Jean Aitchison's Metaphors For Prescriptive Attitudes To Language Change

The Damp Spoon model highlights the apparent laziness and sloppiness over the ways language changes - such as dropping apostrophes and the subjunctive (basically all prescriptivists see change as negative). It's called this because it's similar to the laziness Aitchison felt when a damp spoon was put back into a sugar bowl.


The Crumbling Castle view treats English as a beautiful, pristine, precious building that must be preserved. Any change would be like letting the castle fall to ruin. The issue is that the language has to have been at a 'perfect' state at some point.  But this isn't true as standardisation never fully set down 'rules' (Latin rules, so again, trash) until 300 years ago.


The Infectious Disease model sees language change as an 'infection' that people can catch, in much the same way that floating germs spread disease. The issue with this is that people change their language use because they want to use the changed meanings, in order to fit in etc. In defence of the model however, it functions in much the same way as the bull's eye theory.