this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Linguistics
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prescriptivism is wrong, actually. descriptivism FTW.
Prescriptions and descriptions are not opposites. They're orthogonal to each other:
And prescribing is not automatically wrong. For example if I were to tell someone "don't call us Latin Americans «spic niggers», it's offensive", I am prescribing against the usage of the expression "spic nigger"; it is prescriptivism. Just like when someone proposes inclusive language.
What is wrong is that sort of poorly grounded prescription that usually boils down to "don't you dare to use language in a different way than I do, or that people did in the past". It's as much of a prescription as the above, but instead of including people it's excluding them.
Tagging @bgainor@thelemmy.club, as this addresses some things that they said.
Ironically, instead of "prescribing against," it seems like you mean proscribing.
Both "to prescribe against [thing]" and "to proscribe [thing]" are functionally equivalent in this context, at least acc. to how I use both words:
But I'd rather use the first one here due to the topic, prescriptivism.