EPT
On April 24 2010 20:36 omninmo wrote:
Allowing this sort of operationalist mentality to corrupt your mind yields us the apathy of the many as kids today run around unwittingly engineering the latest in normative language such as "fail, lol, omg, fffuuu, rickrolled, collosuses" and other meme-laden gibberish as though they are speaking English.
What is etymology good for but to tell us what where words comes from, how to use them, and what they mean?
New words form all the time. but, these are qualitatively different from compacted grammar mistakes and memes.
When historical precedents (here it is proper word usage and etymological credence) takes a back-seat to normative usage, or "what the powerful, cool, rich or over-all majority are doing", you get fascism.
What is current, or actual, does not therby have any a priori relationship to truth unless you wish to posit that ontological Actuality is predicated by temporality?
That being said, say collosuses in your commentary of Starcraft II: Wing of Liberty if you chose.
But don't let them teach ebonics to posterity!
Allowing this sort of operationalist mentality to corrupt your mind yields us the apathy of the many as kids today run around unwittingly engineering the latest in normative language such as "fail, lol, omg, fffuuu, rickrolled, collosuses" and other meme-laden gibberish as though they are speaking English.
What is etymology good for but to tell us what where words comes from, how to use them, and what they mean?
New words form all the time. but, these are qualitatively different from compacted grammar mistakes and memes.
When historical precedents (here it is proper word usage and etymological credence) takes a back-seat to normative usage, or "what the powerful, cool, rich or over-all majority are doing", you get fascism.
What is current, or actual, does not therby have any a priori relationship to truth unless you wish to posit that ontological Actuality is predicated by temporality?
That being said, say collosuses in your commentary of Starcraft II: Wing of Liberty if you chose.
But don't let them teach ebonics to posterity!
An interesting post but I do not think there is a great deal that is correct in it, with respect.
My point can be demonstrated by a simple reductio. Take any initial determination of a word's meaning and usage. Now let the relevant linguistic community slowly modify the practical usage over time until finally everyone (or as close as makes no difference) uses it in the modified way. The kind of prescriptivist position I was pointing to as erroneous would appear to have to maintain that everyone is now using the word incorrectly. And of course this is an utterly absurd position for reasons which should be obvious.
This point has nothing whatseover to do with what "the powerful, cool, rich" are doing and can hardly fathom what role they are supposed to be playing in your argument. The determination of correct usage may not simply be reduced to what an "over-all majority" does although there is a connection to the proportionate embeddedness of various usages in the relevant linguistic community.
I do not do commentary and when I use a plural form of "colossus" I say "colossi" but this is irrelevant to the general point.
