o1mnikent

Prescriptivists make up meaningless rules about language, like don’t split your infinitives (“to boldly go where no one has gone before”), and other and baseless usage rules.

Jan Freeman explains why you can’t be both a language prescriptivist and a historian.

From the Boston Globe:

…I often turn to usage history to help put current complaints in perspective. There’s a wealth of material: During the past couple of centuries, when prescriptivism really got rolling, there was an English-language authority ready to pronounce on almost any usage point, no matter how small.

Some of my favorite examples:

Laundry. “Meaning a place where clothing is washed, this word cannot mean, also, clothing sent there to be washed.” (Ambrose Bierce, “Write it Right,” 1909)

Girl for daughter. “A father, on being requested by a rich and vulgar fellow for permission to marry ‘one of his girls,’ gave this rather crushing reply: ‘Certainly. Which one would you prefer – the waitress or the cook?’ ” (C.W. Bardeen, “Verbal Pitfalls,” 1883)

Sleuth “denotes the track of a living creature, in particular the track of a wild animal. . . . In a semi-humorous way the newspapers commonly mention a detective as a sleuth; their readers, not thinking of the humor, take sleuth to be a regular synonym of detective. The only meaning the word has in sober English is track or footprint.” (Joseph Fitzgerald, “Word and Phrase: True and False Usage in English,”1901)