Descriptivism, prescriptivism and the evolution of language

[Chung]

(I figured I'd better bring across here rather than reply in Marais's thread.)

On the tangent of prescriptivism versus descriptivism, I consider myself to be a descriptivist who's weakly prescriptivist. While I do not subscribe to Cainntear's and others' insinuation on letting "common" (however that is defined) usage strongly trump prescriptivist or perceived elitist usage, the best that I can do is use the language in a way that makes sense to me and in some cases this draws on my exposure to other languages.

That is the exact opposite of descriptivism, and how English got into this mess in the first place -- you can't use reason to decide what's right and wrong, and particularly not other languages. We tried to apply rules of Latin (don't split your infinitive languages) and predicate logic (double negative is a positive).

They're different things here. I'm a descriptivist in that I observe and hesitate to correct some variants used by other native speakers but that doesn't mean that I'm forbidden from holding an opinion of variants, and these opinions often guide me in using the forms that I use. Moreover when asked about something's validity in English, I freely show a dominant descriptivism leavened by a little prescriptivism. (e.g. "Chung, is 'capsicum' the correct term for this thing? - Yes, although around here I and others use 'bell pepper', 'sweet pepper' or just 'pepper'. 'Capsicum' is used often in Australia but using it here might draw more blank stares than not, so use those forms with 'pepper' to make your life easier with us).

I find that letting frequency of usage be the main determinant in an element's "correctness" reminds me a bit of the Simpsons' episode with a poster of smokers bearing the caption "50 million smokers can't be wrong!".

!! When was the last time anyone died of conjugular cancer?

You're starting to remind me a bit of the Serb, Vuk Karadžić, who was guided by Johann Christoph Adelung's declaration Schreibe, wie Du sprichst! ("Write as you speak!"). When standardizing Serbian, Karadžić took this declaration seriously but what really came out is that other Serbs (and to a good degree Bosnians, Croats and Montenegrins) ended up with standards that reflect strongly how he and his neighbours spoke no matter how divergent their manner was from that of those other Southern Slavs. You don't speak for my usage and that of some of my peers while I don't speak for your usage and that of those you've known.

High frequency of anything doesn't make it immune from criticism (or scorn), and in a way descriptivists acknowledge this by observing/noting that so-and-so forms exist while also noting that each form may elicit different reactions. It'd be wise for the learner or user to be aware of the connotations.

I completely agree. But that doesn't mean it's OK to scorn others. Just as giving advice to help avoid being a victim of racist attack doesn't justify racism.

Well I suppose that opinions, judgments or connotations are to be ignored too. You as a teacher should know very well that metalinguistic awareness exists. Morality aside, we're all judged not just on the content of our output but its presentation and manner. I wouldn't be surprised if you took for me for a stiff-ass elitist as much as I'd take you for a brash linguistic populist who likes thumbing his nose at perceived elitists.

- using "different than" rather than "different from" - "than" indicates comparisons of greater/lesser degree (which has a vague quantitative edge) rather than mere qualitative difference.

Your explanation doesn't stack up. Explain the "than" in "rather than" (eg. rather than go to the shops, I stayed in and ordered online.)

C'mon, give yourself a chance. You know damned well that "rather" and "different" don't encompass the same parts of speech. "Rather" descends from a comparative adjective while "different" doesn't, so the use of "than" with "rather" turns out not to be out of place (see here). I can add to your twisting and posit "instead of..." and then ask if "of" is worthy of being compared to "than". Just for fun, we also have "different to". Want to muck things up more?

On the other hand, I know damned well that something translateable as "than" can follow a word translateable as "different" (e.g. Slovak Mačka je väčšia než pes. "The cat is bigger than the dog" but Mačka je iná než pes "The cat is different than the dog." (i.e. not "different from"). However that's fine for Slovak.

- using "ain't" to replace "aren't" and "isn't" (e.g. "he ain't coming" for "he isn't coming") when etymologically it's a contraction of "(I) am not".

A) etymology is not meaning, B) That's not my understanding of the etymology -- as I understand it, it appears in the records as both a contraction of am not and are not pretty much simultaneously.

Etymology can explain a word or morpheme's meaning, past and present. See here, here and here for the etymology. It's not clear to me looking at all of these links that "ain't" for "am not" and "aren't" came simultaneously as you posted. The phonological effect beginning with the change of m in am is clearer compared to "aren't" being a contraction of "are not" which shows no change to the consonant.

