Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
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.
That's indeed a fair description of the alleged difference -- but my point is that, in practice, this is all just meaningless rhetorical posturing and is just what you call people when you decide you don't like what they've said. I confess to having little patience for lexicographers of the more extreme of the 'people do whatever, and we take notes' school of thought. (As I said in the linked passage, in _lexicography_, there is some meaning to the discussed distinction, unlike in general discussion where it's just bullshit posturing.) I really have little respect for a dictionary writer so spineless and lacking in professional self-esteem that he/she literally makes a dictionary say that infer and imply are interchangeable in meaning because some bunch of people think they are. (Please see also the mail included at the bottom that I once wrote to a favourite radio programme host, to inform him of inadvertent humour concerning the word 'enormity'.)
IMO Americans use "libertarian" in a silly way,
Well, to paraphrase Graham Chapman's King Arthur, it is a silly place.
It'd be like trying to make the British use "public school" correctly.
Yes, quite. I've actually been at a loss to explain to Britons, in terms they will correctly understand, the nature of my elementary school in British Hong Kong in the 1960s. The place was called Peak School (it being near the top of Victoria Peak, a couple of blocks from the Peak Tram terminus), and at that time it was run by some agency of the British government. My sister and I were two of the three non-Britons permitted admission. The school still exists (and has a Web site!), but the organisation is entirely different (obviously), and the student population a great deal more diverse. But I'm at a loss to find the correct term for what the school _was_ at the time I attended it. 'Public school' is what Yanks call such a place, but Brits reserve that term for something else. 'Comprehensive school' might be the right term, but I probably am missing nuances of meaning. -- Rick M. From rick Tue May 4 15:49:16 2004 Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 15:49:16 -0700 To: kusc@kusc.org Subject: Arnold Bax and "enormity" X-Mas: Bah humbug. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i [Kind folks at KUSC: Would you be kind enough to pass this along to Jim Svejda? Thank you.] Dear Mr. Svejda: A couple of weeks ago, I was enjoying "The Record Shelf" on one of my local public radio stations (KALW), and you went into an engaging set of anecdotes about Arnold Bax. Speaking of the initially unnamed composer, you made reference to the "enormity of his output". Oh dear. "Enormity", you see, does not mean hugeness. It denotes the quality of being greatly and infamously wicked: You might therefore speak of the enormity of the Third Reich's crimes, but the word has no obvious application in musicology beyond, say, the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Which reminds me: I once heard a special broadcast of The Record Shelf in which you reached for enormity and managed instead to be endearing and hilarious: It was a (2-hour?) pastiche of clips of wildly incompatible pieces from various operas, one of which I remember was from Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov", in which I think you'd stitched together some unlikely plot a la "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" I used to keep several off-the-air cassette tapes of it in my car, but the risk to other drivers from bouts of helpless mirth was too great. Thank you! -- Cheers, Founding member of the Hyphenation Society, a grassroots-based, Rick Moen not-for-profit, locally-owned-and-operated, cooperatively-managed, rick@linuxmafia.com modern-American-English-usage-improvement association.