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." Copyediting is all about clarity, and avoidance of (unintended) ambiguity, in written prose. Good usage is clear, as precise as intended, and difficult to mis-read. It is helped in that by good punctuation, which "fences off" possible misinterpretations and misparsings, while at the same time avoiding calling attention to itself. Editing professionals know those things intuitively, and tweak prose accordingly -- not wasting time on irrelevant ideological battles or dumb question-begging about whether our always-evolving language(s) should be "allowed to change". 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."