- curious disparaging of "ain't" as so non-standard/uneducated that it's been long viewed as proper to use "aren't I?" instead. I've never had a problem saying "ain't I?" when contracting "am I not?" since "aren't I?" seems like a hyper-correction. Writing is a different story though since outside casual writing, I try like hell to avoid contractions with apostrophes as phrases such as "I ain't" and "we aren't" look less attractive to me than "I am not" or "we are not" respectively)

And this brings us back to "ain't" going out of fashion in the first place, because it was due to a rejection of contractions as barbaric by arch-prescriptivists. Prescriptivists who wanted a "pure" English, and they even reintroduced conjugations for person and number, the fools. I mean, English had spent a millenium trying to rid itself of them, and by the restoration era in England, they'd all but gone. And then someone decided it was "wrong".

Indeed. I'm using "I ain't" ("ain't I?"), "you/we/they aren't" ("aren't you/we/they?") and "(s)he/it isn't" ("isn't (s)he/it?"), and don't see the fuss.

- using "If I/(s)he was..." instead of "If I/(s)he were..."

The subjunctive is dead. Deal with it.

In your dialect and that of many whom you know, it's dead. In mine and that of others, it's not despite the widespread merging of its forms with indicative ones. See here and here. I'm not the only one who'd question your self-assuredness. Am I to believe that sentences such as "I insist that you be careful.", "If she were here, then there'd be no problem." or "I hid myself behind the shelf, lest he find me." are ungrammatical or not part of the living language?

- letting "that" or even "which" replace "who" as a relative pronoun ("I'd like to thank my friends, that/which..."). I stick to "who" ("whom" when oblique) for blatant personal antecedants, and "that" or "which" for non-personal ones. When the antecedant is something that's fuzzier to me, my usage oscillates ("That's the team who/that won the championship last year" - I don't feel as bad with this sentence as saying "That's the player that scored the winning goal". For the latter I use "That's the player who scored the winning goal" no questions asked).

Ah... I was just waiting for that one. Have.a look back in the original thread -- there's one there.

But the thing is, "which" is for inanimate, "who" is for animate, but "that" is either. It was always thus. There is no hard distinction about when to use than vs which/who, but the pattern that modern grammar books present (and is taught as standard in English lessons to non-natives) is that "that" is used in restrictive relative clauses, and "who"/"which" is used for non-restrictive relative clauses.

The examples you used were all restrictive relative clauses, so "that" is the accepted (and taught) norm.
(Non-restrictive relative clauses are things like "My parents, who met at university, are from different countries.")

Using "that" to cover personal antecedents is indeed accepted and encountered regularly in output by natives and non-natives alike, but perhaps to your dismay/scorn/shock I was never taught this, and yes I'm a native speaker of English (relative clauses weren't taught to me like this but under certain circumstances I do perceive a difference between "which" and "that" as in "I finished off the soup, which she had left unfinished" versus "I finished off the soup that she had left unfinished". The distinction taught explicitly to me instead depends on the "humaness" of the antecedent rather than restrictiveness, and is reinforced by the association of "who" to humans and sometimes to animals.

"each and every" (even in legalese this seems out of place. let alone marketing fluff),

Well, if you go by the rules of other language, redundant repetition as intensifier is pretty normal....

It's more elegant than saying "absolutely every", I'd say.

Indeed it is a common technique for intensification, yet it's there for effect. "Absolutely every" is about as (in)elegant as "each and every" to me. Doing this can set off metalinguistic awareness in the thinking person.

[Cainntear]

You're starting to remind me a bit of the Serb, Vuk Karadžić, who was guided by Johann Christoph Adelung's declaration Schreibe, wie Du sprichst! ("Write as you speak!"). When standardizing Serbian, Karadžić took this declaration seriously but what really came out is that other Serbs (and to a good degree Bosnians, Croats and Montenegrins) ended up with standards that reflect strongly how he and his neighbours spoke and wrote no matter how divergent their manner was from that of those other Southern Slavs. You don't speak for my usage and that of some of my peers while I don't speak for your usage and that of those you've known.

...which would be prescriptivism, not descriptivism. Which is where corpus studies come in.

Now I'll admit I did the following for effect:

- using "If I/(s)he was..." instead of "If I/(s)he were..."

The subjunctive is dead. Deal with it.

because your reaction is exactly what I was looking for:

In your dialect and that of many whom you know, it's dead. For me and others, it's not despite the widespread merging of its forms with indicative ones. See here and here. I'm not the only one who'd question your self-assuredness. Am I to believe that sentences such as "I insist that you be careful.", "If she were here, then there'd be no problem." or "I hid myself behind the shelf, lest he find me." are ungrammatical or not part of the living language?

