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Language changes over time. A word that used to mean "knife" now means "flatware". That's linguistic description. > It shouldn't be done. That's linguistic pr
by flir 6y ago
Language changes over time. A word that used to mean "knife" now means "flatware". That's linguistic description.
> It shouldn't be done.
That's linguistic prescription. "This word means what it means and if you change it you're incorrect".
- roenxi 6y agoLinguistic prescription is saying it shouldn't be done because there are rules, and the change breaks them. I'm not saying that. My position is it shouldn't be done because creating new slurs for no reason is stupid. A prescriptivist and a descriptivist could both agree to that, though they'd disagree with each other on whether the idea of the change is legitimate. Which is probably a similar position to ccmcarey's original comment. No position was taken on whether the change breaks the rules of language or not, the argument was that either way the change is being bought on by ignorance of both normal usage and the lineage of the word (ie, potentially in defiance of both prescriptivist and descriptivist logic). This isn't really an issue of prescriptive vs descriptive philosophy. Although the descriptivists will be hopping mad.