According to Ambrose Bierce and his Devil’s Dictionary a prescription is:

A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Actually that is a pretty good description of what’s happened to me. I’ve recently started taking the first prescription medicine that I expect I’ll have to continue for the rest of my life. Nothing too serious; eye drops to control the pressure in my eyeballs so I don’t get tunnel vision from glaucoma. This process has taken years but here’s the summary and why it relates to today’s word.

I went to the doctor and he did some tests. Then he scribbled on a little piece of paper and I took that piece of paper to the drug store and got my eye drops.

The piece of paper was called a prescription and the reason it is called a prescription is that the doctor had to write it out before I could get the drops. It’s right there in the word pre scribe; pre meaning “before” and scribe meaning “write.”

But there’s more to the word than the fact that the doctor had to write me a note. There is a sense of enforceability to prescribe and you can’t get the kind of drugs doctors prescribe without a prescription.

This actually shows up in the history of the word since prescription only began to mean the little notes doctors write about the time Shakespeare was born, while the word itself had been around in English for 200 years by that point with a legal meaning.

There’s always been a sense of “rules” about prescribe.

The reason this word came to my attention was that a few weeks ago Grammar Girl talked about the difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries in her podcast. One of her listeners had asked about the word irregardless and the argument came up that if it’s in the dictionary it must be a word.

Fact is that any word that people actually use is a word; and people actually use irregardless, so it’s a word.

Grammarians object to it because it is repetitive in meaning— irregardless literally means “not-regard-not;” what people usually mean is “regard not” which is what regardless breaks down as.

But this brings up a fundamental difference between grammarians and lexicographers.

• Grammarians start from a point of view that there is a right way and a wrong way to express yourself—that’s prescriptive.
• Lexicographers on the other hand are only reporting on words as they see them being used; no value judgments—that’s descriptive.

So why don’t grammarians and lexicographers get into fistfights in libraries and bookstores all over the world?

The reason is because they are both right. The point of words is to communicate and whether you are a university professor or a street kid or live in some former British colony, if you use words that get your message across then the words you’ve used are perfectly good.

All of these places and more have differing codes for what is the social norm in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation. That’s why my accent sounds weird to some and fine to others.

But it’s also true that along with the different colors of English across the landscape the landscape isn’t really flat. The university professor likely makes more money and has more prestige than the street kid. The accents you year on NPR and BBC are more uniform than the entire range of accents across America or Britain. This has to do with the concept of “standard English.”

There is no legally authorized body to enforce certain English usages but the fact is when you open your mouth and say something you leave an impression with people. If what you say is too different from the way they are used to hearing things expressed the impression you leave may not be good.

Grammar Girl promotes her podcast as important tips for better writing and I can tell you that it can be important. One guy I know has such atrocious communications skills that I didn’t want to work with him. I had to re-read all his emails to be sure I didn’t get his meaning wrong.

So although I’m firmly in the descriptivist camp that’s why I don’t get in fistfights with grammarians (although they sometimes might want to punch me out). They don’t have tunnel vision, in being prescriptive they’re only trying to help you get ahead.

As for me, with this podcast it’s clear that it’s too late for me to take the following little piece of advice:

It’s often better to keep your mouth closed and have people think you’re an idiot than to open your yap and have them know it.