Jesse S. et al. v. Antonin S. et al. on fleeting expletives

[Dave Wilton]

It's "confused" because censorship by its nature is prescriptivist in that
it establishes proper or approved use of language; it assigns a normative
value to particular usages. Censorship cannot in any way be reconciled with
descriptivism, which does not do this.

Freedman conflates prescriptivism with the notion that language should
remain fixed and unchanged. Even the most die-hard prescriptivist
acknowledges that the standards change over time. The fights start over the
pace of this change and which particular changes should (a normative
judgment) be made.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Joel S. Berson
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 8:07 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Jesse S. et al. v. Antonin S. et al. on fleeting expletives

I look forward with anticipation to Arnold's explanation of why
Freedman's sentence is "spectacularly confused", since I thought I
understood it!

I took it having the sense "Although one might think censorship is
only a prescriptivist exercise, it is necessarily also descriptivist,
since standards for what is taboo vary over time and place."

Is the problem that Freedman's critics here believe that "standards"
are necessarily prescriptivist?  What if in my paraphrasing I
replaced "standards" by "common usage"?

Joel

At 5/4/2009 10:30 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On May 4, 2009, at 6:59 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>
>>
>>Freedman also pens this whopper, "As much as one sympathizes with
>>language
>>prescriptivism in general [...], censorship is necessarily a
>>descriptivist
>>endeavor."
>
>yes, spectacularly confused.  i'm hoping to post on this for Language
>Log (or on my blog), but new topics have been cropping up faster than
>i can deal with them, so it might be a while.
>
>arnold
>
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