALDCE7), but like it or not it is one of the very best dictionaries currently available for learners and teachers of EFL. (Usage guides designed for native speakers with inexhaustible appetites [patience?] for lots of argumentative detail don't have enough space beyond extolling or demolishing all the shibboleths to provide much coverage of the phraseological nuances of the wider language. Better then for the purposes of Dave's readers are resources like the COBUILD and Chambers usage guides, and obviously Swan's PEU, which are all pretty detailed and TEFL-oriented).
One British writer, in particular, was very functionalist, from whom I learned about the philosophy in depth. He sat beside me and we had lot of conversations together. He saw the value in being correct in the language whenever he could, so yes, I probably influenced and persuaded him as well, though he was a solid functionalist.
Now Longman was one of many references actually used, but with a grain of salt. We (and anyone) is at a disadvantage in dealing with EFL issues in that prescriptivists don't care about this market. There are almost no books that deal specifically with the hangups foreigners tend to make with the English language. If such prescriptivists endeavored to do so, such resources would be more awesome than what's on the market today. We always had some prescriptivist resources at hand, but the instances they could actually be used in EFL were limited, (but still frequent enough). In many cases, I questioned the linguist view of something, but didn't have any prescriptivt resources that dealt with the issue so as to back up or negate my intuition.
Well, that was a little extreme back in 1961. Other dictionaries seized the opportunity and made a little more lurch to the prescriptive side with descriptive tendencies because of the extremeness. I would say that now, dictionaries have heard the other side and they have moved closer to the prescriptive side than they were before (but still quite descriptive), and they have ways of labeling things so as to diminish confusion or avoid upsetting people. Also, we now have Encarta dictionary, which is probably the most prescriptive dictionary we've had in a while.As for American dictionaries, I don't use them much (except for the AmE version of the Macmillan English Dictionary, First edition), and have no particular desire to intrude on your nation's grief over the permissiveness of the W3 etc. I doubt though if a British dictionary would ever say (or has ever said) that cultured speakers use ain't - Longman for example says "a short form of 'am not', 'is not', 'are not', 'has not', or 'have not', that many people think is incorrect": http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/ain-t . (So British works not only don't overdo the prescription, but also actually get the description right, whereas American works would appear to veer between extremes. Landau's Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography gives the source of the W3 line on ain't - I'll add it a bit later in an edit). Which is surely even more reason to use dictionaries like the (current) Longman, despite your apparent attempt to lump it in with the W3. (The W3 might however have been a good dictionary overall for all I know - it/1961 was a bit before my time really, and indeed before even the first edition of the LDOCE, published in 1978).