#prescriptive linguistics

[bookofmirth]

i watched this video on language and i immediately thought of you: youtube[.]com/watch?v=JTslqcXsFd4

Yesssss I love this FEEBLE POSITION

All of this, all of these pet peeves people can shove right up their butts because they often show a prejudice against certain people (young women, POC, poor people, etc.) I love when this kind of stuff is widely disseminated because YES I’m going to end my sentence with a preposition and split my infinitives and you’re still going to understand me, KARENNETH.

lowkey thought you were trying to rickroll me though haha

Here’s the link for people interested: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JTslqcXsFd4

[philosopherking1887]

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.

[thepeacockangel]

When someone is like "Antiquated dictionary definitions are more valid than common usage" I'm like "Tôsprecan Englisc"

[jdvancefreefeetpics]

“This means the ability to interpret the text is dependent upon the knowledge of the semantic structure of the related standard dialect. In this sense poetic dialects are ‘parasitic’ upon standard dialects.” - S.P. Corder

Listen, I dislike poetry as much as the next person, but you gotta get this prescriptivist bullshit out of here. 

[meta-plastic]

My brash spitfire renegade grammarian take on why “less [things]” is generally correct to say in the same place as “fewer [things]”, although “fewer things” specifies that they’re discrete objects (we don’t say ‘fewer water’):

“less than” is a mathematical operator which works between whole numbers,

and

“less [things]” can be read as a shortened version of the phrase, “a number of [things] which is less than [another referenced number of things]”.

So: “I have less apples than Cthulhu” = “My number of apples is less than the number of apples Cthulhu, who whispers to me in my dreams, possesses in deep strange underwater gardens lit with feverish hallucinatory light.”

Now, “fewer” is still more exact/specific, and it does have linguistic utility when applicable. This is the sort of thing that might make sense in a high-level manuscript edit, if it fits the cadence. But it’s a perfectly unnecessary thing to dispute in any casual text or conversation.

[minusforty]

Language Change Angers Traditionalist

Headlines were once a concise summary of the content of the story. Their eventual change into descriptive yet vague, complete sentences will disturb you.