In praise of prescriptivism

I am a prescriptivist. I realize that this puts me out of step and out of tune with the majority in the language arts, but that is simply too bad.

But perhaps I should explain what I am talking about. There is a dichotomy — really a bimodal distribution — in approaches to the study and explication of the English language over the question of what purpose this academic activity has. To a descriptivist, English is to…