Where there are two norms, calling one better than the other is naturally elitist -- it says one side is more important than the other. It's not nice when I do it to you, it's not nice when you do it to me.

But if you insist on their being one "correct" form, why should it be the form that is demonstrably in the minority?

I'm reminded of politicians and political activists here -- when they say "we must be unified", they mean "you must not disagree with me." Those who seek a consensus must be willing to compromise.

I do accept that the subjunctive is not dead, and I don't criticise people for using it. But I do criticise them for attacking people who don't.

Well I suppose that opinions, judgments or connotations are to be ignored too. You as a teacher should know very well that metalinguistic awareness exists. Morality aside, we're all judged not just on the content of our output but its presentation and manner. I wouldn't be surprised if you took for me for a stiff-ass elitist as much as I'd take you for a brash linguistic populist who likes thumbing his nose at perceived elitists.

The problem with metalinguistic judgements is that they rely on being properly taught. Your "thinking person" is actually an "educated person", but with a specific type of education, and to imply that someone is not a "thinking person" (code for "intelligent") because they haven't had the same education as you is elitist. It's part of a self-perpetuating system where everyone buys into what they've been told, even when they often don't do it themselves. It's not a conscious choice to be elitist, just like a few hundred years ago, almost everyone was pretty racist and homophobic, not because they were nasty people, but just because that's the way they were brought up. Bringing it back to language, most dying languages have a "lost generation" where the school system has convinced people that their language is "wrong", and when people internalise this idea as youngsters, they don't pass the language on as adults.

Metalinguistic awareness is mostly delivered in a very negative fashion, of pointing at natural language and calling it wrong. It's basically an aversion therapy to stop children writing like normal people, and instead write and speak an artificial language. We're conditioned, like a grotesque version of Pavlov's dogs, to foam at the mouth when people dare to write normally... if we notice, that is.

There was a great story in the introduction to a style guide I once read. (It was by the editor of the Independent or the Guardian, I can't remember which.)
It told the story of how, during the recent "pedant's revolt" phase following the success of Lynn Truss's Eats, shoots and leaves, he read an editorial in one of the right-wing, conservative papers decrying the usual "common mistakes", so he went through the whole issue looking for the cited "mistakes" and "correct" forms... and the mistakes outnumbered the "correct" forms considerably. The editorial in question was a genuine editorial, written by the actual editor of the paper, the guy who's supposed to give approval to everything in the paper. He might not read everything, but a lot of those "errors" will have been in front of his eyes, but he didn't notice them.

Why?

We only notice these things when we're looking for them. For example, Xenops used "that" as a relative conjunction with a human referent in the other thread. I noticed this because we were in a thread discussing pedantry -- I would not have noticed it otherwise It was for a restrictive clause, so it was perfectly acceptable, but because I was thinking of the old rules I was taught at school, I spotted it.

What starts people looking for them normally is one of two things: difficulty in understanding what's written, or failure to identify with the author. The latter is pure elitism -- the person pointing out the flaw disagrees with what they are reading, and is looking for proof that they are "better" than the person who wrote it, so that the other party can be dismissed as "wrong". The former occurs where the writer is simply not good at writing, and the reader misascribes the problem to specific points that they've been trained to look for, rather than identifying genuine problems in structure and composition. That's why you don't notice these "errors" in the writing of journalists, who are well trained in composition.

But by focusing on the wrong thing in criticising poorly structured texts, we break our education system, because we end up teaching kids things that don't make the damnedest bit of difference instead of teaching them things that do. And in doing so, we doom them to a cycle of writing bad essays, getting feedback that doesn't solve the problem, and writing more bad essays. Meanwhile, the kids who manage to get their heads round proper composition independently will be making some of these "errors" but not getting called up on them, because the teacher doesn't notice.

C'mon, give yourself a chance. You know damned well that "rather" and "different" don't encompass the same parts of speech.

But we're talking about "than", not "rather" or "different"...
...and we could go on like this forever, because when you try to justify a language feature by following attempted logic, all you're doing is rationalisation after the fact. Even if someone was to incontrovertibly disprove your logic, you'd just change tack. As I said before, if there was a single logic that language had to follow, there would only be one language.

- using "ain't" to replace "aren't" and "isn't" (e.g. "he ain't coming" for "he isn't coming") when etymologically it's a contraction of "(I) am not".

