Martial arts maestro Bruce Lee in his book, “Striking Thoughts,” stated that “Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.” I encountered his book in the gift shop of ...
From grammar rules to everyday slang, debates over descriptivism and prescriptivism reveal how we balance authority with the way people really speak. What is language, why do we use it, and how did it ...
About a decade ago, I read a blog written by a linguistics student who proclaimed, “Prescriptivism must die!!!” He was talking about the school of thought that believes that textbooks and other ...
SO-CALLED "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in language love to hate each other. It's dirty hippies versus fascists, permissivists versus authoritarians, or, in neutral terms, those who talk ...
TEXTUALISM in law and prescriptivism in usage are, in some ways, estranged cousins. It is fitting, then, that Antonin Scalia, textualism’s most prominent advocate, and Bryan Garner, the face of modern ...