Adherents to descriptive linguistics

Ever notice how, as soon as someone learns about cultural relativism, descriptive linguistics, or similar schools of thought, they tend to get all uppity and offended by things like prescriptivism in their own culture?

As an example, consider the descriptivist who starts bitching about a schoolteacher's teaching of grammar because it's prescriptivism. I always smile at this because the descriptivist has missed the point quite badly and considered it best depicted by, for instance, a multicultural society that accepts multiple points of view.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies. Ideally, a descriptivist perspective should explicitly preclude the making of any value judgments about any feature of the system being studied.

As an aside, and admittedly somewhat unrelated to linguistics, it bothers me when so-called adherents to cultural relativism complain about the failure of non-European societies to enforce European concepts of human rights. For those people who complain about Arab women being required to wear headdresses, I can only wonder what they would say about homosexual rites of passage of the Marind-anim people...

>>9
>Actually, value judgments are of key importance in descriptive linguistics.
Other people's value judgements, yes - test participants' value judgements, yes - but not your own. Or at least not just your own, and preferably not even mainly your own.

You probably know linguists are actually the least qualified to give grammaticality judgements, because if you spend so much time and attention on construction A, it messes up your intuitions, in the same way that saying the same word over and over again makes it sound weird.
It might even be enough to mess up your intuitions to have any idea of how it works, and to approach it analytically at all. Let alone if you have a hypothesis to be partial to and you're aware that if this sentence is okay, you must be on to something. Try being objective with your judgements then.

I know linguists will informally use their own hunches to weigh whether something sounds right or not, but for any serious conclusions, anyone worth their salt would have the sense to at least double-check it with other people.