I thought you couldn’t be snob and captain obvious at the same time, but here we are.
On the other hand, with your degree in linguistics are you granted a special permission to use random capitals?
Yes. English is evolved by whatever’s popular, ergo whatever the cool kids are doing. They’re actually going to make ‘fetch’ happen because there’s no one driving this crazy short bus just a bunch of cheerleaders on the roof and influencers tasting the back windows.
I’ve always said the dictionary is a follower not a leader, by the time a word gets added to the dictionary it’s already established widespread usage
Meh, seems cromulent.
Adequately pondiferous.
Ok but “melty” isn’t a real word and I’ll die on this hill
even if it’s a real word I hate it
Neither is “ask” as a noun. You don’t have asks, you have requests.
Something expensive is spendy. Something that melts is melty. What’s the trub, bub?
I don’t care about melty, but “would of” will never be right no matter how many times people say it.
Would’ve
People don’t say “Would of”, they just miswrite “would’ve”
Skibidi rizz
Gen Z slang really pushes my descriptivist tolerance.
Some people think god is an English teacher and his cock is a huge red pen.
Nucular. Checkmate, atheists.
Descriptivists will never haltodulate the hatsrglabatude of us prescriptivists.
Yeah, yeah, but where’s the fun in that? Trolling the shit out of people is way too much fun to not be pedantic.
Learned this a while ago, from an excellent YA writer:
memory unlocked
What a fantastic book. Thanks.
End prescriptuhvist speling! We haf nuthing to loose butt hour wigly red underlyns!
Ow. What did I do to you?!
If you think that’s bad, never try reading FEERSUM ENDJINN.
This reads like it was written by an ork from Warhammer 40k
I prefer Excession. There’s no amount of minds talking or new names of minds that is too much for me.
Would you look at the time? Loose butt hour.
That hurt to read… Kudos!
undalihnz
“a language that doesn’t adapt to an ever changing society is bound to be lost”, sure, but adapt too quickly and you lose the ability to communicate between groups of people.
There needs to be some compromise where new words are adopted, and changed words are accepted, without flooding the language with garbage. For example, English should still be taught in schools, and English teachers should still have the freedom of correcting the writing kids produce, and taking points off for “mistakes”.
Like, if you go pure descriptivist, “it’s” and “its” can now mean the same thing. There is no ability to distinguish between their, they’re and there. A business email describing a product as “cheugy, no cap” is perfectly acceptable and it’s up to the reader to figure it out, because every word is a real word and perfectly valid, and every grammar deviation is acceptable because languages evolve.
Even on social media, I think it’s fair to push back on “mistakes” that make it hard to understand something. An error that might take a poster 1 second to fix, might cost the world minutes, as thousands of people each take a few seconds to puzzle out what the OP meant to write.
Languages are about communication, and that can suffer whether the language police are too rigid and forbid any deviation, are too easily bribed and allow for anything.
Certain registers of a language do have different rules, but those also change and are still kinda whatever that part of society agrees with. Business letters that I learned to write in gradeschool in the '80s aren’t necessarily the same as I would write or expect to receive today. Ubiquitous, fast electronic communication also through a wrench into things a bit.
It’s too good to pass this up in this thread: threw*.
Formality, just like meaning, is decided collectively. The reason you wouldn’t use “cheugy no cap” in a formal email is not because they’re not words, but because they are commonly understood to be informal.
This is how descriptivists try to cope with the fact that they’re academics who claim that some random guy who has never seen a dictionary knows better than academics do.
Even descriptivists accept there has to be some degree of balance. Yes, language evolves, that doesn’t mean I can start calling my shoes bhurghs and expect anyone to know what I’m talking about.
But if it catches on…
Except there’s quite a few descriptivists online that take that very stance.
name one
There’s literally one in the topic of this post. And don’t tell me you haven’t dealt with crazy randos on Reddit that rake the same stance
You got trolled bro
I’ve seen descriptivists take the position that if enough people use a made up word it counts as communication, but the only people I’ve ever seen saying “well I’m gonna call a tree a xopo instead” are prescriptivists who don’t understand descriptivism.
There are so many specific technical things in my workplace that have words in the small group that cares about them.
They won’t find their way into dictionaries, but they are meaningful and useful. Some words like that have leaked into popular speech; my work isn’t the sort to have its gone grown words spread.
(My phone dislikes me pluralising “cares”. I presume it was taught in America)
Well, I mean describin’ ain’t easy.
Tell me this, why don’t “but” and “put” sound similar?
What about “height” and “weight”, what’s the rule here? And what makes a letter silent in a word? If any of these rules have exceptions, then why are there exceptions?
I dig the variety of topics on this comm, and I super appreciate how it doesn’t get STEMlordy at all.
It’s all connected. :)
I’m old enough to have noticed that a huge amount of language has changed in American English in the Westcoast at least. It’s pretty remarkable even myself and other middle aged people I know have changed their word use and slang.
It has changed a lot! But I’m bound and determined to keep “hella” alive, even if no one understands what I’m saying.
I noticed rad has made a resurgence in the past decade or so
'cause it’s a tubular word, doy. (and for a brief moment, I was a kid in the '80s again)
I think we used gnarly a lot back then too
It later made its way to the ski/snowboard communities, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it came back, i.e., “Shreddin’ the gnar.”
