The prescriptivist selects one of the options to the exclusion of the others, on the basis of reasoning which turns out to be arbitrary and spurious

The chosen option is prescribed as the “correct” usage

The excluded options are proscribed and condemned as “incorrect”

At schools an antipathy is fostered in children towards “incorrect” grammar patterns and a correspondingly critical attitude towards those people who continue to use them

The rejected options may actually be far more commonly used than the favoured one

The aim of prescriptivism is to support class distinction by linguistic criteria

The set of prescriptive rules proved to be immensely powerful as class discriminators