Grammar, a Prescriptive Relic
The rules of grammar. A torturous and pointless exercise we all go through at school. But, as David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy , grammar never starts off that way: “People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious rules that people seem to be employing when they speak.” The transformation to an oppressive and meaningless relic happens later, over decades and centuries: “Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.” Shane Parrish reiterates that point: “descriptive” means “it tells us what the world is currently like”. Whereas “prescriptive” means “it tells us how the world should be”. Grammar (and dictionaries) ...
