🦋 Prescriptive Bagels
Over at LanguageHat (among other places) I am used to seeing prescriptive* grammar trashed; and while I don't feel as strongly about it as some, I generally sympathize with the trashers -- from what I can understand of the argument, it seems more useful to start with the goal of describing language than of controlling it. (The gist of it: "prescriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a set of rules for composition; "descriptive grammar" = grammar viewed as a description of how people use language.) Yesterday and today however, in the yeasty intersection of language and food, I found myself taking an unambiguously prescriptive stance. A little background -- there is in South Orange a small bakery that makes only bagels and muffins, and makes them both very very well. The hand-rolled bagels are, as is proper, boiled before they are baked; and they come out dense and chewy, with a thick crust -- in a word, "bagels". So when Ellen suggested last night that I should buy some bagels Sunday morning for the parents of Sylvia's friends, who will be coming to her birthday party, I naturally said "Okay, I can stop by the bagel shop on my way back from Kings", which is the supermarket where I will be picking up Sylvia's birthday cake; that, however, was not what Ellen had in mind. Ellen thought I should buy bagels from Kings while I was there. Bear in mind that the pastries sold by Kings under the name "bagels" are something quite different -- they are rolled and shaped by a machine, and baked in a steam-injected oven; and they come out soft, with little crust and less flavor. Ellen's argument in favor of these non-bagels was that many people prefer their bagels not to be chewy. I was in the end able to talk her out of it; but I have been fretting all day about her point. Is my anti-soft-bland-bagel stance just empty snobbery? Should the word "bagel" mean what it is used by the general population to mean, regardless of authenticity? My hunch is that the answer to both of these questions is "yes".
* I am to this day not sure if I should be talking about "prescriptive" or "proscriptive" grammar -- the former seems a little closer to the meaning of the phrase as I understand it. [Update: KF of Planned Obsolescence says my intuition was correct in this regard.]
posted evening of Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
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