Uncle Jazzbeau suggests that "Within every soi disant descriptivist is a prescriptivist dying to drop all the pretense and nonsense and correct somebody. Hard and with passion."
I'm sure that Uncle J. doesn't need to be warned that this can be a difficult subject, as we learned in our earlier
discussion of the (non-)plurality of
[a] libertarian who calls me a prescriptivist is a libertarian who is going to be asked to step outside in the back alley for a few minutes of profound unpleasantness, most of which he will spend lying on the ground by the dumpster.
Not that anyone has called Geoff a prescriptivist, exactly :-).
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 6, 2003 09:58 AM