prescriptivist - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
From prescriptive + -ist.
prescriptivist (plural prescriptivists)
- (linguistics) Someone who lays down rules regarding language usage, or who believes that traditional norms of language usage should be upheld.
2001 April, David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage”, in Harper's Magazine:
The plutocratic tone and styptic wit of Safire and Newman and the best of the Prescriptivists is often modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same Twin Towers of scholarly Prescriptivism whom Garner talks about revering as a kid.
prescriptivist (comparative more prescriptivist, superlative most prescriptivist)
- Having a tendency to prescribe.
2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes[1], page 312:
In short, they tend to present Indian English as nothing more than "standard" English with a select collection of lexical peculiarities tacked on, as it were, many of which would be regarded as "errors" by prescriptivist language scholars.