Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Lev, this makes me wonder: when it comes to linguistics, do you favour prescription or description? ;-)
Ah yes! One of the favourite shibboleths of the 1990s.
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#prescriptivist
Prescriptivist / Descriptivist
Code phrase meaning "I don't understand grammar, punctuation, or usage, but want to have an opinion on the matter anyway." [...] Used in lexicography, the terms have some meaning in theory, but in practice tend to be just name-calling phrases meaning "I don't like these people's policies."
Ah, well, my understanding of it was "you're wrong because <appeal to authority>!!1!" versus "people do whatever, and we take notes". Or more seriously, schoolteachers prescribe & linguists describe. I didn't have internet in the 90s; if it was "a thing", I didn't know. I'm reading Fowler (1st ed, of course) and his attitude seems to boil down to "<usage> is etymologically wrong, but trying to 'fix' it won't work and will just make things worse." Which is what I was thinking about when reading Lev's post. IMO Americans use "libertarian" in a silly way, but since "socialist" and "anarchist" are sufficient for most discussion, it's not worth getting upset about. It'd be like trying to make the British use "public school" correctly.