OP did you put a typo in your title to bait the prescriptivists?
.... Yes, I am totally that clever. 👀
Perhaps
Could it be a pun on perception?
they make terrible linguists too.
they should aim for "cunning" instead of "terrible".
They don't.
Language requires intelligent design from intelligent people sometimes. When needed, prescriptivists in legion can make a literate civilization out of illiterate primitives.
The asinine and the arcane can both make learning unnecessarily difficult.
oof, no. "in legion"? lol wtf, do you think this is Warhammer or something?
we started speaking way before we started writing. literacy had been irrelevant in the evolution of a language. and even today it barely matters; thanks to the the current ubiquity of media and communication, people can start using a new word, or start pronouncing a word a different way, or spelling something a new way, and it can spread faster than it ever did before. some dickwad insisting that this is "incorrect" is not going to change anything if most people disagree.
speaking of which, why are you not speaking or spelling the way Shakespeare did? what are these newfangled bullshit words and spellings you're using like some illiterate primitive?
Yes and no but mostly no. Prescriptivists are are great when you need to build a general structure of a language, but language can and will evolve without any intelligent design by the people using it.
The primary purpose of language is to communicate ideas and most of the times the linguistic rules are not necessary to convey an idea.
Ah the ages old: The few drag the masses kicking and screaming into a better future.
I think there is a very fine line between prescribing language because of a world view that insists on conformity, and correcting grammer and vocabulary because being clear and understood is kinda the point of language.
I don't think it's that hard, the line is mainly "is this hard to understand?" If yes then correcting or discussing it is not prescriptivism, if no, then you're just being pedantic
Just take texting or internet comments for example, how many are missing punctuation? How many are using slang terms or shortenings of words? How many are straight up omitting/skipping words? How many are making liberal use of language to either express themselves or have some emotional impact? Or just don't put in the effort to do grammar
After all, I miss punctuation in this very comment as well, especially at the end of paragraphs, in addition to skipping words or making liberal use of language like "do grammar". Is that grammatically correct? Absolutely not, but you understand what I mean
Assuming informal communication, of course. Formal communication is more about being proper, and ties into cultural norms of formality etc
"Hard to understand?" Is a question more complex than it might appear on the surface. There are obvious examples of ambiguity in speech which lead to complete misunderstanding.
But "hard to understand?" may also satisfy the criteria of "effort to understand". Just because a message was understood does not mean the audience was able to hear it effortlessly. And that boils down to consideration.
It's a two way street. Correcting mistakes because of apparent lack of effort is probably not warranted, but a speaker is not entitled to a happy audience either
As with many online feuds, I think a lot of these problems typically arise because of a lack of operating under the assumption others are acting in good faith.
Permanently Deleted
Prescriptivists: don't use that word, it's not in the Dictionary. It doesn't exist.
People working for Dictionary: new words? Yeah we pick whatever people say or write.
Oxford English Dictionary: -adds a slang term or portmanteau in common use for years by millions of people in order to reflect the linguistic zeitgeist-
Prescriptivists: 🤬NO🤬SLANG🤬IN🤬DICTIONARY🤬
Prescriptivists from the 1800s: 🤬NO🤬USING🤬"ZEITGEIST"🤬OUTSIDE🤬PHILOSOPHY🤬
Yeah we pick whatever people say or write.
"The framework of the language says it shouldn't be pluralized as a mass nouns, but Becky and the cool kids got everyone saying it so it's now a word.
Calling someone a prescriptivist is a sad rebuttal to the worry that our language is evolving arbitrarily based on the whims of vapid influencers.
The speakers decide. Always has been.
if you don't want language to evolve based on the whims of vapid influencers, help steer society away from vapid influencers being influential rather than getting pissy about how people speak.
What you're doing is very close to complaining about poor people speaking "lazily", and telling them to try harder, because obviously you're the shining example of enlightened correct speech.
You've got it backward. Successful modern influencers follow linguistic trends and reinforce them, but they typically do not invent them (see the litany of words from jersey shore that never made it into the greater american lexicon) even when they try. Typically, new words arise out of necessity, efficiency, or mutual enjoyment.
It boggles the mind to see how many armchair linguists come out of the woodwork for posts like these. As language evolves, we get new ways to express ourselves, but idiots that cannot possibly learn one new word stall that progress by just being stubborn. If anything, you should be more wary of people or groups preventing the use of new words, or re-prescribing existing words that are usually used one way popularly.
The ONLY valid goal with language is communication and understanding - couples develop words, workplaces develop words, gaming communities develop words, and all of these groups use either existing words to mean new things, or acronym words in new ways, or even make completely new words from brand names or nonsense. Prescriptivists cannot typically handle new jargon, regardless of its use, and this makes them a laughingstock in academia and online spaces alike.
If you can't parse what's being said, lurk more. The etymology of new words is just as valid as the etymology of ancient ones. It's fine to take words on loan from another language regardless of grammatical correctness. The word "eyeball" came from "an influencer".
Yeah, but loose instead of lose and too in place of to is annoying. As well as using apostrophe's on word's that end in S's that aren't possessive.
I thinc u kare abowt this to much
Upvote for the perscurptivist spelling, lawl
Why would anyone want rules and consistent applications of those rules? ANYONE could just learn any language that way. How would we keep our ability to communicate for native speakers only? It doesn't make sense.
You can want it all you want. It's just not reality. And pretending like it is isn't helpful to people trying to learn the language.
We don't have to be silly with descriptivism either. Of course languages evolve over time, but speakers also make mistakes that should still be corrected to keep language cohesive. It's the difference between change in body shape from evolution, and an isolated growth that probably shouldn't exist. We use a different word for that second one: cancer.
You gotta have both IMO. Not too rigid, not too flexible.
