As an avowed word nerd, I have many beloved words, but there's one I'm too scared to use: myriad. I distinctly recall a course instructor saying that using it as a noun, as in “a myriad of bananas” or even pluralized as “myriads,” is just plain wrong—the word is an adjective, after all!
However, years later, I know that’s not the case; the noun form is fine to use as well. But she isn’t alone in this error, or her judgment of it.
It seems that, oftentimes with linguistic prescriptivism, the prescriptivist complainer decries some newfangled use (or outright "misuse") of a word (how dare they change my language like this!); think of the linguistic developments (reflected in Merriam-Webster) of the word “literally,” which go back at least as far as the 18th century but are met with complaints about what “literally” originally or actually means.
What’s curious to me is that, here, with myriad, people are making an incorrect assumption about the word’s older, apparently original usage. I guess some poet or another preferred the mouthfeel of “myriad” as an adjective over that of it as a noun, and that pronouncement stuck, but regardless, here we are.
So why am I still so afraid to use “myriad” however I please—recklessly, as either a noun or an adjective?
Because many word nerds and grammar snobs are mean.
There’s much to be said about the perils of linguistic prescriptivism—classism, racism, etc.—but here I want to focus on the more general prejudice against seeming linguistic misuse. Some of these snobs feel a certain schadenfreude when they spot grammatical mistakes or incorrect usage; they delight in the mistakes of others, as it were, and in judging people for making them. Other snobs simply look down on people for these seeming errors, assuming the speaker in error is ignorant or even “uneducated.”
But here, with using myriad as a noun, it’s the judger who’s decidedly “ignorant.” I’m not in the wrong with “a myriad of bananas” or whatever I might say, but they think I am and, so the fear goes, could judge me for it. Unable to defend myself through the page or screen, I am stuck in a lose-lose situation: Either I abandon a beloved and beautiful word to avoid incorrect and unfounded judgments, or I go on using that word however I please but seem professionally ignorant to my editorial peers...
Or a secret third thing: I write an article about it online, which doesn’t actually solve the problem, but it certainly feels nice getting it out there.
I think the moral of the story here is having humility in grammar and linguistics. Prescriptivism, at its blindest and most callous, usually comes with a merciless and typically unenlightened arrogance; many of its assumptions ignore real-world linguistic developments and cultural moments, sometimes directly deriding them in the worst possible, least-informed way. And as mentioned above, it can amount to classism, racism, and more when it insists that “people should speak properly,” where what is “proper” is typically a white, middle- to upper-class dialect.
But that’s a subject to dive into in another article, at a later time. Here, I want to caution you to, yes, abide by your style guide, but also do your research now and then and stay curious.