The problem is that people frequently use this type of argument when they are unable to spell or follow the basic rules of syntax and grammar instead of simply admitting they're wrong.
Language does change, over time and across many cultures. It doesn't mean that anything you write is automatically correct.
Just going to share this little gem again...
"a language that doesn't adapt to an ever changing society is bound to be lost", sure, but adapt too quickly and you lose the ability to communicate between groups of people.
There needs to be some compromise where new words are adopted, and changed words are accepted, without flooding the language with garbage. For example, English should still be taught in schools, and English teachers should still have the freedom of correcting the writing kids produce, and taking points off for "mistakes".
Like, if you go pure descriptivist, "it's" and "its" can now mean the same thing. There is no ability to distinguish between their, they're and there. A business email describing a product as "cheugy, no cap" is perfectly acceptable and it's up to the reader to figure it out, because every word is a real word and perfectly valid, and every grammar deviation is acceptable because languages evolve.
Even on social media, I think it's fair to push back on "mistakes" that make it hard to understand something. An error that might take a poster 1 second to fix, might cost the world minutes, as thousands of people each take a few seconds to puzzle out what the OP meant to write.
Languages are about communication, and that can suffer whether the language police are too rigid and forbid any deviation, are too easily bribed and allow for anything.
Descriptivists will never haltodulate the hatsrglabatude of us prescriptivists.
You know what my biggest problem with
descriptivistsprecriptivists is? What is "correct" always coincides exactly to what they learned in school or university from 15 - 20. It's never anything else. Never in like 20.000 years of human history did we nail language except for that timeframe, and never will it happen again. what a coinkidink.ITT we fight against the evil descriptivist windmills
"refrigerate" at least has sensible etymological roots in its constituent components.
The problem with brain rot lingo is that it isn't constructed from precedent but a decay therefrom, corrupted by niche "meta" references that are little more than inside jokes that escaped their in-group, divorced of the context that brought them about.
...
Then again, though, the most popular word that humans speak all over the world is "OK", which is itself a memetic corruption of a fad, wherein people were saying "All Correct" with a deliberately exaggerated fake British accent: "Oll Korrect" (which became abbreviated).
And brain rot does have the fact that it's very funny going for it. It sounds silly which makes it fun to say and it pisses people off which makes it even funnier, because getting mad about it is a drastic overreaction. So I don't think it'll even really BECOME an actual serious problem, because the moment it hits mainstream and corporations start publishing commercials about "skibidi Ohio GYATT" it's going to implode like "it's morbin time" burned Sony.
Otherwise, constructing new words out of extant etymological particles is DELIGHTFULLY useful. In Minecraft, I built an Enfenestrator:
A window through which zombies throw themselves into a catchment chamber for culling and (when zombified villagers are isolated) curing.Yes. English is evolved by whatever's popular, ergo whatever the cool kids are doing. They're actually going to make 'fetch' happen because there's no one driving this crazy short bus; just a bunch of cheerleaders on the roof and influencers tasting the back windows.
I think the words “pious cunt “ has been with us for quite sometime.
My ex-wife was a word snob. I wish I'd seen this when I was married to her.
I just like to point out that umami is a terrible word to import into English. Why? Because we already have a word for savory. It's savory. Worse, umami doesn't completely just mean savory. It also means meaty or deliciousness. In English, savory ≠ meaty, and deliciousness is subjective. The word just doesn't translate cleanly. So when anybody uses umami to describe savory food, all they're really doing is sounding like an imprecise, pretentious jackass.
Given our thoughts are largely impacted by the vocabulary we know, being able to come up with new words can be considered a super power!
English dictionaries are also very much on the descriptive side of things as of late, especially compared to their counterparts among other languages.
Dunno how the tea totallers do things but here in burgerland we actually have sort of a minor annual event finding out the latest slang terms and grammars that have entered this year's edition of the webster dictionary, and which words have fallen out of significant use enough to be dropped from the book too.
I love militant descriptivists
Yeah, yeah, but where's the fun in that? Trolling the shit out of people is way too much fun to not be pedantic.
