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It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. English is full of examples where incorrect usage be

by curun1r 12y ago

It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. English is full of examples where incorrect usage became pervasive enough to become accepted as correct. But some people fight that process because they don't like that the language changes as a result of people using it ignorantly. For me, it really comes down to how you view the purpose of language. If the purpose is to convey meaning as accurately as possible, then these changes devalue the language since the usages that result from ignorant speakers are, by nature, less precise. The oft-cited "begging the question" has a very precise meaning that's difficult to convey in other terms. When ignorant usage widens the meaning, we lose the ability to easily refer to the more narrow meaning. On the other hand, you can view language as a shared cultural identity that's always shifting and evolving organically. In that light, these minutiae are pointless because the majority of speakers don't understand the subtlety and never will. You can try to educate people, but you'll just end up alienating them. As humans, we're evolved to learn language from our environment and the people who talk to us, not from a textbook. So why would we consider the textbook version to be the canonical version? These two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and yet are both reasonable and there are many well-educated people on both sides.

eridius 12y ago
Well said. Though I think that in the context of an online encyclopedia, being precise has far more value than in most other contexts, and so the prescriptivists are in the right. This should be recognizably true even if you take the side of the descriptivists in other contexts.
svachalek 12y ago
I have to say I find myself on both. In general I find the descriptive view of language to be far more flexible, pragmatic, and realistic. But certain phrases such as "all intensive purposes" evoke such a strong response from my gut that I just cannot abide it.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Are people defending "all intensive purposes"? I think descriptivists get a bad rap sometimes for "anything goes" but that's not true either. All intensive purposes is clearly a mistake.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    "Intensive purposes" (and "intense and purposes") is an eggcorn, so it's started the long walk to acceptance. http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/32/intensive-purposes/ http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/32/intensive-purposes/ Edit: this is a nice article about it http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/magazine/on-language-return-of-the-mondegreens.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/magazine/on-language-retur...
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      Do eggcorns inevitably become standard usage? Usually the replacement has some advantage, but here the original phrase is neither awkward not obtuse, and it makes more sense.
- curun1r 12y ago
  I agree...I find myself on both sides and that's why I presented both sides. I've decided that I want to learn as much from the prescriptivists as possible, since I find the evolution of language to be a fascinating topic. But I've also decided that I have very little interest in correcting people, so I try to vary my behavior contextually. I do my best to avoid mistakes in grammar in my own speech, but I don't correct other people that use them. And I try to use as much language precision as I feel the listeners are able to grasp. It's almost like a client-capability protocol upgrade in the tech world...if you can use the enhanced protocol, you can benefit from it. But if your client (the person you're speaking to) doesn't understand the subtlety of your word choice, it's pointless and potentially confusing to choose the more advanced usages. So I fall back to the common usages that tend to bother prescriptivists. But since this forum seems to be the more capable, here's one departure that people might find interesting. "All intensive purposes" is a malaprop, a specific language error that's almost never considered to be correct. But they can be fascinating examples of how we make sense of the world. My mother was a child psychologist for 30 years and collected malaprops from the children she saw. Children, especially those who have not yet started to read, have very small vocabularies and learn words phonetically from those that speak to them. When they encounter words that they don't know, they try to make sense of them from the context in which they're used and the similar words that they've already learned. This is a surprisingly effective technique, but often results in some interesting mistakes that surface as malaprops. My favorite example was a child that thought that Alzheimer's disease was actually "old timer's" disease. From that one mistake, you can really see how children approach unfamiliarity in their world.
mcphage 12y ago
> there are many well-educated people on both sides However, there are not many linguists—y'know, people who study language and how it works—on the prescriptivist side. There are a lot of well-educated people who reject evolution, too, although you'll note that not many of them are biologists.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. I'm not sure that's accurate. Being a descriptivist doesn't stop you from wanting works that are important to you to adopt clear and consistent style; the mere fact of having a usage preference and seeking, within a collective work, to have that preference consistently applied is not equivalent to linguistic prescriptivism.

by curun1r 12y ago

eridius 12y ago

Well said. Though I think that in the context of an online encyclopedia, being precise has far more value than in most other contexts, and so the prescriptivists are in the right. This should be recognizably true even if you take the side of the descriptivists in other contexts.

svachalek 12y ago

I have to say I find myself on both. In general I find the descriptive view of language to be far more flexible, pragmatic, and realistic. But certain phrases such as "all intensive purposes" evoke such a strong response from my gut that I just cannot abide it.

tedunangst 12y ago
Are people defending "all intensive purposes"? I think descriptivists get a bad rap sometimes for "anything goes" but that's not true either. All intensive purposes is clearly a mistake.
- DanBC 12y ago
  "Intensive purposes" (and "intense and purposes") is an eggcorn, so it's started the long walk to acceptance. http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/32/intensive-purposes/ http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/32/intensive-purposes/ Edit: this is a nice article about it http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/magazine/on-language-return-of-the-mondegreens.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/magazine/on-language-retur...
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Do eggcorns inevitably become standard usage? Usually the replacement has some advantage, but here the original phrase is neither awkward not obtuse, and it makes more sense.
curun1r 12y ago
I agree...I find myself on both sides and that's why I presented both sides. I've decided that I want to learn as much from the prescriptivists as possible, since I find the evolution of language to be a fascinating topic. But I've also decided that I have very little interest in correcting people, so I try to vary my behavior contextually. I do my best to avoid mistakes in grammar in my own speech, but I don't correct other people that use them. And I try to use as much language precision as I feel the listeners are able to grasp. It's almost like a client-capability protocol upgrade in the tech world...if you can use the enhanced protocol, you can benefit from it. But if your client (the person you're speaking to) doesn't understand the subtlety of your word choice, it's pointless and potentially confusing to choose the more advanced usages. So I fall back to the common usages that tend to bother prescriptivists. But since this forum seems to be the more capable, here's one departure that people might find interesting. "All intensive purposes" is a malaprop, a specific language error that's almost never considered to be correct. But they can be fascinating examples of how we make sense of the world. My mother was a child psychologist for 30 years and collected malaprops from the children she saw. Children, especially those who have not yet started to read, have very small vocabularies and learn words phonetically from those that speak to them. When they encounter words that they don't know, they try to make sense of them from the context in which they're used and the similar words that they've already learned. This is a surprisingly effective technique, but often results in some interesting mistakes that surface as malaprops. My favorite example was a child that thought that Alzheimer's disease was actually "old timer's" disease. From that one mistake, you can really see how children approach unfamiliarity in their world.

mcphage 12y ago

> there are many well-educated people on both sides However, there are not many linguists—y'know, people who study language and how it works—on the prescriptivist side. There are a lot of well-educated people who reject evolution, too, although you'll note that not many of them are biologists.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. I'm not sure that's accurate. Being a descriptivist doesn't stop you from wanting works that are important to you to adopt clear and consistent style; the mere fact of having a usage preference and seeking, within a collective work, to have that preference consistently applied is not equivalent to linguistic prescriptivism.