Linguistic Prescriptivists Puns

Bearing in mind that I'm not a linguist. If you try to go into more depth on linguistics theory here, I will probably have little idea what you're talking about.

It seems like a lot of conflict in social justice circles comes down to definitions of words (see: racism, is it institutional-only or can it be personal, etc.). So I'm curious how people's views on language intertwine with their views on gender.

To the best of my ability to explain: Descriptivists look at languages as constantly evolving, and that the definition of words is basically how people treat those words in every day conversation. Prescriptivists treat language as more static and standardized and are more likely to look to a dictionary than to common usage to define a word. (actual linguists, if you're out there, if these explanations are flawed, please clarify them).

Hey everyone! I commented somewhere on /r/linguistics that there was no such thing as 'mistakes' in prescriptivist linguistics, only slight variations in the set of rules one uses, but I believe I'm wrong. /u/paniniconqueso suggested I create a thread to discuss this topic so I understand.

What I understand from what they said is that some are inconsistent in their mistakes, thus excluding the idea of a different so-called 'rule', but is there such a thing as inconsistency in such a case? Could we not say the 'non-standard speaker' unconsciously chooses to use one form or another depending on some non-conventional factors for the non-standard piece of language?

Feel free to share what you have to say on that topic.

EDIT: WOOOPS, major typo -_- I meant DESCRIPTIVIST all the way.

EDIT 2: By distractedly replacing the keyword of the thread by its antonym, I've actually just proven myself wrong. Kinda. It is apparently possible to make a mistake that makes no sense whatsoever (my main mother tongue is French, so I have no excuse since both terms are pretty transparent both in French and English). Thanks for your answers.

I'm entertained by the idea of Cicero waggling his finger at the stylistic "errors" of lesser speakers and writers.

A contrary belief would be that the emergence of prescriptive beliefs is completely spurious and that societal pressures account entirely for their prevalence.

Which one do you subscribe to, and why? Perhaps this question has been investigated scientifically or speculatively in some literature?

I'm asking this because of my armchair hypothesis that some nontrivial features of natural languages naturally "prime" our minds for explanations of the prescriptivist kind (given certain universal cognitive biases and sufficient linguistic naivety).

The core-periphery structure of natural languages seems especially salient to me in this respect. After all, so many prescriptivist statements are predicated on the unsuccessful transfer of some productive rule or reading onto a "peripheral" lexical item that has arisen by some kind of lexicalization.

My friend is convinced that prescriptive grammar is objective and scientific, judges people as speaking and writing English incorrectly if they use “you and me” instead of “you and I” or “I will” instead of “I shall” and all this nonsense. He’s also convinced that Standard American English and the General American accent is somehow “pure” for North America and considers less prestigious dialects as objectively inferior in phonology and grammar. He’s the kind of asshole that considers AAVE and Appalachian English as being lazy corruptions of true English.

I’m just an interested layman when it comes to linguistics, but I realize how completely unscientific, ignorant, and pompous he’s being with these ideas. I care so much about this issue that I’m honestly starting to look at this guy in similar ways that I regard racists. What really bothers me is that his attitudes are shared by thousands of high school English teachers and millions of their pathetic internet progeny. This guy prides himself on knowing so much about linguistics when pretty much all academic linguists - you know, real scientists that study language - completely disagree with him.

I’m not against the teaching of prescriptive grammar and I'm not against English classes focusing on the English literary language. I’m not against the standardization of language to help break detrimental barriers. I'm not against rigid styles of writing for certain purposes, such as official documentation or writing newspapers, or whatever. Prescriptivism has its uses of course. What I’m against is the misinformation; the bogus and misinformed justifications for prescriptivism, linguistic prestige attitudes, and the idea that there are – objectively and linguistically speaking – proper/improper, intelligent/uneducated, pure/corrupt, and superior/inferior dialects and accents and grammars.

I’ve tried to convince him otherwise but I can’t articulate what I’m trying to say well enough. I’m not a very good orator in the first place. You guys know your stuff, so please help me knock this guy down a notch. He’s full of so much proud ignorance and hypocrisy it’s hard to know what to do. For every one fire I put out, he starts 10 more. Help me take away his lighter.

Thanks in advance :)

Like, if you look in any dictionary, the word 'linguist' has meant 'polyglot/translator' since long before it mean 'linguistic scientist' but I sometimes hear otherwise-descriptivist linguists saying that this is wrong and that's not actually what 'linguist' means. For example, take this tweet- they don't just say 'that's not how we use the word linguist' but 'military linguists are not linguists'. What gives?

I understand why prescriptivist attitudes among professional linguists may be problematic if, for example, the aim of the discipline is value-free inquiry. However, I regularly hear linguists and non-linguists alike criticize prescriptivist attitudes among non-linguists on disciplinary grounds, and I can't help but feel that they're overstepping the boundaries of the discipline. If, for example, one is a utilitarian, and has good reason to believe that adopting a prescriptivist attitude will serve to maximize moral utility, why should what linguistics think of the matter trump such normative concerns?

