{"id":13877,"date":"2011-10-25T17:34:49","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T21:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/10\/25\/13877.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:00:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:00:04","slug":"more-snarky-descriptivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/10\/25\/more-snarky-descriptivism\/","title":{"rendered":"More Snarky Descriptivism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger has written before about being a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/09\/18\/10282.html\">snarky descriptivist<\/a>; in general, I grew up a stickler (essentially an <a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/2011\/10\/04\/descriptivism-prescriptivism-and-assertionism\/\">assertionist<\/a>, except that my assertions were backed by such authorities as Edwin Newman, William Safire and my mother) but have been eschewing prescriptivism since my early twenties. The stickler lies close to the surface, though; an actual error in language use (or punctuation or so on) often provokes gleeful scorn on my part before by better angel reminds me (of Lex Hartmania if nothing else).\n<P>Still, the point of being a descriptivist is this: the language people actually speak (and write and text) trumps the rules in books (and web sites). This means that if I screw up the language people actually speak, I is <I>wrong<\/i>, or at least wrong for my context (which is a complicated issue indeed, but somehow intuitively gettable). It also means that awareness of audience is of primary importance, which I think is an excellent rule for communication anyway. If you are writing to a stodgy person, stodge away. If you are writing for a hep person, put some hep in your step. If you are writing for a niche audience, make sure to put in lots of identifiers that your readers are in the Inner Ring, and if you are writing for a wide audience, make sure to avoid obscurity. If, as Maimonides says, the Divine speaks to us (through Scripture) in the language of humans, how much more so do we speak to each other in the language of humans, not the language of rulebooks.\n<P>That said, <a href=\"http:\/\/wordsmith.org\/words\/quisle.html\">this<\/a> has been bugging me for several days now. Quisling is just not a verb. It just isn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s not. You cannot quisle someone. You cannot be quisled. I mean, it&#8217;s wrong to be a quisling, much more seriously wrong, but it&#8217;s wrong to say that someone is in the act of quisling someone else. I don&#8217;t care who used it or is using it or how often, it&#8217;s just wrong.\n<P>Frankly, if you absolutely had to verb the thing, I would prefer keeping the ing: <i>He decided to quisling his start-up partners and retire<\/i>; <i>The CEO was quislinged by the CFO<\/i>; <I>The board members were all quislinging as hard as they could<\/i>. Those are all terrible, yes, but less slate-scratchingly terrible than their ing-less counterparts.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger throws a hissy fit. With hissing and all. Ssssss!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19439,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13877\/revisions\/19439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}