The Weekly Standard, “Wars of Words”

October 1, 2012

David Skinner, “Wars of Words” (The Weekly Standard, October 2012).

In the midst of a recent book review, the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella read from the old script about prescriptivists and descriptivists as she observed that the American Heritage Dictionary seems increasingly ambivalent toward its own position as the prescriptivist dictionary. …
Acocella … compounded her error by offering readers the usual sermon about the good but fallible prescriptivists and their long crusade against the self-righteous descriptivists, provoking Language Log contributor Ben Zimmer to accuse her of arguing with straw men.

Read the rest here. (Related Language Log post)

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