The main problem of the poll that causes prescriptivist-descriptivist polarization is that it refers to correctness in English without defining what is meant by correctness.
Descriptivists do have a notion of prescritivist-style correctness. They just refer to it by other adjectives such as "normative" or "standard" instead of using "correct". For descriptivists, the notion of commonness of occurrence, particularly among native speakers (of any level of education), is what is most relevant. In the end, when something is "ungrammatical/unattested/semantically incoherent/infelicitous", what is really meant is that the thing is unlikely to be uttered by a native speaker.
"Words" is naturally a lot more normative than "word's" or "wurds", in fact it's the only normative choice. However, even a full-on prescriptivist would allow "word's" or "wurds" to be printed in a book as long as such spellings are used rhetorically in context. Imagine the author of a book of children's literature writing "wurds" in order to portray that a child is beginning to learn to write, or portray the rebelliousness of some naughty brats.
badger wrote:if you want a rant on the misuse of apostropes, I find the use of the dangling possessive apostrophe on words ending in "s" but which aren't plurals even more irritating - eg "James' book".
It's not always a "misuse" even from a prescriptivist point of view. Many styleguides recommend doing that for ancient Greek, ancient Roman and ancient Middle Eastern names ending in -s, e.g. "Plautus' comedies" (presumably this also applies to Chinese philosophers "Confucius" and "Mencius"). This idea seems particularly stronger in the case of "Jesus", e.g. "Jesus' parables", to the point I've sometimes heard random lay people (not styleguides) say that "Jesus" is the one exception.