Comment on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:28:37 GMT

Downvoted not for the objection but for the use of the term "descriptivist" as if it meant "the point of view that prestige language forms don't exist"

Prismattic wasn't making a claim about what the subject of linguistics should deal with, but rather simply an object-level claim that a particular usage is unprestigious.

Is this right? Prismattic wrote (or, at least, has edited their comment to say) that singular "dice" is a "mistake", not that it is unprestigious. MixedNuts linked evidence that it isn't necessarily a mistake. The "descriptivist cock" thing is a jokey nod to how descriptivists often rebut prescriptivist hypercorrection (i.e. what MixedNuts was doing), no?

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