Prescription or Description ?

Once upon a time a dictionary would tell us what a word meant, how it should be used, how it should be spelled, and how it should be pronounced. We expected the dictionary to be 'prescriptive', to 'prescribe' correct usage, to put us right.

Today it is (often for quite sound reasons) as unfashionable to think of 'correctness' in the use of words as in any other matter - except, of course, that it is (politically, at any rate) correct not to prescribe correctness at all, especially in people's language, tastes, behaviour, religion or politics.

So dictionaries are now 'descriptive'. Everything goes, nothing is wrong, all is OK. No longer do you need a Dictionary of Slang to supplement your 'proper' dictionaries: everything, proper or improper, correct or incorrect, is included between the same pair of covers (two pairs, actually, in the new, descriptive, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary).

Many older dictionaries would include some of the less sexually explicit slang terms with the warning 'vulg.', just to help you avoid actually using them. 'Vulg.' meant vulgar, and vulgar meant 'of the common people'. Now we don't use that term: SOED says 'coarse' instead. Four-letter words that even now we still tend to print with asterisks were not included at all in the mid-twentieth-century SOED; today, in the twenty-first, they have at last been welcomed, given equal status, are spelt out and defined.

Even misusages are included: after all, if people do say 'anticipate' when they mean 'expect', or 'transpired' when they mean 'happened', or 'ignorant' for 'surly', who are the publishers of dictionaries to correct them ?

In the new SOED the use by the English of the Scottish term 'of that ilk' to mean 'of that kind' is acknowledged - and the pedant has to draw what satisfaction he or she can from the footnote that tells us that such a usage, though recognised by the dictionary, arises from a 'misunderstanding' of the Scottish idiom. In fact, it is plain wrong; but it is no longer the job of the dictionary to say so. We may go on misusing it while the lexicographer smiles at us indulgently.

Prescription or Description ?