into: ‘And that it was this which [that] made that false which [that] would otherwise have been, and which [that] was intended to be, true!’ So much for Cobbett’s vaunted ‘readability’.
§§ People like Robert Lowth are typically termed ‘prescriptivists’, and grammarians like Isaiah Morris ‘descriptivists’. Prescriptivists give rules about how language ought to be, while descriptivists want to observe and describe language. These categories are unfairly extreme in the case of nineteenth-century grammarians. They give the impression that supposed prescriptivists (like Lowth and his adherents) laid down laws without recognising that a writer’s taste was still important, and they give the impression that supposed descriptivists (Morris and his ilk) just described language in action without trying to give any laws. The truth is much more complicated. All of these grammarians, negotiating the competing demands of rules and personal taste, were much more nuanced than dumping them into prescriptivist or descriptivist camps would indicate. In fact, one of the things that’s most fascinating about reading grammars from Lowth’s and Morris’s times is how plain it is on the face of the texts that the grammarians were struggling with this fundamental problem of grammar.
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