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.






