Description becomes Prescription

[Peggy1026]

Hello! I was interviewing for an article yesterday and he used the phrase "Description becomes Prescription." I said I was not familiar with that phrase, and he said it was an old saying. He declined to explain what it meant! anyone here familiar with it? thanks!

[BobK]

Hello! I was interviewing for an article yesterday and he used the phrase "Description becomes Prescription." I said I was not familiar with that phrase, and he said it was an old saying. He declined to explain what it meant! anyone here familiar with it? thanks!

I think I've met it, but very rarely. What it is saying is that present-day prescriptions about aspects of language often derive from descriptions of a change that happened long ago. For example, in the time of Chaucer there was a word pronounced (more or less) ['nıxtǝ] - where [x] represents the sound at the end of Scottish "loch"; a description of the sound at the time would have said so. Today, the prescribed spelling includes the silent letters "gh" but they once represented a sound (that could have been described); night club owners often spell it 'nite', and so do night-club advertisements (and indeed customers, sometimes) but the prescription is the norm.


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[BobK]

PS

'Description becomes prescription' could be said of many apparently arbitrary spelling rules in English, but not all. The silent 'b' in "debt" for example was a prescription dreamed up by an interfering busy-body who wanted to show off his Classical learning (L. debitum) and make life difficult for English learners. Centuries before the 'b' appeared there was a perfectly good and b-free word that English had borrowed from French - dette.

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