Vocabula -- (Uh oh)

[Gerald Cohen]

At 7:10 PM -0400 6/17/03, Robert Hartwell Fiske wrote:
>
>...I imagine, though, that the principal reason for the vituperative (and ad
>hominem) attacks against me is that people who have spent their lives studying
>linguistics are infuriated when someone dares say, in effect, that
>how they see things is largely nonsense. No one likes to be told,
>even implicitly, that
>they have wasted their lives. ...


   Uh oh.  Maybe it's time to put an end to this ads-l discussion, or
at least to put it on hold.  The linguists on this list have devoted
themselves to many aspects of language, not just the
descriptivist/prescriptivist issue.  For someone outside the field,
unfamiliar with the work that many ADS linguists have done, to
declare that they have wasted their lives is a bit much. A
backing-off  seems in order.

Gerald Cohen