"last stitch effort"

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 4:12 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "last stitch effort"
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> On Sep 24, 2004, at 12:44 PM, Wilson Gray wrote, on "supposably":
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>> ... Like "dookie," "supposably" is far
>> more widespread than I would ever have imagined. Won't somebody please
>> stand up for prescriptivism?!
>
> how would that help you?
>
> arnold, famously evil permissive *linguist* (snarl when you say that!)
>

Well, it wouldn't matter wrt "dookie," since that's slang and I'm a
great fan of that. As for "supposably" for "supposedly," my guess is
that there's nothing to prevent it from becoming standard except for it
to go out of style. Remember "forMIDable"? It's been years since I've
heard that. Unfortunately, "exQUIsite" is still with us. In any case,
realistically speaking, it was too late for prescriptivism in English
before Beowulf was written down. In fact, it seems to me that even the
concept of presriptivism is ridiculous. So, I'm basically just joking
with my appeals to prescriptivism, given that permissiveness pretty
much renders a lifetime spent learning "proper English," as it's known
in BE - and in. no doubt, every other "non-standard" dialect, as
someone will point out - otiose. My dear wife is willing to humor me
when I remind her that "wh" represents "hw" and not simply "w." But I
don't expect anyone else to do that.

BTW, do you read SF? Are you familiar with the short story, "Shall we
have a little talk?", by Robert Sheckley? Although I don't think that
Sheckley had prescriptivism in mind, this story makes a laughing stock
of it.

The thrust of the story is that there exists a language that has only
native speakers, because, if a non-native tries to learn the language,
the very attempt to study it causes the language to change. As a
consequence, not even a descriptive grammar of the language is
possible, let alone a prescriptive one.

-Wilson