“Splendidly prejudiced”

This paper examines terms used for disapproval in usage guides during the 19th and 20th centuries. Two corpora are used for this investigation: the Hyper Usage Guide of English database (HUGE) and a corpus of 29 usage guides representing nearly all decades of the 19th and 20th centuries. The terms of disapproval fall into four groups: terms emphasizing correctness (wrong, error), communication (confusing, awkward), varieties of English (variant, slang), and social judgments (silly, ignorant). The examination shows that terms emphasizing correctness are most dominant today and have predominated over time. In contrast, judgmental terms have declined over time, while variation and communication terms have increased. The paper further notes that for shibboleths – prescriptive rules with high salience for “some readers” – a common formulation is that “some writers” or even “many writers” use the disapproved term, thus paralleling the “some readers” who notice the shibboleths.