cimorene

...jokey stories about how Chief Justice Warren Burger used to misspell homicide as "homocide" and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun (whose papers were recently released) used to circle the misspelling angrily when commenting on the Chief Justice's draft opinions.

(This story warms the cockles of my heart.)

I used to be a prescriptivist (nicknamed "Grammar Cop" by my extended family from an early age for my fearless interruptions in virtually any conversation with anyone to correct their usage) until I read a couple of books on basic sociolinguistics a few years ago - entirely for fun - and had a renaissance of opinion.

(I still harbour certain prescriptivist pet peeves, though I try to weed them out as I notice them if they don't have a defensible basis like overwhelming majority usage or etymology. "Potential ambiguity" is not, NB, usually as defensible a basis as it first appears, if you're inured to prescriptivist use of it since it is the most common justification; read Language Log for a while if you don't believe me.)

Linguists are rarely prescriptivists: looking at language through a scientific lens tends, I observe, to make prescriptivism look silly. I particularly enjoyed a few Language Log posts on the prescriptivist rants of the style "Word X doesn't mean Y, it means Z!": starting with today's "Fulsome use of the Dictionary" by Geoffrey K. Pullum, and here are a few more linked from the latest post: Cullen Murphy Draws the Line and At a Loss for Lexicons by Mark Liberman, and 0 for 3 on Grammar... and Sidney Goldberg on NYT Grammar: 0 for 3 by Geoffrey K. Pullum.