I don't know a lot about linguistics at all, but I do at least know that language prescriptivism is negatively regarded as conservative and even pseudoscienctific. The raison d'être of the Académie française seems to be exactly that.

If so, could you guys recommend some books/resources?

So, I got into an argument with my friend, who thinks it is sexist to use "he" when talking to someone of unknown gender. Meanwhile, I think using "he" in this case is perfectly natural, and my friend is being prescriptivist here. I thought asking here colud help, so who is right in this case?

If say, someone wanted to use the letter “M” to represent the /h/ sound, or use the letter “E” to represent the /s/ sound, then why would it be wrong to be prescriptivist against that?

If you could read and write anything freely, even in conlangs, how truly useful would that be? Why not make a conlang and use the alphabet with different sounds as mentioned above (A as /f/, B as /u/, C as /l/, etc.), or write any word any which way you want (like “linguistics” as “lynquystyx”), or pronounce anything however you want (like /leɪŋɡwɪdʒ/ as /rajngvatʃ/)? Then what even is the point of using writing or speech as communication if there aren’t certain prescribed rules that are followed?

Every language has benefitted from a healthy amount of prescriptivism, in terms of using it to actually communicate and transmit ideas.

I love your and Michael’s dogs.

I love you and Michael’s dogs.

Or is neither correct? If so, what is the correct way to say it?

I’m in my first year of an English Language course and part of the current unit I’m studying is covers the media misconceptions and misrepresentations of what linguists do. One of the representations discussed is that of linguists being arbiters and prescribers of how language should be used. For example in the film My Fair Lady the linguist Professor Higgins criticises the non-standard varieties of English and accents other than RP as being ‘incorrect’ and ‘bad’. My unit states that even during the time the film was set 1910’s London linguists took a descriptive approach to English language studying how it was used, its varieties etc.

What I wanted to know was in the English Language linguistic community are there still prescriptive linguists/grammarians?

I’m doing a linguistics degree and theres a constant argument about weather language can be sexist or not. How can you objectify or look at this descriptively without getting too ideological about it? For example, if you say Esperanto grammar is sexist, is that being prescriptivist because you’re assigning a belief to the grammar of Esperanto and not finding a way to tie it into how language is actually used? Is there a way to factually or descriptively call a language sexist or is there always going to be some kind of opinion involved ?

Another example is the usage of “dude” which some people use as gender neutral, but there are arguments that it’s not gender neutral (or at least originally it wasn’t) and that it’s sexist to use masculine words for women.

There are also counter arguments that say the culture is sexist and the culture shapes the language, so the sexism is not the language but the culture. So my hands are tied on this issue as to weather languages can actually be sexist or not.

PS…Ill also add that This debate also seems to be very politically fueled with the student’s and professor’s political beliefs being a determiner of weather they actually think language can be sexist. So very rarely does this debate seem to be 100% without some kind of ideology involved. Weather that’s conservative biased people saying language isn’t sexist, or liberally biased people saying it is. More broadly put, it seems to be like this all through out social sciences.

I’m also not very experienced with linguistics yet myself so some of what I’m saying might sound stupid , so pardon me on that.

I am writing a short essay discussing the main challenges of the prevailing societal prescriptivist view. I was going to write a section about how English has evolved and is still evolving with outside input. Then another about how English is no longer dominated by English countries and there are more ESOL speakers. Then a section on how the people that champion prescriptivism tend not to be linguists. It's 1000 words and I'm a dumb first year. Is this going to actually answer the question, or am I missing the mark?

Near full literacy has been achieved in most developed countries regardless of reformed spelling, and illiteracy is only prevelent where school education is not and poor economic conditions exist. For example the four poorest (by GRP per capita) Brazillian states also have the lowest literacy rates. On the flip side both Singapore and Hong Kong achieved near full literacy with similar economic and educational environments despite one using Simplified Chinese and the latter Traditional (obviously, this would have no effect on the non-Chinese population in SG).

So my question is, why, despite the lack of any obvious benefit in literacy and the practical problems it would entail, is spelling reform still thrown around so much by amateur linguists? I can understand a desire for a less prescriptivist approach that would be less hostile to minor errors, especially those caused by dyslexia, but I cannot really see any compelling reasons for spelling reform when one takes into account the problems it would have (dialectal variation, replacement of millions of existing texts).

I'm no linguistic prescriptivist, but it seems apparent that these newer uses of the word "brave" bare little resemblance to traditional definitions. Sure, this is how language evolves. But in this particular case I suspect that there's a pernicious aspect at play in the ways that the definitions of "brave" are changing. It's not so much that the original definitions are expanding, but rather that they're changing in ways that no longer relate to the original set of definitions and instead highlight far less significant definitions.