A) etymology is not meaning, B) That's not my understanding of the etymology -- as I understand it, it appears in the records as both a contraction of am not and are not pretty much simultaneously.

Etymology can explain a word or morpheme's meaning, past and present. See here, here and here for the etymology. It's not clear to me looking at all of these links that "ain't" for "am not" and "aren't" came simultaneously as you posted.[/quote]
Well wikipedia points to The Merriam Webster New Book of World Histories which has attestations of an't for first person singular (1695) and a'n't for third person plural (1696), pre-dating the first attestations of the "ain't" form, but given the instability of vowels, we really have to consider them equivalent in the absence of other evidence.

The phonological effect beginning with the change of m in am is clearer compared to "aren't" being a contraction of "are not" which shows no change to the consonant.

I don't follow. Are you suggesting that because not-rhotic accents don't strongly pronounce Rs, they would have no reason to drop it in writing?

Using "that" to cover personal antecedants is indeed accepted and encountered regularly in output by natives and non-natives alike, but perhaps to your dismay/scorn/shock I was never taught this, and yes I'm a native speaker of English (something like this was never taught to me quite in this way but I would without hesitation use "which" as in "I finished off the soup, which she had left unfinished.". Using "I finished off the soup that she had left unfinished." somehow seems off). The distinction taught explicitly to me instead depends on the "humaness" of the antecedant rather than restrictveness.

When I was at school, they told me to use which or who -- "that" was just lazy. Your prescriptive rule was different from my prescriptive rule. Which one's right? Well, I could argue "parts of speech" and say that "what" and "which" are pronominal conjunctions, whereas "that" is a plain conjunction... but we'd be back into circular arguments, because my definition of "that" as a plain conjunction would be based on my rule being correct, and we get nowhere.

The thing is, when you look at the corpus evidence, the observed pattern is what I already mentioned, and that in general, "who" corresponds to "which"; but also that where "that" is normal, "who" is more common than "which", so your prescriptive rule does define a genuine tendency.

What I gave is the most common pattern, and therefore the most widely and easily understood, so it's the one that the learner books now use.

[dampingwire]

But if you insist on their being one "correct" form, why should it be the form that is demonstrably in the minority?

At some point "form A" was presumably the "correct form". Now the tide is turning and "form B" is rising in popularity. Eventually most of the people for whom [sic] "form A" was natural and "form B" was either a careless slip or a sign of a feeble mind die off (or give up and go with the flow). Eventually only "form B" is left. By this point "form B" has to be correct, it's won the battle after all. It doesn't necessarily become correct when it is the most commonly used form: it's perfectly OK for "form B" to have to work a bit harder than that to earn its place in the language.

Right now, so far as I am concerned at least, "should have" is good and "should of" is simply incorrect. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that 100 years from now "should of" may be acceptable. In the somewhat unlikely event that I am still here 100 years from now, I'll try to reduce my pained wince to a mere internal shudder. I'll probably stop correcting my offspring too (at least in public ... I can promise no more than that!).

I do accept that the subjunctive is not dead, and I don't criticise people for using it. But I do criticise them for attacking people who don't.

The subjunctive, in English, is on the way out. That doesn't mean that its replacement can be considered correct: at least not yet.

It told the story of how, during the recent "pedant's revolt" phase following the success of Lynn Truss's Eats, shoots and leaves, he read an editorial in one of the right-wing, conservative papers decrying the usual "common mistakes", so he went through the whole issue looking for the cited "mistakes" and "correct" forms... and the mistakes outnumbered the "correct" forms considerably. The editorial in question was a genuine editorial, written by the actual editor of the paper, the guy who's supposed to give approval to everything in the paper. He might not read everything, but a lot of those "errors" will have been in front of his eyes, but he didn't notice them.

Why?

"Why?" is irrelevant really. Newspapers usually have style guides that go far beyond using "form A" versus "form B": they'll often lay down the law about how to refer to certain situations, which of N perfectly correct alternatives should be used in a given circumstance and so on. So in this case it looks like someone somewhere messed up. Happens all the time, especially when people have deadlines to meet. Whether the "mistakes" were "mistakes" or mistakes isn't in the least bit affected by the newspaper's ability to avoid them or not.

[YtownPolyglot]

As a former ESL instructor, I see the value in a mix of both prescriptivist and descriptivist teaching. Students will need to be able to produce the "correct" forms on tests and in other academic settings (my ESL experience was in a university). At the same time, if they get out and about to any degree, they're going to hear a lot of "wrong" English and should at least be able to understand it.

