Language Log

Is there any "prescriptivist science"? Could there be any? The reaction of some linguists will be that "prescriptivist science" is as much as a contradiction in terms as "creation science" is. But I disagree.

Farhad Manjoo, "Call Me 'They'", NYT 7/10/2019: The singular “they” is inclusive and flexible, and it breaks the stifling prison of gender expectations. Let’s all use it. I am your stereotypical, cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad. I dabble in woodworking, I take out the garbage, and I covet my neighbor’s Porsche. Though I do think men […]

Rachel Paige King ("The Draconian Dictionary Is Back", The Atlantic 8/5/2018) suggests that lexicographers might be (re)turning to prescriptivism: Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. […] The standard way of describing these two approaches in lexicography is to call them […]

The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature: With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […] The judgments here are backed up […]

Scott Walker recently got into a little trouble for a preposterous proposal that he put forward on Meet the Press. The headlines tell the story: "Scott Walker: Canada-U.S. border wall worth considering", CNBC News; "Scott Walker: U.S.-Canada wall a 'legitimate' idea", CNN;  "Scott Walker says wall along Canadian border is worth reviewing", AP. Except that Walker never made any […]

I somehow missed this when it was fresh (Joseph Bottum, "Loose Language", The Weekly Standard 10/25/2010: The plural of syllabus is syllabi. Or is it syllabuses? Focuses and foci, cactuses and cacti, funguses and fungi: English has a good set of these Greek and Latin words—and pseudo-Greek and Latin words—that might take a classical-sounding plural. […]

Reader JB described a visit to the Peabody Museum in New Haven, "where in addition to the classic dinosaur bones and so on they had a temporary exhibit aimed at educating kids about the nation’s burgeoning obesity problem and its (per sort of unreflective conventional wisdom) causes". One feature of this exhibit was "a set […]

In the comments on various recent LL posts, someone using various names has been complaining repeatedly and at length about "Linguistic Post-Modernists" who allegedly believe that "there is no such thing as a 'wrong' usage, only nonstandard ones", and so on. Since the associated set of confusions is all too common, I've collected below a […]

Yesterday I posted about the history of the English word infer, including the fact that an often-deprecated usage — "evidence E infers conclusion C" — is one of the original meanings, has been used by elite writers since the 16th century, and is hallowed by inclusion in authoritative dictionaries like Webster's 2nd. Rob Gunningham's comment […]

This morning, from the airport in Brussels, I want to following up on our discussion of discourse anaphora ("Why are some summatives labeled 'vague'?", 5/21/2008; "More theory trumping practice", 5/22/2008; "Poor pitiful which", 5/23/2008; "Clarity, choice, and evidence", 5/23/2008), in the spirit of Friday's post about "Prescriptivist science".

I was surprised to find Jay Livingston, an intelligent and sensible person, subscribing to the prejudice that words like which and this, when understood as referring to some situation or proposition alluded to in the preceding discourse, should be shunned as "non-reference pronouns". On the contrary, it seems clear that (what Arnold Zwicky calls) "summative" […]