I've been physically disabled for about 12 years. It's made my life very difficult, but a lot of people have difficult lives. When people call me "brave" just because I'm sick a lot, I cringe and generally check them off my internal list of people I respect. In my view bravery must be earned through above-and-beyond action. Simply by being inflicted by a difficulty does not qualify a person for this. I am not brave. I've been brave in certain moments, but I'm not a brave person. I'm a coward.

In 1996, as a wee bairn, a teacher told my class that he'd once has a student who was born blind and came into class each day tapping her science notes into a special notepad with a special braille pen. He teared up as he described her bravery. I raised my hand and explained that her actions didn't qualify for bravery, but that she simply did what any student would do in her position. It was the loudest I've ever been screamed at by a teacher. I still believe that I'm right. Doing what one is forced to do does not involve bravery unless serious risk is involved. That girl was forced to go to school every day just like the rest of us. Her reality was different than mine, but our situations were similar--we were forced.

For some reason that I fail to grasp, a lot of people associate bravery with misfortune. I've heard very poor people, those with heart disease, addicts, those who've survived abuse, those with PTSD, and many others called "brave." I have great empathy for these individuals, but unless they did something else that makes them brave, they're not brave. That's simply not what the word means. I'm sure that plenty of suffering people are indeed brave, but there's zero correlation between suffering and bravery. Call your unwell friend/relative tenacious, determined, strong, dogged, persistent, and so on. But don't call them brave, because "brave" means something entirely different. I feel insulted when people call me brave becaus

The word "literally" has been used as hyperbole or to mean "figuratively" for centuries now. Seriously. Literally your entire life it has had this other meaning        ⠀

Mark Twain and Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald used it this way just to name a few. It's not some new trend to use it this way.

⠀ And the meaning you want "literally" to have, to mean "actually" or "in a literal manner or sense; exactly", that's not even the original definition of the word "literally"! Why are you adamant that the 2nd definition of literally is the only one that's OK. But for the 1st and 3rd meanings of "literally" you think they don't count?       ⠀

The original definition of "literally" was when something had to do with writing, like "concerning the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form."

⠀ Essentially it's what we use "literary" for these days. So why don't you whine about how you're using the updated changed new definition of "literally"? Why do you only whine about the 3rd meaning of it, and not the 2nd meaning?

⠀ And literally every day you use words that have changed definition. Some of them actually mean the opposite of what they originally did. Like you've definitely used the word "awful" to mean something that's bad. Originally it meant something great and amazing, that filled you with awe, awe-ful. It's what we use "awesome" for these days (and "awesome" is another example, it used to mean something that was great in a horrible terrifying way, not "great" as in "good", just something very big and powerful and scary)       ⠀

Or how about "terrific" which originally meant something that was incredibly frightening or bad, terror-fic. Nowadays it means something that's really great or good. That new definition of the word "terrific" came about in the 19th century, the same exact time that the definition of "literally" that you hate so much came about. It's literally the same age as the definition for "literally".

⠀ So why do you whine about one and not the other? They're the same age, both "new" definitions. If you were in any way consistent, you'd be whining about the "new" definition of "terrific" because it's the same exact age as the "new" meaning of literally        ⠀

Is it because you don't really know what you're talking about and just wanna hang on this one word you hate, but because you don't know how English works, you've never read a book on it or on lingu

I keep seeing posts on this subreddit where the user posts a screenshot of a social media post where the OP claims the poster is 'wrong' in their grammar usage, when in reality it's simply that the post has a colloquial register.

If you want to be a good Grammar Nazi and be able to identify where language use is actually 'wrong' (for want of a better word) then you need to be sensitive to register and form (i.e. the context of the language you are commenting on). If you expect written language to be used in the same way on a legal document as in an Instagram post then you're probably going to be disappointed.

Linguists like David Crystal have characterised social media posts as existing in a sort of liminal space between writing and everyday speech. In other words: people often write things on Twitter in the way they would speak them, and furthermore the way they would speak to their friends (i.e. with a highly colloquial register).

This doesn't mean that they can't be wrong in some way. But linguistic prescriptivism isn't a thing any more: any modern linguist will tell you that context is a huge part of semantics (the study of meaning).

To give an example, consider the word "literally". It has, relatively recently, become a contranym, a word with two opposite meanings. Imagine you see it in a published essay about Shakespeare written by an academic.

• "In Antony and Cleopatra, the character Enobarbus literally dies of a broken heart."

Now consider this usage of the word, from a 14 year-old girl's Twitter post:

• "James left me. Literally heartbroken right now."

Enobarbus, in the play, does quite literally die of a broken heart, but the same probably cannot be said of our 14 year-old Twitter user, who is "heartbroken" only in the figurative sense.