They should also know what "not to say" to avoid undue embarrassment or other problems. They should understand how situations have a lot to do with what will be accepted and what won't.

[galaxyrocker]

Right now, so far as I am concerned at least, "should have" is good and "should of" is simply incorrect. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that 100 years from now "should of" may be acceptable. In the somewhat unlikely event that I am still here 100 years from now, I'll try to reduce my pained wince to a mere internal shudder. I'll probably stop correcting my offspring too (at least in public ... I can promise no more than that!).

First off, I'd like to point out that there is a difference between writing and language. Writing obeys certain specific rules, which can be violated; that's why "there, they're and their" can be considered mistakes when mixed up. Language is speech/signs and is what people inherently use. Writing is a way to represent language, but not language itself. That said, I'd like to point out that at least one scientific study argues that some people actually say "should of" and not "should've". See Kayne 1997.

The subjunctive, in English, is on the way out. That doesn't mean that its replacement can be considered correct: at least not yet.

It's definitely correct in my dialect. "If I were" sounds stuffy and would not naturally be said. And I'd wager it's that way for the majority of Americans.

"Why?" is irrelevant really. Newspapers usually have style guides that go far beyond using "form A" versus "form B": they'll often lay down the law about how to refer to certain situations, which of N perfectly correct alternatives should be used in a given circumstance and so on. So in this case it looks like someone somewhere messed up. Happens all the time, especially when people have deadlines to meet. Whether the "mistakes" were "mistakes" or mistakes isn't in the least bit affected by the newspaper's ability to avoid them or not.

Newspapers aren't really a good example. Why? Because they're focused on writing, and a specific type of it, which generally adheres to certain prescribed rules. This isn't the same as speech.

[tastyonions]

It's interesting that the disappearance of the subjunctive seems to be more complete with "be" forms than "have" forms. I hear "I wish that I was" all the time but "I wish that I have" is pretty rare in my experience.

[galaxyrocker]

It's interesting that the disappearance of the subjunctive seems to be more complete with "be" forms than "have" forms. I hear "I wish that I was" all the time but "I wish that I have" is pretty rare in my experience.

Are you saying that you hear "I wish that I had..." more often? If so, I think that's just the general collapse of the subjunctive into the past. For me, for example, the subjunctive has collapsed to the past tense (even down to "I wish you was" if I'm fully speaking dialect, or "I wish you were" if not; I'd still say "I wish he was" though). So it's likely you're not hearing "I wish that I have" because it's collapsed to "I wish that I had."

[dampingwire]

First off, I'd like to point out that there is a difference between writing and language.

Yes. My rules for speech and my rules for writing differ. I presume that's the case for you too. In addition, our rules for each differ from each other's rules too.

That said, I'd like to point out that at least one scientific study argues that some people actually say "should of" and not "should've". See Kayne 1997.

In case it was unclear, the "should of" example I cited specifically referred to speech. My children's speech. No need for a study's arguments!

The subjunctive, in English, is on the way out. That doesn't mean that its replacement can be considered correct: at least not yet.

It's definitely correct in my dialect. "If I were" sounds stuffy and would not naturally be said. And I'd wager it's that way for the majority of Americans.

There are things I suspect we agree on: it sounds like neither of us is particularly happy with "should of". There are things we disagree on: the use of the subjunctive in contemporary speech. Some of those areas where we disagree will jar when we hear them in speech and some we may not even notice. Ultimately, if they don't hinder communication, they don't matter, and if they do hinder it, then they are a problem. Unfortunately I can't manage to remember exactly what you think of every speech pattern I've ever used and I'm struggling to remember what Joe next to you thinks of "who vs whom" and the guy across the desk from me is different again.

So all I can do is stick with the patterns that I am happy with. I suspect that 99% of the time we'll be fine communicating. Every now and then there will be something that jars. Hopefully we'd cut each other some slack, but if not, then one or both of us may well lose out in some transaction or other. If I were learning English now and I needed in some professional capacity I think I'd be best off trying to learn to speak "by the book" rather than maybe learning from a soap. I'd worry about the subtle nuances once I approached "fluency".

[reineke]

---

[Cainntear]

But if you insist on their being one "correct" form, why should it be the form that is demonstrably in the minority?

At some point "form A" was presumably the "correct form". Now the tide is turning and "form B" is rising in popularity. Eventually most of the people for whom [sic] "form A" was natural and "form B" was either a careless slip or a sign of a feeble mind die off (or give up and go with the flow). Eventually only "form B" is left. By this point "form B" has to be correct, it's won the battle after all. It doesn't necessarily become correct when it is the most commonly used form: it's perfectly OK for "form B" to have to work a bit harder than that to earn its place in the language.

