I'm in San Francisco for InterSpeech 2016, where I'm involved in four papers over three days, so blogging will probably be a bit light. But I have a few minutes before the morning starts, so let me continue the discussion of Gabriel Roth's feelings ("Paper cut to the heart", 9/8/2016) by quoting from Bill S's comment:
Some of the context for M-W's reply is (I would think) the prescriptivist injunctions against the use of "I feel like" for "I think that" — I've seen waves of complaints about "I feel like" washing up on various internet shores over the past year (may be recency effect though). If read as ironic deployment of prescriptivism against prescriptivism, it has enough artfulness to counter the rudeness (to me, anyway — you don't get a good opportunity for a one-liner like that every day, and it would be a shame to pass it up).
Indeed: some prior LLOG coverage:
"'I feel like'", 8/24/2013
"Feelings, beliefs, and thoughts", 5/1/2016
"Feeling in the Supreme Court", 5/3/2016
And it's also worth quoting John McIntyre's comment:
I rather thought his set of tweets was a labored attempt at humor that, whether he knows better or not, appeared to betray an ignorance of what dictionaries are for and how lexicographers work. His talking about feeling ambivalent made the Merriam-Webster response concise and apt. The language doesn't care how you feel about it.
But I want to add a note about the history and current status of mad used to mean "angry", which makes this case an especially problematic one to use as the starting point for a complaint that "Merriam-Webster is turning into the 'chill' parent who lets your friends come over and get high".
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