Recovering Prescriptivist
Greetings all. Happy New Year. I’mma be doing some new things here. I’m going to post content on most days. The content will not always be about The Facts of Life. I am open to a better organization of the content but I need someone to do that for me. But my shit is worth saying, and I’m gonna say it here until I figure out a better place to say it.
Right now, I want to rant about the dreadful misuse of “worse” and “worst.” It is too often that I see otherwise coherent people write that something is “the worse [whatever] they’ve ever seen.”
No. “Worse” is comparative (between two items), while “worst” is superlative (among more than two items). It’s exactly like the distinction between “more” and “most,” yet people don’t seem to make the same “error” with those two words.
I put “error” in quotation marks because I have also learned this year that prescriptivism, that is, the belief that one variety of a language is superior to others, is racist and classist. The idea that something is “proper” because of a standard set up by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy inherently marginalizes voices deemed “other.” The contrasting term is “descriptivism,” in which priority is placed on understanding the way that language is actually used rather than any way it’s “supposed” to be used.
Of course words have meanings, but we’re not talking about absurdities here, we’re talking about a certain need to “correct” “nonstandard” usage, largely to show that you are an expert who knows all the rules. And by “you are,” I mean “I am.”
It has been difficult for me to transition to a descriptivist perspective. One challenge is that for so long, one of the ways I’ve distinguished myself is with my mastery of “proper” English. Given my relative lack of privilege, I clung to my superior understanding of this language to validate my existence in a space in which I worried I didn’t really belong. I perceived myself to be a Jo among Blairs, and I thought my grammar was my best ticket to the party. In a transformative 2019, I learned that I don’t need any ticket other than what I already have, and I owe myself the opportunity to really get to know myself.
And embracing descriptivism does not mean that my appreciation for English and my mastery of standard American English is meaningless. It’s handy to know multiple languages and dialects. There is lots of room in Dictionopolis and the marketplace is diverse.
Writing this post has been an exercise in self-critique. I started intending to school the reader on the difference between “worse” and “worst.” Instead, I’ve concluded that while I think standard usage here helps with clarity, the nonstandard usage of “worse” as a superlative usually communicates the intended meaning and is absolutely acceptable, especially in casual communication. Thank you for witnessing my transformation.
