Inner Prescriptivism

[Jonathan Lighter]

When prescriptivism serves the cause of lucidity, it is no sin.

  When it undermines that cause, it is no virtue.

  Sez me.

  JL
Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: Inner Prescriptivism
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Jesse Sheidlower just referred in a posting to his "inner prescriptivist."
I notice that it is not uncommon for linguists and lexicographers on this
list to criticize pet-peeve linguistic usages, contrary to the usual
descriptivist ideology of linguistic scholars. I wonder whether there
have ever been any studies done of closet prescriptivism among linguists.
(I did see a study a few years ago revealing that members of the UCLA
English Department, in their own private reading for pleasure, actually
preferred the literature of dead white European males.)

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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