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How do people here land on the subject of "prescriptive linguistics"? I personally find myself getting irritated at people putting down prescriptive linguistics. For the past 10 years, anyone who tells someone they're not using certain words correctly gets shut down as a prescriptive linguist. I'm reminded of an SSC post
I feel like the same applies for "prescriptive linguistics", it's basically a cudgel, a way of telling someone to die in a fire.
Charitably, people justify this argument by saying that linguistics is a descriptive science, so there's no place to be prescriptive. In their mind, linguistics is meant to just describe how people use language, not tell people how to use it.
Uncharitably, I think this sounds like a general push towards post modernism, a pushback on the notion that there's any correct way to do anything. They're not just against prescriptive linguists, they're against prescriptive anything.
In an anti-prescriptivist mindset, someone may use prescriptive linguistics as a cudgel to shut down alternate ways of expression, and (of course) enforce colonial and white supremecist standards on unprivileged minorities. This especially comes up in conversations about double negatives, which are commonly used in various low-class English variants, like ebonics.
I might push back on anti-prescriptivists by saying, many people who try to enforce grammar rules not a linguistic scientists, but people who are trying to enforce sense in their worlds. Therefore, they're not prescriptive linguists; they're not even linguists! They're people living in the world and using language as a tool, and they want that tool to be as effective as possible.
It's not their sacred duty to simply understand language no matter what, so don't call them a prescriptive linguist. When I tell someone not to use the word "literally" as emphasis, it's because I'm finding that the word literally is less useful than it used to be, and I want to combat that. Nowadays there is no word that accurately works in as an antonym for "figuratively"; the meaning is muddled and unclear because people have watered down the definition of literally to be something else.
I also sense there may be political aspects to the use of the word "prescriptive linguistics". relating to Noam Chomsky's history in the field and his political affiliations, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I'm interested if anyone here has info on this.
The use of "literally" for emphasis annoys me. So does saying "everyone" when you mean "most people", or "literally no-one" when you mean "almost no-one". Oddly, I find that even here where most people have above-average verbal skills, I see this quite often.
It's called hyperbole. Everyone knows what those words literally mean, which is why using them figuratively creates emphasis. It's not a lack of verbal skills, in fact it takes verbal skills to be able to encode and decode the hyperbole.
It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works
Contrast the example from up thread
with this alternative
It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically
then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.
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The problem is that hyperbole can eat a word. It ate "very", "truly" and "really". All of those words originally meant "this is not hyperbole; this happened in reality" - look at the etymology. Rampant hyperbole destroyed that meaning, and now the hyperbolic meaning is considered the normal one. Now we have to use three syllables if we want to indicate a lack of hyperbole - "actually" or "literally". If we lose those, we'll have to use more than three.
We need a word of reasonable length to signify "I am on simulacrum level 1; this is truth"; this is a very-important concept. Hyperbole, ironically, has a strong tendency to eat such words. The only viable solution seems to be exactly the kind of opprobrium that you're decrying; shame people for using these words as hyperbole.
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