4 ms·

> If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a

by viewer5 12y ago

> If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material. I don't think descriptivists are obliged to treat a one-man crusade on a phrase with the same gloves as the grand-scale evolution of that phrase in the first place. 47,000 instances of "comprised of" across a zillion wikipedia articles written by a bunch of people is evidence of lingual evolution; one guy reverting those all to "comprised" isn't further evolution, that's just one guy changing something he doesn't like.

aetherson 12y ago
Sure. But, you know, when you use evolution metaphors, you get that what starts a change in a species is one mutation, right? Someone first used the phrase "comprised of" in this sense, and that person, it would seem, got some traction. Giraffedata is trying to be the guy who gets traction on making the phrase ungrammatical. This does happen! At some point, we stopped for example using the second-person informal (thou). This didn't happen because the God of Zeitgeist changed the minds of millions of English-speakers all at once. It happened because individual people started to change how they used language, and it caught on. Do I think that giraffedata's crusade is likely to be successful? Nope. But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing."
- tokenrove 12y ago
  > But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing." I think the offensive part comes from the implication that one way is right and one way is wrong.
  - Flimm 12y ago
    So it's wrong to say that one way is right and one way is wrong? ... ad nauseum
  - SilasX 12y ago
    It's not (merely) about right vs wrong, but about "destroys useful symmetries" vs doesn't, or "makes language less useful" vs doesn't. If people start to use "up" to mean "down", that defeats the purpose of having words for them. If a term's very existence is to provide a context-free way to disambiguate, it will be a pain when people expect you to infer the real meaning from context (cf literally). In programming, if you accept some new idioms, but those make it hard to see if a given line of code mutates state, that will create pain for you down the line, even if it's "just the evolution of the language".
spdustin 12y ago
A fair point. But common usage can find an obstacle in those whose beliefs or principles refuse to accept it. I still enjoy seeing the Sears Tower in feb-roo-airy, in spite of others' desire to visit the Willis Tower in Feb-you-airy. As long as they don't try to drop a "nuke-you-lar" bomb, I won't correct them. I could care less, but then I'd be apathetic to their linguistic failings. (Edit: grammatical error)

by viewer5 12y ago

aetherson 12y ago

Sure. But, you know, when you use evolution metaphors, you get that what starts a change in a species is one mutation, right? Someone first used the phrase "comprised of" in this sense, and that person, it would seem, got some traction. Giraffedata is trying to be the guy who gets traction on making the phrase ungrammatical. This does happen! At some point, we stopped for example using the second-person informal (thou). This didn't happen because the God of Zeitgeist changed the minds of millions of English-speakers all at once. It happened because individual people started to change how they used language, and it caught on. Do I think that giraffedata's crusade is likely to be successful? Nope. But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing."

tokenrove 12y ago
> But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing." I think the offensive part comes from the implication that one way is right and one way is wrong.
- Flimm 12y ago
  So it's wrong to say that one way is right and one way is wrong? ... ad nauseum
- SilasX 12y ago
  It's not (merely) about right vs wrong, but about "destroys useful symmetries" vs doesn't, or "makes language less useful" vs doesn't. If people start to use "up" to mean "down", that defeats the purpose of having words for them. If a term's very existence is to provide a context-free way to disambiguate, it will be a pain when people expect you to infer the real meaning from context (cf literally). In programming, if you accept some new idioms, but those make it hard to see if a given line of code mutates state, that will create pain for you down the line, even if it's "just the evolution of the language".

spdustin 12y ago

A fair point. But common usage can find an obstacle in those whose beliefs or principles refuse to accept it. I still enjoy seeing the Sears Tower in feb-roo-airy, in spite of others' desire to visit the Willis Tower in Feb-you-airy. As long as they don't try to drop a "nuke-you-lar" bomb, I won't correct them. I could care less, but then I'd be apathetic to their linguistic failings. (Edit: grammatical error)