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Musick,
I’m sorry, but I don’t have the auto-email capability turned on. To be honest, I didn’t even know it existed until you mentioned it.
I did read your reply earlier today though. I wanted to answer, but I was busy at the time and didn’t have the opportunity.
Thank you, belMarduk.
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it does have its place in trying to correct the obvious misusage of a word through unfortunate ignorance, and keep that misusage out the authoritative representatives of the words of our language, i.e. dictionaries.
Misuses such as using nice to mean something other than 'ignorant', or silly to mean something other than 'blessed', or disinterested to mean'impartial' or uninterseted to mean 'lacking interest'? That sort of obvious misusage of a word through unfortunate ignorance?
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Dear Dgeigh ~
Don't fret. Don't be offended. Faldage is just like this, sometimes. He means well and knows a lot about words. And he does, after all, look a great deal like the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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Dgeigh, this message board has been wacky the past week or so! I'm sorry you had gremlins attack your attempt to delete your post; at the same time, I don't understand why you wanted to delete it. Stinking?  Anyway, on the pre- vs. des- issue, I sit squarely in the middle, on the fence. I'm a firm prescriptivist when it comes to style, while lexically I'm a descriptivist. Go figger.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I've never figured out the pre- vs des- thing but the "Huh, what apostrophe" response would niggle at me too. Changes happen, silly no longer means blessed, but I prefer to at least try to follow the current rules. (Although moments of pure sillyness with a small child do leave me feeling blessed?/blest?happy.)
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There is certainly nothing wrong with setting standards for particular circumstances. Someone on another board once compared language use to choice of shoes. If you are interviewing for a job as a senior executive and you're wearing a pair of dirty work boots you're probably not going to get the job. On the other hand, if you're looking for a job on an off shore oil rig and you're wearing a pair of $600 Guccis you're not going to do very well, either.
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People would utter whatever they chose, and no one would understand them.
This exists. It's called glossolalia or speaking in tongues. For some it's a religious experience, and for others it's nonsense. I'm afraid that prescriptivists exaggerate in their own way similar to how descriptivists exaggerate, i.e., for rhetorical pruposes. Very few prescriptive rules have anything to do with ambiguity or clearness of meaning; many say they do, but they don't. The thing about correcting somebody's "grammar" is, that if you can correct it, you've already understood it, and what's the use. It simply annoys people. Somebody with aphasia or the desire to speaking in tongues doesn't need to be understood, nor can they.
There's something that's been studied by sociolinguists (mainly in Europe) called accommodation (theory). People speaking different dialects or languages who wish to communicate often accommodate towards one another. They end up not speaking their own dialect/language, but something in between. That is, if they wish to communicate. I've observed that many speaking the same language oftentimes don't.
keep that misusage out the authoritative representatives of the words of our language, i.e. dictionaries.
A dictionary is a book written by humans. Monolingual dictionaries are written for people who've already learned the language they're written in. In other words, nobody learns a language from a dictionary. Or if they do, it is not a language that anybody else shares with them. You need a grammar (in the technical sense) which is a set of rules for generating legal sentences / utterances in the language. (And you don't find grammars in books, you learn them from people speaking a language while growing up.) A dictionary (or lexicon) is not only a collection of vocabulary, but also the place where exceptions to rules are listed. Nobody would suggest that the plural of ox, i.e., oxen, is wrong, so why insist that ain't or irregardless is? In fact, ain't for the contraction of am not is OK.
This does not mean that I don't write in a standard register formally or that nobody should, but the web and forums thereon are not the place for formal writing. I don't for the most part dislike the the extra, tiny set of arbitrary rules for writing formal English so much as I dislike the prescriptivists who argue from authority (often anonymous) or logic, etc. (NB, the "arbitrary rules" above are different from the grammatical rules a speaker learns during language acquisition. Those rules are unconscious, and the arbitrary, prescriptivist rules are anything but.) There is absolutely nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive, ending a sentence with a preposition, or using which for a restrictive relative clause. Not a thing. Most of these rules were invented ex nihilo in the 18th or 19th century, and completely contradicted the grammar of English. (That's probably why they're so hard to follow; sort of like our spelling non-system.)
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive, ending a sentence with a preposition, or using which for a restrictive relative clause. Not a thing. Most of these rules were invented ex nihilo in the 18th or 19th century, and completely contradicted the grammar of English.
Yep, jheem, the Victorian inkhorns decided, for example, that if you can't split a Latin infinitive, you can't split an English one, either. I had an editor once who took that to extremes. He decided that since "to boldly go" was incorrect, then "he is boldly going" is, also.
Where's the *sigh* emoticon?
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the Victorian inkhorns decided
A lot of these rules have been blamed on Robert Lowth, an 18th century English bishop, but I've been reading his Short Introduction to English Grammar, and have yet to find anything of the sort. In fact, I think it more likely that lesser known Victorians did the damage, as they did so much other damage ...
The thing about the Romans is that given a preposition and the noun phrase that it governed, they enjoyed splitting the preposition and interposing other words. Of course, it's easier in Latin with cases and all to show some of the relationships between words in a sentence rather than just word order.
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Pooh-Bah
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Faldage, I like the shoe analogy.
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