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...

>>12
Read the rest of the post you're quoting. 

>data from real people who are aware of how they talk, and therefore already have some prescriptive rules integrated into their dialect. 
>some prescriptive rules integrated into their dialect

What I'm saying is that there are things such as avoidance strategies and hyper-correction that are very real for a lot of people and are very much the result of prescriptivism.  People learn not to end sentences in prepositions in school, not at home.

An individual may only avoid ending a sentence in a preposition in their most formal writing, or when speaking to someone they perceive to be an intellectual superior, but the fact that some people do this is a real aspect of their grammars, and descriptive linguistics has to it into account.