Comment Re:Something completely different... (Score 2) 667
The lack of a prescriptive body for English is a historical accident, the same way the United Kingdom doesn't have a constitution, just a shitload of case law, treaties and statutes. For quite some time, Norman French was the language of government - naturally, the government did not try to regulate the grammar of a language they never spoke. After that, it was a populist thing - trying to formalize English would cause backlash at your supposed elitism. There was a brief window where a prescriptive body could have been formed, but soon enough there were too many far-flung colonies (and then former colonies) to do so effectively. Now you can't get a single prescriptive body at all, because the British will never bow to an American body, the Americans will never bow to a British body, and there's enough foreign speakers that they could arguably form their own prescriptive body and make it stick to everyone but the biggest two.
It also fails to note how prescriptive bodies often fail when they try to dictate usage, instead of formalizing actual usage. The French Academy, for instance, insists that the proper word for email is "courrier electronique". Informally, most French just use "email" or "mel", and the Quebecois managed to standardize "courriel". It's a bit of a joke, really, how little authority the French Academy actually has to dictate French.
Prescriptivism is fundamentally unworkable for languages in general use. The best prescriptive bodies do not dictate language, but formalize existing practices, and standardize where inconsistent. They may title themselves prescriptive bodies, and may sometimes try to dictate usage themselves (and usually fail), but at heart they are not prescriptivist.