prescriptivist

The usual author of this column is often accused of being a prescriptivist.

"I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant," she says (really).

Ain't was a prominent target of early prescriptivist writers.

For an illustrative example of the prescriptivist stance, consider the moral sentence "Murder is wrong."

Yet no reputable prescriptivist — not even the 18th‑century grammarians — took such a position.

Modern prescriptivist textbooks draw heavily on descriptive linguistic analysis.

Mr. Lawrence is a prescriptivist and we linguists are descriptivist in orientation.

A value-judgment might also have descriptive and emotive meanings, but these are not its primary meaning on a prescriptivist account.

Much of his dictionary was prescriptivist.

For my work in that book, a writer in The Economist recently called me a “highbrow prescriptivist.”

Simon Heffer, a more serious recent English prescriptivist, likes to throw around “illiterate.”

By definition, grammatical syllepsis will often be grammatically "incorrect" according to prescriptivist rules.

Prescriptivist translations fare only slightly better ("She does not realize that she is not to eat meat").

Barnes identifies himself as a former lexicographer, a "descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist", whose subject in this case is himself.

A prescriptivist might paraphrase "X is good" as "Do X!"

An extreme prescriptivist might maintain that even if every sentence in current English uses a certain construction, that construction can still be incorrect.

But the book you are holding is avowedly prescriptivist: it consists of several hunded pages in which I am bossing you around.

And then they must defend their work against two sets of critics: the popular, often incorrect prescriptivist masses and the well-read, reasoned prescriptivists.

Bodine not only documents the prescriptivist promotion of he over they, she also quotes extensively from the passages in which grammarians give reasons for their choice.

“A prescriptivist dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgments and provides explanation,” he notes.

The foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in 1572 set the model for future purist and prescriptivist institutions in Europe.

That unfortunate locution has been put into the mouths of scores of butlers by writers who are neither prescriptivist nor descriptivist; they are simply wrong.

Some fraygrants took the prescriptivist position: People must be told how to use the language if it isn't to succumb to its natural tendency to go "all higgledy piggledy."

Under this criticism, it would appear as if emotivist and prescriptivist theories are only capable of converting a relatively small subset of all ethical claims into imperatives.

Some sooner, some later, which brings me to the chief of the Burning Deck Brigade, Jacques Barzun, Prescriptivist Emeritus.