If you're entirely blind to context, it might be tempting to accuse the Twitter poster of misusing the word 'literally'. But actually she's not misusing it, she's using a perfectly conventional recent manifestation of the word where, in informal contexts, it's used to give emphasis to a declarative, and is synonymous with "really". Profanities like "fucking" can serve the same function. Notice also how the second sentence elides the subject ("I am..."), another convention of colloquial discourse.

If the academic had used "literally" for emphasis then that would be an odd breach of decorum/style, and may even be considered 'wrong' in the sense of their misjudgement of register. Plus it would make t

Because they're too busy debating whether it should be multiamory or polyerotes. :D

Just a little joke I thought of and wanted to share. Party on, Dudes.

S’mae pawb! Some background context: I grew up in south Wales but never enjoyed Welsh in school, so my learning was very limited. However, I went on to study several languages + linguistics at university (in England), and since coming home I’ve been trying to make a real effort to learn Cymraeg, after all if I can learn many others why not learn the language of my home country?

Now I have a few friends who are native speakers, and their insight is always helpful for improving my Welsh. However, one of them is often quite prescriptivist with what is “right” and “wrong”, usually with it forcibly being their way or no way. The most recent example of this was a heated discussion of gyda vs. gan, with the claim being that Duolingo (among others) is teaching Welsh incorrectly and that sentences such as “Mae car gyda fi” are ungrammatical and sound like child’s speak. All sources I can find online (including academic linguistics papers) say that it is indeed grammatical and just a local preference (gan in the north and gyda in the south), with gan being slightly more formal. This seems to align with what I remember learning in school. That aside, I know I can’t change this person’s view, especially as they come from the perspective of a native speaker, but I wanted to get some insight from other native/advanced speakers on the subject in order to help me learn and make my own choices on the Welsh dialect I speak: is the gyda form acceptable/grammatical? Does it really sound like child’s speech? Would a sentence such as “Mae problemau gyda ti gyda’r banc” be ungrammatical/nonsensical? (Apologies for any missed mutations in my examples, I’m still working on learning those!)

Any input would be greatly appreciated! Iechyd da i chi gyd 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Whenever someone complains about a word being used incorrectly, you get all these geniuses tut-tutting and thinking they're so smart for realising 'there's no inherent meaning to words' and 'words just have the meaning for which people use them'. Language changes over time, so you're dumb for complaining about language changing. We're descriptive theorists, we don't make judgements about what's right and wrong, unlike those moralistic prescriptivists.

However, if these self-proclaimed linguists were actually smart and not just idiot commenters, they would realise they are actually deriving a prescriptive argument from a descriptive one: language changes, therefore you should accept changes in language. Not every new use for a word becomes a common one. In evolution not every mutation becomes a dominant one; some offer no advantage and die off without being passed on.

People complaining about new uses for words and pointing out why they're stupid are part of this process of evolution. For example, I reckon the use of 'literally' as 'figuratively' is actually declining, and for that we can thank arseholes who told people how dumb they were for using literally to mean figuratively.

So next time you see someone complaining about a new usage for a word and you want to justify that new usage, make a proper prescriptive argument instead of just saying, essentially, 'it is what it is'.

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Alot of great jokes get posted here! However just because you have a joke, doesn't mean it's a dad joke.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT NSFW, THIS IS ABOUT LONG JOKES, BLONDE JOKES, SEXUAL JOKES, KNOCK KNOCK JOKES, POLITICAL JOKES, ETC BEING POSTED IN A DAD JOKE SUB

Try telling these sexual jokes that get posted here, to your kid and see how your spouse likes it.. if that goes well, Try telling one of your friends kid about your sex life being like Coca cola, first it was normal, than light and now zero , and see if the parents are OK with you telling their kid the "dad joke"

I'm not even referencing the NSFW, I'm saying Dad jokes are corny, and sometimes painful, not sexual

So check out r/jokes for all types of jokes

r/unclejokes for dirty jokes

r/3amjokes for real weird and alot of OC

r/cleandadjokes If your really sick of seeing not dad jokes in r/dadjokes

Punchline !

Edit: this is not a post about NSFW , This is about jokes, knock knock jokes, blonde jokes, political jokes etc being posted in a dad joke sub

Edit 2: don't touch the thermostat

Do your worst!

How the hell am I suppose to know when it’s raining in Sweden?

I understand why prescriptivist attitudes among professional linguists may be problematic if, for example, the aim of the discipline is value-free inquiry. However, I regularly hear linguists and non-linguists alike criticize prescriptivist attitudes among non-linguists on disciplinary grounds, and I can't help but feel that they're overstepping the boundaries of the discipline. If, for example, one is a utilitarian, and has good reason to believe that adopting a prescriptivist attitude will serve to maximize moral utility, why should what linguistics think of the matter trump such normative concerns?