> If grammar rules should reflect usage, can
>anything somebody uses be wrong?

I've been thinking about this (the question of whether or not grammar rules should reflect usage, not the "can anything be wrong" part) and I keep coming back to this thought: If grammar rules *don't* reflect usage, where do they come from? Certainly there's no Bible of the English language. No god handed down the tablets of stone that had the first English grammar rules written on them.

Grammar rules *have* to come from common usage. There's simply no other place they can come from. The question then becomes, is it desireable, or even possible, to "freeze" these rules at some point, and declare that these codified rules are now prescriptive and everyone should follow them?

I say no to both points. First, the possibility part. The only languages that have prescriptive grammars are designed languages (such as Esperanto) and dead languages (such as Latin). As long as there are native speakers of English, the language will evolve. There's just no way to fight that. Sentences such as "Where you at?" and "Who he?" sound wrong to many of us today, but it's entirely possible that these could be widely accepted usages in the future ("Where you at" is already widely accepted, I'd claim, although not widely accepted enough to make it not sound "wrong" or a deliberate attempt to evoke a particular culture or social group's method of speech.) To simply decide to freeze the language as it is right now just won't work.

As for the desireability, I think languages evolve for a reason. We use language to help us communicate. New words, new usages, new constructions come into common use to help us communicate the changing world and culture we find ourselves living in. If we couldn't add words or phrases or constructions to our language, we'd end up with languages like many Native American languages that are essentially dead, but have shoe-horned in words for airplanes and computers and such that translate to things like "iron bird" or something like that.

Mostly, I think the desire for a prescriptive grammar is simply a curmudgeonly reaction to change. I'm not saying I'm immune to this. Far from it. I absolutely hate a lot of "common usage" things in English. I despise double-negatives making "ultra negatives" instead of the logical positive. I absolutely hate the fact that the word "loose" is turning into a synonym for "lose" as well as keeping its original meaning. I personally don't think those are necessarily good changes. But I recognize that they are basically personal feelings and not anything else. If enough people pick up the changes, they'll stick, and there's little I can do about it. I can fight for "correct" usage, and often I do, but in the end, the masses will have their say. I just hope I can convince enough people that "loose" does not mean "lose". I say fight the good fight on issues where clarity really comes into play. Communication, after all, is what language is about. However, recognize that even if you have clarity on your side (and I'd argue that a lot of times, even when you think you do--as in my crusade against the double negative--often you don't. Enough people intuitively understand a double-negative making an "ultra-negative" rather than a positive, so the appeal to clarity falls on deaf ears) you may still lose, and your opinion is still just a subjective opinion, in most cases.

-- Dave