All hail to our modern Moses, leading us to the promised land of proper English usage... 
But forgive me. That would be the traditionalist, prescriptivist, "you're absolutely right, Dr. Johnson, prologomenon/a/ous absolutely is not a verb, because the Greek roots forbid it being so. My deepest apologies."
It sounds, then, as though we have a whizzle, fizzle, nizzle descriptivist on our hands, trying to break down the oppressive barriers by which we've all been bound ever since our kindergarten teachers forced us to make the lines of our capital A's perfect 30 degree angles. So lead on, fearless leader, lead on! (Though we may actually be following your lovely sidekick).
2 comments:
Silly to write a comment to my own post, I know, but I just wanted to clarify that we did not take these pictures especially for this post, I just thought they fit the message well.
Since all of our jokes apparently need to be explained, I will go ahead and give you all a little insight into the usage world, and hopefully the humor in this post will be more lucid.
There are two schools of thought in the usage world, prescriptivist and descriptivist. A prescriptivist basically says that the dictionary and the grammar books are the rules of the English language and that these tools prescribe what rules and words we as speakers and writers of the language ought to use. More fundamentally, prescriptivists follow the Greek and Latin tradition of our language and generally only permit what would be permitted in Latin. This is where the "split infinitive" argument comes into play, as well as "don't end a sentence with a preposition".
On the other side of the debate are the descriptivists who argue that dictionaries and grammar books describe how real people use the language, and thus that a language is an organic entity that is constantly changing. Among its most liberal proponents, descriptivism holds that there are no hard and fast rules and really that anything goes. If a normal, middle-class individual knows that a "bling" is a diamond, then in Webster's next edition that definition ought to be listed there.
In both my and Justin's opinion, language is obviously an organic entity, but a very slowly changing one, thus a moderate stance leaning more toward the prescriptivist tradition is the most correct one. Given this, Justin's entire post defending his neologism was obviously facetious because he is by no means a descriptivist. My post following was intended to make that a little more clear. Would Justin ever say that "whizzle, fizzle, nizzle" nonsense ought to be in the dictionary because that's what real people are saying? But couldn't the exact arguments he puts forth in his defense be used in the defense of those words? And so we see that it was a joke.
Finally, as a prescriptivist, I encourage all who doubt that a gerund (running, skipping, jumping)is a verbal noun to go look it up in their dictionary.
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