ADS Website Link to Vocabula Review

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Robert Hartwell Fiske wrote:

#Apparently, descriptivists are hell-bent to unearth "subtexts";
#prescriptivists wish only to write well and clearly. Any subtext in
#Vocabula articles is of Barrett's imaging; what's more, I dare say, he
#has not read any of Vocabula's articles in at least a year; he does
#not subscribe, and he does not know of what he speaks.
#
#Truly I had no contempt for linguists (though I didn't much care, as I made
#plain, for the tone of the attacks against me), but I'm now understanding that
#linguists (very well, some linguists) are lemming-like. However would you
#manage if the country were overcome by terrorists or North Koreans or evangelical
#conservatives? Tergiversate? Become quislings? A society *is* generally as lax
#as its language.
#
#As I believe I have said before, only a handful of ADS members do subscribe
#to The Vocabula Review. The rest of you (who have participated in railing
#against me and Vocabula) have not read TVR, but you have felt you can judge it
#harshly (based, I suppose, on a four-paragraph mission statement -- which by the
#way, I wrote some years ago; TVR has evolved over time even if the mission
#statement has not). This is surely the antithesis of liberalism.
#
#The final point I wish to make is that I welcome alternative or opposing
#views in Vocabula; descriptivists have written articles for Vocabula (I suspect
#you'd all be delighted to read jjoan ttaber altieri's articles, for instance,
#which even I find interesting). ADS, it must now be now clear, does not tolerate
#free-thinking any more than it does a prescriptivist approach.

Whoa back there, man! As a TVR subscriber, an ADS member, an admirer of
good style and clear writing, a descriptivist AND (when wearing my
editor's hat) an unashamed prescriptivist, and an active contributor to
this list, I consider myself fully qualified to call you on this one.
Or, I should say, these ones, extracted from the above:

 (1st para)
#Apparently, descriptivists are hell-bent to unearth "subtexts";
#prescriptivists wish only to write well and clearly.

So you're free to generalize negatively about all descriptivists from
what one of them says, and positively about prescriptivists from your
perception of the characteristic that defines them?

 (2nd para)
At least you said "some". As for the motto that concludes the para, and
the bloody shirt you wave based on it, I'll quote from upthread: CFR.

 (3rd para left in w.r.t. my qualifications)

 (4th para)
#ADS, it must now be now clear, does not tolerate free-thinking any
#more than it does a prescriptivist approach.

A conclusion, based on what you're calling "free-thinking" and some ADS
members' language, some of it intemperate (as I judge some of yours also
to be), falsely generalized to the organization itself.

Tsk, tsk.

-- Mark A. Mandel