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Comments (1270)
Actually bare noun phrases in English carry both interpretations, ambiguously. The canonical example is "Policemen carry guns" versus "Policemen were arriving" -- the former makes little sense when interpreted existentially, but the latter makes even less sense when interpreted universally.
In short, there is no preferred interpretation.
(Oh, and prescriptivists always lose.)
What, always ? By definition ? That sounds dangerously like a prescriptivist statement to me ! :-)
Problems with linguistic prescriptivism.
Your comment was a pretty cute tu quoque, but arguing against prescriptivism doesn't mean giving up the ability to assert propositions.
I was making a joke :-(
(This comment originally said only, "Don't do that." That was rude, so I'm replacing it with the following. I apologize if you already saw that.)
As a general rule, I'd prefer that people don't make silly jokes on this website, as that's one first step in the slippery slope toward making this site just another reddit.
Paul Graham:
Curious. I was just reading Jerome Tuccille's book on the history of libertarianism through his eyes, and when he discusses how Objectivism turned into a cult one of the issues apparently was a lack of acceptance of humor.
I disagree with your blanket policy on jokes. I don't want to be a member of an organization that prohibits making fun of said organization (or its well-respected members); these types of organizations tend to have poor track records. I would, of course, fully support a ban on bad jokes, where "bad" is defined as "an unfunny joke that makes me want to downvote your comment, oh look, here's me downvoting it".
That said, I upvoted your comment for the honest clarification.
(I try to simply not vote on comments that actually make me laugh - there is a conflict between the part of me that wants LW to be Serious Business and the part of me that wants unexpected laughs, and such comments tend to get more karma than would be fair anyway.)
I usually operate using this definition, with one tweak: I'm more likely to upvote a useful comment if it's also funny. I'm unlikely to upvote a comment if it's only funny; and though the temptation to make those arises, I try hard to save it for reddit.
Does it count as a joke if I mention that every time I see your username I think of TROGDOR?
(This is only one of many similar mildly obsessive thought patterns that I have.)
Well, it was a hasty generalization on my part. Flawed descriptivism, not prescriptivism. But you're losing sight of the issue, even as you refute an unsound argument. In the particular case--check it out--Grognor resolved the ambiguity in favor of the universal quantifier. This would be uncharitable in the general case, but in context it's--as I said--a ridiculous argument. I stretched for an abstract argument to establish the ridiculousness, and I produced a specious argument. But the fact is that it was Grognor who had accused Loosemore of "abuse of language," on the tacit ground that the universal quantifier is automatically implied. There was the original prescriptivism.