Resumen de Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why
Weiner (1988. “On Editing a Usage Guide.” In Words for Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by E. G. Stanley, and T. F. Hoad, 171–183. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 173) describes usage guides as being ‘as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations’. This paper focusses on these ‘sociolinguistic considerations’, to try and answer the question of why people like greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters are stigmatised for certain perceived linguistic errors. The greengrocer’s apostrophe is well known (Beal, Joan C. 2010. “The Grocer’s Apostrophe: Popular Prescriptivism in the Twenty-First Century.” English Today 26 (2): 57–64), but the other three categories, the sports commentators’ adverb (the flat adverb), the estate agent’s pronoun (yourselves for you) and the television presenter’s demonstrative pronoun (these/those ones), I first encountered in Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), one of the three most recent and most prescriptive publications in the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems. Discussing Taggart’s usage guide as a case study, I will go into the question of why certain groups of speakers are made into the object of prescriptivism and will argue that the British class system plays an important role in this. As a case study, this article highlights the need for more linguists to view usage guides as a genre that needs to be treated critically rather than be ignored, as is generally the case at present.
