Well, the title of this post scares me much more than the article itself does. All that it really puts forward is the blog and twitter presence of Webster taking a prescriptive approach in order...
Well, the title of this post scares me much more than the article itself does. All that it really puts forward is the blog and twitter presence of Webster taking a prescriptive approach in order to be witty and call out the Trump administration. I am a little frustrated that, by doing that, it wants to tie descriptivism into being soft on the administration or something...as if the purpose of a dictionary (or of the social media presence of a dictionary) is to have gotchas against politicians.
This puzzles me because I had thought that dictionaries were always essentially descriptivist. Isn't that the reason behind them having new editions - to reflect changes in how words are used? A...
This puzzles me because I had thought that dictionaries were always essentially descriptivist. Isn't that the reason behind them having new editions - to reflect changes in how words are used? A new edition of a dictionary doesn't only add new words which have been created since the last edition, but also identifies changes in usage of old words.
Sure, the writers of dictionaries might also provide prescriptivist guides on how to use words and punctuation, and proper grammar, but I always considered those guides to be separate from the dictionaries themselves, which are inherently descriptivist.
Well, the title of this post scares me much more than the article itself does. All that it really puts forward is the blog and twitter presence of Webster taking a prescriptive approach in order to be witty and call out the Trump administration. I am a little frustrated that, by doing that, it wants to tie descriptivism into being soft on the administration or something...as if the purpose of a dictionary (or of the social media presence of a dictionary) is to have gotchas against politicians.
This puzzles me because I had thought that dictionaries were always essentially descriptivist. Isn't that the reason behind them having new editions - to reflect changes in how words are used? A new edition of a dictionary doesn't only add new words which have been created since the last edition, but also identifies changes in usage of old words.
Sure, the writers of dictionaries might also provide prescriptivist guides on how to use words and punctuation, and proper grammar, but I always considered those guides to be separate from the dictionaries themselves, which are inherently descriptivist.
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