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(Bad linguistics) Language change is wrong, actually (www.independent.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Found this article in the longreads community arguing why "politically correct" terms shouldn't be used. You guys have any thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Prescriptions and descriptions are not opposites. They're orthogonal to each other:

when you tell people how things are, you're being descriptive;
when you tell people how things should be, or what they should do, you're being prescriptive.

And prescribing is not automatically wrong. For example if I were to tell someone "don't call us Latin Americans «spic niggers», it's offensive", I am prescribing against the usage of the expression "spic nigger"; it is prescriptivism. Just like when someone proposes inclusive language.

What is wrong is that sort of poorly grounded prescription that usually boils down to "don't you dare to use language in a different way than I do, or that people did in the past". It's as much of a prescription as the above, but instead of including people it's excluding them.

Tagging @[email protected], as this addresses some things that they said.

[–] bgainor 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This is fair. Usually when I hear "prescriptive" I have a knee-jerk reaction to it as something bad because it's usually used to refer to people using made-up rules to enforce systems of oppression rather than fight against them like inclusive language does, but I hadn't thought about it as "prescriptivism for good."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

The knee-jerk reaction is understandable, since most prescriptions are of the exclusionary type. And at the same time, since linguists say "we're describing, not prescribing", people create a false opposition between both things. And, well, if description is scientific and good the prescription ends as "unscientific and bad", through that opposition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ironically, instead of "prescribing against," it seems like you mean proscribing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Both "to prescribe against [thing]" and "to proscribe [thing]" are functionally equivalent in this context, at least acc. to how I use both words:

to prescribe - to lay down rules on what should be accepted / rejected.
to proscribe - to forbid, to strongly recommend against something.

But I'd rather use the first one here due to the topic, prescriptivism.