Quote from: brainiac on April 18, 2010, 02:36:04 AM
I wasn't. I consider written language a totally different animal than spoken language. People have every right to complain about spelling conventions and clarity of expression in writing.
But, when people attempt to apply those rules to the spoken word, that I can't stand for. More often than not, it's misguided correction that amounts to "the standard dialect is better than your dialect", which is a class thing.
And adhering to established definitions isn't prescriptive. Language has rules, yes. Descriptivism looks at all the rules that people actually use IN GENERAL equally, while prescriptivism values one set of artificial rules over others. One person using a word wrong means that they aren't using a word the same way as most other people, and that they'll probably change their usage over time to match the common usage of the word. There is no one singular correct way to use a word, particularly open-class (content) words. Definitions are not as strict and categorical as we would like to think they are.
100%
this. Prescriptivism, particularly fundamentalist prescriptivism, can also be used as a way of justifying racist or cultural chauvinist views; the best example of this is when white folks criticize black kids for speaking in black/inner city dialect. It's important to be able to communicate outside of cultural groups, and people should be able to speak the
lingua franca when needed, but criticizing speakers of African American Vernacular English/Ebonics/what-have-you for speaking a "degraded" or "crude" form of English, or simply accusing them of being able to speak "good English," is disingenuous and ignorant. I can't speak, and often can't understand, AAVE/Ebonics; does that mean I speak "bad AAVE/Ebonics?" No, of course not. It means I speak a different form of English. I hold a privileged ground insofar as I was raised speaking more or less standard American English, instead of, say, AAVE/Ebonics, Cockney, or Scots. That makes life easier for me, but it doesn't mean the English I was raised speaking is superior.
Of course, the English I speak is
not entirely standard; nobody's is. My speech is peppered with Jewish figures of speech, Internet slang, queer/trans slang, turns of phrase I inherited from various family members, and so on. That's a beautiful thing, and there's nothing wrong with it. I like my speech for what it is.
Pidgins, creoles and dialects are the birthing grounds of new languages, and new languages, whatever practical communication challenges they pose, are beautiful things. Flexibility in language implementation is a
good thing.
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As for the actual topic at hand, I support "android," "gynoid" and "androgynoid." Not exactly abbreviations, I know.
