Posts Tagged ‘language’

Prescriptive vs Descriptive Linguistics

Adam: typoed?
typo’ed
typo’d?
I don’t know which of those is correct

Me: they all are
equally correct

Adam: in that they’re all wrong?

Me: i aint no prescriptive linguist
but that is one way to look at it

I want to say that this article, which you should read, is a good response to this article, but to do so, I’d have to read that second article.   I couldn’t make it all the way through, because any blogger who writes a paragraph too large for my screen is doing something wrong.

I’m not going to go through the second article, but I’m going to give Fry the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is not actively trying to bastardize the English language.  It’s one thing to use a noun as a verb, knowing that it is incorrect.  It’s another thing entirely to say that it is literally raining cats & dogs.

More XKCD

I discovered the KXCD forums a few days ago, and had a blast.  I found this little gem on that day where I promised not to post anymore XKCD. I thought it was really clever. Then I got to the end and discovered that this kind of post has already been done to death, and is no longer funny. Where the hell have I been?

Readed, bringed, and catched? Never heared of them. I’ve often thinked that English haved way, way too many irregular participles that gived nothing special to the language, and only maked things difficult for non-native speakers: by the time you’ve sayed two words, you’ve hitted one. I’m sure people always seed regularities as strange when they comed into the language, but I wouldn’t have losed too much sleep over these ubiquitous irregular participles if they goed away. But you probably knowed that.