Ah, prescriptivism versus descriptivism.

Prescriptivism is appropriate for technical or legal discussions, where the specific meanings of words are hugely important.

Descriptivism is appropriate for casual communication, where it's fine as long as your intended meaning comes across.

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DavidWoof 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's absolutely not what the article is about. Did you even read it?

People don't really have that debate anymore outside of twitter casuals, and it's dismissed with a wave almost immediately in this article, which then goes on to examine the complex grammar of "try and".

	▲	umanwizard 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. This is like someone seeing an article about geology and saying “ah, sphere earth vs. flat earth”. Like, no, the article already presupposes that the earth is spherical because that’s the viewpoint taken by all people with a serious academic interest in the topic.

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lblume 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Prescriptivism is inherently limited to situations where near-unanimous consent exists between all speakers.

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tialaramex 6 days ago | parent [-]

Nah, prescriptivists love writing books saying that a thing almost everybody does - sometimes including themselves - is wrong. Prescriptivist amateurs with strong opinions sell reasonably well, publishers are quite fond.

But this is part of a project by academics and the academics abandoned prescriptivism because it's not science. We don't have prescriptivist chemists or physicists either.

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windward 5 days ago | parent [-]

Do you have any examples of the books?

	▲	tialaramex 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss or "Her Ladyship's Guide to the Queen's English" by Caroline Taggart would be examples.