... rules for English include not splitting infinitives, resulting in sentences such as 'to go boldly where no man has gone before', rather than 'to boldly go'. The rationale behind this was because the Latin infinitive is a single word, and so the equivalent English construction should also be treated as if it were a single unit. Prescriptivists rules include such things as 'bad' language as ending a sentence with a preposition, multiple negation, as two negatives destroy each other and make a positive, and using who in place of whom. One famous example of how the result can be if you are forced to follow a prescriptivist rule is Winston Churchill's quote, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." Descriptivism is the way used to describe the facts of languages without adding any value judgements of our own. They believe that the positioning ...

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