Comment on Linguistic Perscriptivists
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 4 months agoYeah we pick whatever people say or write.
"The framework of the language says it shouldn’t be pluralized as a mass nouns, but Becky and the cool kids got everyone saying it so it’s now a word.
Calling someone a prescriptivist is a sad rebuttal to the worry that our language is evolving arbitrarily based on the whims of vapid influencers.
if you don’t want language to evolve based on the whims of vapid influencers, help steer society away from vapid influencers being influential rather than getting pissy about how people speak.
What you’re doing is very close to complaining about poor people speaking “lazily”, and telling them to try harder, because obviously you’re the shining example of enlightened correct speech.
You’ve got it backward. Successful modern influencers follow linguistic trends and reinforce them, but they typically do not invent them (see the litany of words from jersey shore that never made it into the greater american lexicon) even when they try. Typically, new words arise out of necessity, efficiency, or mutual enjoyment.
It boggles the mind to see how many armchair linguists come out of the woodwork for posts like these. As language evolves, we get new ways to express ourselves, but idiots that cannot possibly learn one new word stall that progress by just being stubborn. If anything, you should be more wary of people or groups preventing the use of new words, or re-prescribing existing words that are usually used one way popularly.
The ONLY valid goal with language is communication and understanding - couples develop words, workplaces develop words, gaming communities develop words, and all of these groups use either existing words to mean new things, or acronym words in new ways, or even make completely new words from brand names or nonsense. Prescriptivists cannot typically handle new jargon, regardless of its use, and this makes them a laughingstock in academia and online spaces alike.
If you can’t parse what’s being said, lurk more. The etymology of new words is just as valid as the etymology of ancient ones. It’s fine to take words on loan from another language regardless of grammatical correctness. The word “eyeball” came from “an influencer”.
luciole@beehaw.org 4 months ago
The speakers decide. Always has been.