Yeah. That is key. And I don’t know that prescriptivism is the best choice—even though my writing would seem to imply that. It’s a funny problem. I don’t see any good solution.
I certainly sympathize with the French not wanting to leave the decision up to a bunch of random chuckle-heads who have no concept of language use beyond random grunts.
“We do not even have a language! Just this stupid accent!”
Of course they can and often are.
Not in our world it isn’t.
Since dictionaries have been descriptivist since 1961, 65 years, longer than almost anyone here, even me, has been an adult, I can’t comprehend how anyone can still have this skewed a definition of descriptivist.
Dictionaries themselves don’t ever include new uses of existing words as soon as one person says it. They carefully compile citations of usage from multiple sources over multiple years. If the new meaning is seen to be so widespread in its use that average readers will encounter it, then they add it to their lexicon because people who are trying to understand what others are actually saying need that information.
Today’s online language coins new words frequently - far more frequently than older words accrue new meanings - and those who are not embedded in the various subcultures therefore need more frequent help when they stumble upon them. Merriam-Webster’s more recent update included Shapewear, Looksmaxxing, Meme coin, Parasocial, Vibe coding, Superfood, Cuffing season, and Uncanny valley. Uncanny valley first appeared in English in 1978. I have to admit I had no idea what cuffing season was but apparently it appeared in that form back in 2011.
Descriptivism means only that words, phrases, and meanings that have entered common usage should be accepted when used properly in proper context. Words evolve. Cuffing season - a time when people seek romantic partnership, usually ahead of winter - merely is a colorful phrase built on the original 17th century use of cuff as a fetter. Probably 90% of modern usage - all meanings, not merely new words - evolved later than the 17th century. A goodly percentage of them evolved since 1961, and most people have no problem with the vast majority because they swim in that sea.
Accepting a practice that has gone on forever in every language is not some modern abberation. Descriptivists merely pushed aside the elite pretensions of prescriptivism and futilely tried to keep pushing until it disappeared off a cliff and never reappeared.
Since I’m lazy, I asked AI to give me meanings of drowned.
Literal Meanings
Figurative Meanings
The literal meanings haven’t implied that death must have occurred for centuries. Figurative meanings evolve from the literal ones, because people love playing with language and do so at every moment. None of them seem to be recent either. There may be a sentence in which death by drowning is unclear, but it can’t be very frequent. If it were, it would be recorded as a meaning.
Most of the time, this just isn’t an issue. If something is unclear, just ask. If two people both clarify what they mean and there’s still a disagreement about who’s correct… well, then, it’s just like any other argument… whoever’s got the better point, the higher charisma score, or the bigger gun wins.
If that guy really believes the snowy cat is black, you’d best just walk away before you’re forced to hear his other thoughts.
It’s not like words have some objective reality to be measured against, some sort of physical test you can do on one to see if it really, truly, means that thing if only you poked it hard enough. It’s always just by convention among two or more people. Most of the time it’s by convention among millions of people, and only very rarely a 50/50 split.
Even prescriptive dictionaries are themselves descriptive, because they are after-the-fact describing conventions that have already taken hold in some segment of society. The only difference is in their curation. They’re not discovering or inventing words out of thin air and mandating that people learn them, at least outside of copyright traps and early priesthoods millennia ago.
Even the institutions that actually do invent words, like the French one that works with the Academie, do so by fighting an uphill battle to try to get people to respect their convention over others (usually some English word that has broader adoption).
The very fact that we’re having this conversation suggests that it’s really not a big deal. Of course misunderstandings and regionalisms and faux pas and deliberate obtuseness do happen, but… they are the exception rather than the rule, or we would’ve long ago died out as a species.
This is (sort of) what’s happening to the word “literal”, which is now widely used in a sense that is pretty much the exact opposite of its, well, literal meaning. The literal meaning is, however, still widely understood, so you have a word that can mean both one thing and its opposite, and usage appears to be about evenly split. Those words are called auto-antonyms, and “literal”, though not originally one, has become one. More standard examples are “clip” (which can mean both “remove” and “attach”), “dust” (“clean off dust” or “sprinkle dust”), “table” (“propose a legislative bill for adoption” or “withdraw a legislative bill from deliberation”) or “sanction” (“endorse” or “punish”).
