4 ms·

Correct according to whom? The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Precriptivism of a li

• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Disagree. The language I speak didn't exist 800 years ago. The Anglo-saxons wouldn't have understood me, and I wouldn't have understood them. And there were barely a billion human beings just 800 years ago - forget about thousands of years. I didn't mention "prescriptivism", although it's obviously the opposite of descriptivism. I thiink you mistake "prescriptivism" for a sort of law-making,like grammar-nazis. I mean something more like a general acceptance that words do have particular meanings, and that it's possible to be wrong about the meaning or use of a word.
  • htfu 3y ago
    Whether or not that is the case, once enough wrong'uns do their thing it becomes correct, correct? Whatever the history or logic or what have you. So it becomes more a question of whether "90k instances on Wikipedia, has made it into dictionaries" is either far too late, or merely a lost cause.