What would the doctor prescribe?

“A HARMLESS drudge.” Of the definitions in Samuel Johnson’s great English dictionary of 1755, that of “lexicographer”, his own calling, is the most famous, an example of the same wit that led him to define “oats” as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

Why name a language column after a harmless drudge? Because Johnson, despite the drudgery, knew that language was not harmless. Its power to inform and to lead astray, to entertain and to annoy, to build co-operation or destroy a reputation, makes language serious stuff. The Economist’s “Johnson” column began in 1992 and was later revived online. This week it returns to the print edition, and henceforth will appear fortnightly.

Many of the topics tackled are fun: swearing and slang, preferences and peeves. Some are more fundamental. Language reveals a lot about human nature: how people reason differently in a foreign language, or to what extent different languages encode a world view, are some of the most exciting and controversial topics in linguistic research.

People care intensely about their language, and so languages in the wider world sometimes come into conflict. The perceived arrogance of Castilians to Catalan threatens to sunder Spain; “language police” in Quebec tell restaurant owners to change “pasta” and “grilled cheese” to pâtes and fromage fondant. At the extreme, the passage of a law downgrading Russian in Ukraine helped spark war in that country; Vladimir Putin has used it as evidence that Ukrainian nationalists are bent on wiping out Russian culture there. The war has rumbled on since, with language the most obvious symbol of wider identity and sympathy.

So the Johnson column treats topics light and heavy as well as language both English and international. How does the spirit of Johnson himself come into it? The best way to answer is to see how he would fit into today’s “usage wars” over authority and correctness. A language column is expected to tackle questions of right and wrong. There are roughly two views of how to do this: one top-down, based on authority, prestige, writing and stability; one bottom-up, resting on how most people actually use the language, and open to change.

The two schools of thought, known as “prescriptivism” (which sets down how the language should be) and “descriptivism” (which tells how it is), have often been at daggers drawn: English teachers and some usage-book writers on one side, and academic linguists, lexicographers and other usage-book writers on the other. In the caricature, prescriptivists are authoritarians with their heads in the sand, insisting on Victorian-era non-rules. The descriptivists are mocked as “anything-is-correct”, embracing every fad, even that Shakespeare should be taught in text-message-speak. To take one example, some prescriptivists say “like” cannot be a conjunction (“tastes good, like a cigarette should”, in a 1950s advert.) Descriptivists point to continuous use since Chaucer.

Recruiting-sergeants from both sides can bang on Samuel Johnson’s door. An intellectual writing for an elite audience, he did not shy away from “right” and “wrong”, even “barbarity”, “depravity” and “corruption”, in matters of language.But he declared his task was not to “form” but to “register” (that is, describe) the language; trying to stop change was like trying to “lash the wind”. Above all, his years of drudging at the dictionary had taught him humility: he knew he was sure to commit “a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free”.

Prescribing is not really the opposite of describing. Lexicographers from Johnson’s day on must describe the language, grounding their definitions in real living English. But that is in order to give stronger roots to a book they know people will use for firm guidance. Academic linguists, the arch-descriptivists, are perfectly willing to call some usages wrong and others plain ugly.

One can prescribe and preach a high-quality English while accepting variety and change. Stability is not the same as rigidity. And judgment should be empirical, not dogmatic, open to real usage and willing to change when the facts change. Getting things right is worth the effort, just as it is in politics. As Johnson wrote, “We have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.”