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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.
Indeed, just another way to cope with the lower verbal abilities of non-Asian minorities :always_has_been.jpg:
See also: “Other ways of knowing” for a more modern example with regard to lower non-Asian minority test scores and academic achievement.
Who? Whom?, as always. It’s open season to mock rural white Americans for their accents and vocabulary, but ebonics are to be worshipped as if they’re channeling the voices of Shakespeare and Nabokov from the beyond.
Even though the rural Americans sound more like
ShaksperSheakspaerShakhsperethat playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon than a $CURRENTYEAR1 BBC announcer does....Uh, aren't the English dialects most similar to Shakespeare northern British ones, particularly Scottish English?
Red dirt English(rural northeast Texas and the Oklahoma lowlands) is probably the most conservative American dialect, true, but a lot less so than Scotland or rural northern England.
Supposedly the American English dialects most similar to Shakespeare are Appalachian (so rural, but hillbilly rather than redneck). Of course these reconstructions are always questionable. For instance, just because a rhyme wouldn't work unless you pronounced a word a certain way doesn't mean it was pronounced that way; Shakespeare may have used an obsolete or novel pronunciation to get his rhyme to work.
I always understood that "redneck" was a general term referring to poor(er) rural, white, mostly southern Americans, including Appalachians south of Pennsylvania, which would generally (though not totally) encompass "hillbilly" -- a person living in rural Appalachia or the Ozarks -- rather than excluding it. ("Hillbilly" is also generally more derogatory -- or at least some people seem to think so; I definitely recall people trying to make a distinction between "rednecks" (themselves) who were, well, definitely Appalachian rednecks and probably hillbillies by most people's estimation, and the "hillbillies" who lived way out in the boonies.)
Is it common to interpret the terms as mutually exclusive, or am I misreading your sense here?
"Redneck" comes from the sunburn a farmer would get working in the fields, "hillbilly" refers to living in the hills (the Appalachians and the Ozarks, mainly).
As to whether they're exclusive, I always considered them such (if you were a hillbilly you weren't a redneck). I don't know whether the people referred to think so, though there's a scene in Ozark which indicates at least one writer does.
Both terms are generally derogatory, though they've sometimes been adopted by the referents.
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