I have nothing more to say here, knowing that the prescriptivist versus descriptivist camps have been warring for decades, except that if a dictionary does not take a stand on correctness, it will leave readers unsatisfied and sound extremely weak. Even though English lacks an academy (to our great advantage), we have certain standards that prevent the learned language from sinking to the depths urban slang has sunk to. Dictionaries embody those standards, and must live up to certain ideals. Merely passing off every little idiot tweak of the language as acceptable usage does not a work worthy of compilation make.
The first part of this is quite true, but may I ask when the last time was that the presciptivist camp had a victory? They are usually conceded to have lost the battle when the third edition of the unabridged Webster’s came out, and that was back in 1961. Since that time, to my knowledge, all major dictionaries have been descriptive, although there has been some movement back to labeling words not acceptable in formal English.
The second part is not so true. Just the opposite. It’s when a dictionary doesn’t keep up with changing usage that it appears weak.
Here’s an actual example. All my dictionaries define “bemused” as “confused”. But when I see the word in print these days, it is almost invariably used to mean “amused.” Even my 2001 college Encarta doesn’t have that definition. And that means that a person using a dictionary to look up a modern instance of bemused will wind up, well, confused.
The job of a dictionary – and not just in my opinion but in the actual daily workings of actual dictionary editors everywhere – is to be a faithful recording of the the current state of the language. Prescriptivist vs descriptivist may be an ongoing battle in the ranks of language mavens, but it’s less of a real-world battle than Microsofties vs. Appleheads. There is no other side in this argument in the hardcover world of actual print dictionaries. That’s why dictionaries are far more alike than dissimilar and all major dictionaries can be used interchageably for all everyday tasks. Which I think is the answer to the OP.
> But when I see the word in print these days, it is almost
> invariably used to mean “amused.”
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree with you here. I’ve never seen the word “bemused” used in print to mean “amused.” To check if it’s merely a matter of my memory, I did a search on Google for the word. I wasn’t able to find a single example where someone used the word to mean “amused.” I think that your memory plays you wrong here. I have no doubt that some people think that “bemused” means “amused,” but I don’t think that it’s a very common thing.
Folks who are interested in the descriptivist vs. prescriptivist battle should really take a look at this Harper’s article by David Foster Wallace. (It’s a review of A Dictionary of Moderan American Usage)
Some extracts:
[quote]
The epistemological assumptions that underlie Methodological Descriptivism have been thoroughly debunked and displaced–in Lit by the rise of post-structuralism, Reader-Response Criticism, and Jaussian Reception Theory; in linguistics by the rise of Pragmatics–and it’s now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter’s particular ideology. And the consequence of (a) and (b) is that there’s no way around it–decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer’s ideology. And every lexicographer’s got one. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.
[/qutoe]
Despite this quote, the article is probably the most even-handed assessment of the descriptivist-prescriptivist debate. I urge y’all to take a look at it.
I suspect that the above “debate” is not a debate at all. It appears to be an exchange of one-upmanship, i.e. a low-level flamewar, a tussle between overly inflated egos. They don’t care about the truth, they just want to make the other guy look bad.
If true, then the idiots don’t need dictionaries (exept perhaps to be whack upside there haid for such self-important behavior.) Instead uh taking pokes about grammer and spellin, dey need to read articles like this wun hyar:
Put simply: when your opponent attacks your spelling, it means that they’ve lost the battle… and usually the same applies to their attacks on your grammar. However, if the INITIAL argument was about correct usage or spelling, then that’s different.