How do you deal with the ambiguities presented by such words? You rely on the panacea that you use in all of linguistics, context.
But who’s going to use the words decreed by the wise overlords in the academy as correct words? The chuckleheads won’t, because those words are beyond their comprehension. So is it just the academicians using these words amongst each other? That’s not much of a language.
I spent about a decade thinking it meant “the time of year when it’s cold enough for long sleeves but still warm enough to feel the need to roll them up.”
The prescriptivists always believe they’re right. The rest of us just happen to notice they’re not.
The New York Times just ran a timely article.
Experts Agree: Nobody Knows What ‘Bimonthly’ or ‘Biweekly’ Means
Just be glad that twyweekly didn’t win out.
This goes way back. In 1884, a publication called The Microscopical Bulletin and Optician’s Circular printed a letter from a subscriber who was missing several issues. “The above is a sample of many letters we have received,” The Bulletin said, “our correspondents evidently being under the impression that we publish twice a month. The word ‘bi-monthly’ ought to mean ‘twice a month’ (Latin bis, twice), but it don’t.” The 1800s were full of remarks on this confusion; some even roped in “triweekly,” which meant thrice a week, despite Noah Webster’s scolding that it shouldn’t. In 1877, the British lexicographer Ebenezer Cobham Brewer described the “biweekly” situation as “quite indefensible.” He also objected to combining the Latin bi- (not bis!) with the Germanic “weekly”: If you wanted to say “twice a week,” in his opinion, “it should be Twyweekly.” (Quite a suggestion, given that people were also saying “triweekly.”)
Bottom line. It’s not going to improve.
It is so tempting to imagine fixing this. Couldn’t we impose some rules-based order, stamping out ambiguities, formalizing every last implication of syntax, etching a single meaning of “bimonthly” on a stone pillar and printing it in red in every dictionary? Couldn’t we drain the swamp of language and put in paths and signs? This tragic hope is why grammar nerds get so excited whenever a multimillion-dollar lawsuit hinges on a single comma in a contract, and the strict meaning of language is finally dignified with real consequences. This tragic hope is also, as Merriam-Webster puts it, “as whispers into a gale” — like insisting that it is objectively better to load the dishwasher this way when you have 1.5 billion roommates.
“Biweekly” should probably mean every other week. Knowing this does not really help.
And sometimes it gets weirder. Consider the sentence:
After I moved to my new apartment, I had no time to deal with the boxes in the living room, so they were still ___ three weeks later.
Most people would unhesitatingly fill in “unpacked” - and would just as unhesitatingly say “Oh, whoops!” if you then pointed out that the word they actually wanted was “packed.”
I would have put “there” !
I would’ve thought “waiting”
Unpacked does not naturally follow still in that sentence. I’d be surprised if most people used it.
More re: “still unpacked”:
https://languagehat.com/still-unpacked/
The same construction shows up in descriptions of gifts as “still unwrapped,” artifacts as “still unearthed,” etc….
I’ll take Language Log’s word for it that it’s a real usage. But I’ve never heard it and can’t imagine saying it.
I did the same for bi-monthly.
So it was apparently doomed from the start.
What that article doesn’t say or imply is that most people would say it. People do say it, but there’s no evidence of the ratio of “still packed” to “still unpacked”. Too bad Google no longer provides number of hits: Language Log used to rely on those for evidence.
The comments on that article, BTW, are great and illuminating, with people explaining the origins and uses of the prefix “un”.
What do you mean by “literal”? Which definition? Literally “literal” or its opposite?
“Literally” is beyond their comprehension? If so, why are they using it?
Seems like it would take the same amount of brainpower to learn the “correct” definition as it would the “incorrect” one. The words they truly can’t comprehend are words like "
myrme-cophilous". They will never know it or try to say it so they can’t screw it up and start propogating silliness.
Literally, they know.
So if the chuckleheads do understand the words they’re using, what makes you call them chuckleheads?