thorandlokibrothersforeternity replied to your post “Another *think* coming”
What is a "descriptive" linguist? Or what does the occupation do? I know it's the study of languages but?.. Cool post tho.
A “descriptive linguist” is to be contrasted with a “prescriptive linguist”... or rather, since I don’t think prescriptivists really count as linguists, “prescriptive grammarians.” Descriptive linguists are people who study how natural language works (including sounds and sound systems, how the sounds are built up into words and sentences, how simpler units of meaning get put together to form more complex meanings, what implicit conversational rules people are following when they talk to each other, etc.).
Prescriptive grammarians, more commonly known as “grammar Nazis” or “the grammar police,” are the people who make a fuss about people saying things “wrong,” using “bad grammar,” etc. These are the people who tend to lament that the language is falling apart and we’ll all lose the ability to communicate with each other because people use “who” instead of “whom” as an object, or say “good” instead of “well” when people ask how they’re doing, or young women are speaking with “vocal fry,” or people are starting to pronounce internet abbreviations like “lol” in spoken language. For the most part, prescriptivists are just trying to enforce the prestige dialect: to distinguish those who have a certain kind and level of education from those who don’t, and to resist the changes in language initiated by the young, and often by women and/or the lower class.
I’m being kind of prescriptivist -- resisting language change and preferring the usage of those with a certain kind of education -- when I insist on “couldn’t care less” and “another think coming.” On the other hand, in this case, I think it’s not totally arbitrary. “I couldn’t care less” makes more sense to me as a way of saying “I really don’t care”: it means that my level of caring is so low that it couldn’t go any lower.
And I prefer “If S thinks that p, S has another think coming” over “...another thing coming” because they both imply that S is wrong and will find out that not-p is actually the case, but that’s all that “another thing coming” says. “S has another think coming” is funny because it echoes the “think” from the first clause of the expression, but uses it as a noun, which is kind of unusual and whimsical. You sort of have to think about what it means to have a think coming; it’s a little bit like having a beating coming, or a reckoning coming, but less violent.