Invading the Crimea of Language

Rules, as I have always been taught, are not made to be broken.  From the clichéd I before e except after c to the basic principle that every sentence needs a subject and a verb, English is no exception to the notion that there are rules aplenty. 

So, as I read Greene and Garner discuss the proper usage and importance of rules in the English language, I was at awe.  I had never realized that there was a place for the oh-so-miraculous descriptivist. A descriptivist, as I have garnered my own definition, is someone that describes language in terms of how it is being used.  OMG thats awesome! I just used an abbreviation for oh my god, and did not use an apostrophe after the second t in thats (although I feel that I might crack at any moment and be obliged to use proper punctuation.) Yes, that is awesome, but a prescriptivist— that is, someone who emphasizes the way language should be used— would say that it’s inappropriate.

Who is right?  As Greene says, there is nothing better than “reasonable moderates.” However, he then proceeds to assign a scale to determine a score from descriptivist to prescriptivist.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Mr. Greene. The very inclination of their having to be a scale provides proof that Greene, a self-proclaimed descriptivist, might in fact by fooling himself.  One cannot be a 3 out of 5 in terms of being bothered by improper language usage.  I’ll let this mistake go, but if he doesn’t capitalize God the next time, I’ll completely discredit him as an author… Is this the way the “3/5” benchmark would work? Or better yet, would they allow God to not be capitalized but require that English be capitalized? The way I see it, one is either a prescriptivist or a descriptivist, there’s no gray area when it comes to following the rules of language.

As for myself, I’m all for adapting and evolving to the language being used today.  While I would feel some odd nostalgia if the English that I consider to be proper becomes archaic, I don’t know (or idk?) if that’s enough to get me to commit to all the rules of language every time I express myself.