The thing is, though, typically the ones people make the biggest noise about are things that have been a minority usage for quite some time now. We inherit our list of "common mistakes" from a century or two of teachers and editors decrying them. Reineke's example of the subjunctive is a good one. Teachers insisted on it for ages, and some still do. But the fact that they've been complaining so long proves that it has long been in the minority.

On a similar note, why do people insist on maintaining an accusative form for "who" ("whom") but not one for "you" ("ye")? It's totally arbitrary (incidentally in some places the you/ye distinction is maintained to this day -- eg Derry (western Northern Ireland)) as they've both undergone parallel loss of distinction and there's no reason the rule should apply in one instance but not the other.

But then there are other examples where there's no proof at all that the "rule" was ever in the majority. We had examples at uni of prescriptivist rules that don't even match the historical record. And some we even know were completely made up -- for example, not splitting the infinitive. Aside from being nonsense ("'To' is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative." -- Otto Jespersen) we have plenty of evidence of it in written records of even Middle English, and the first known complaint about it was in 1834.

Right now, so far as I am concerned at least, "should have" is good and "should of" is simply incorrect. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that 100 years from now "should of" may be acceptable. In the somewhat unlikely event that I am still here 100 years from now, I'll try to reduce my pained wince to a mere internal shudder. I'll probably stop correcting my offspring too (at least in public ... I can promise no more than that!).

I'll never encourage students to write "should of", but I'll never decry it as incorrect. English has lost the ability to string multiple auxiliary verbs together -- no more can you say "I will can do it" -- so there's no structure within the language to support "should have". If we just let people write "should've", I don't think we'd have a problem, because that's what people say. The reason people end up writing "should of" is that we ask them to write "full words" when they have no internal model of the 've as a word. It's fused -- it's a suffix that turns conditional to conditional perfect.

The subjunctive, in English, is on the way out. That doesn't mean that its replacement can be considered correct: at least not yet.

But it is considered correct by all major authorities. No-one will be marked incorrect in the Cambridge, Trinity, TOEIC etc exams for not using a subjunctive, or for not using "whom", "amongst", "whilst" etc.

It told the story of how, during the recent "pedant's revolt" phase following the success of Lynn Truss's Eats, shoots and leaves, he read an editorial in one of the right-wing, conservative papers decrying the usual "common mistakes", so he went through the whole issue looking for the cited "mistakes" and "correct" forms... and the mistakes outnumbered the "correct" forms considerably. The editorial in question was a genuine editorial, written by the actual editor of the paper, the guy who's supposed to give approval to everything in the paper. He might not read everything, but a lot of those "errors" will have been in front of his eyes, but he didn't notice them.

Why?

"Why?" is irrelevant really. Newspapers usually have style guides that go far beyond using "form A" versus "form B": they'll often lay down the law about how to refer to certain situations, which of N perfectly correct alternatives should be used in a given circumstance and so on. So in this case it looks like someone somewhere messed up. Happens all the time, especially when people have deadlines to meet. Whether the "mistakes" were "mistakes" or mistakes isn't in the least bit affected by the newspaper's ability to avoid them or not.

Not irrelevant.

The phrase "do as I say, not as I do" is the wrong way round. If an expert in something professes a rule that they don't follow, then logically following that rule won't make you an expert. There are countless stories from various fields of people discovering that the rules they taught were wrong.

Example 1: swimming front crawl
The traditional rule: keep your fingers together, move your hand through the water in an S shape.
Anyone who wasn't swimming fast would have these rules drilled into them again and again.
Then they invented the underwater chase cam, and you could see what people were doing while swimming. It turn out only the "bad students" were actually being good students and doing what they were told. The "good students" were ignoring the rules and moving their hands in the way that felt most efficient -- in a straight line, with their fingers slightly apart.

Example 2: playing the piano
At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the various schools of piano playing in the conservatoires of Paris had vastly different professed techniques. Some would say you needed muscle tension on the back of your right arm and the front of your left arm, others the opposite. Others still would say that the tension should all be on the back of both arms, and the remainder would say muscle tension on the front of both. Some were about dropping the left wrist and raising the right, vice-versa, or both raised or both lowered
A blind pianist was baffled by this variety and studied under all of the top masters in Paris. Because he was blind, he could only observe their technique by touch, and he discovered that all good pianists were relaxed -- the muscle tension they professed actually hindered proper playing technique.