# When did "pull oneself by one's bootstraps" flip meaning ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 7, 2018, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-pull-oneself-by-ones-bootstraps-flip-meaning/822619 "2018-10-07T18:51:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 46
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2018, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-pull-oneself-by-ones-bootstraps-flip-meaning/822619/46 "2018-10-11T19:35:44Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > …it’s not a sin to recognize that language should and does follow rules and that it’s incumbent on us to know the ones that matter…stating – as many self-indentified “descriptivists” do – that language usage cannot be deemed “wrong” if the meaning is clearly understood is precisely like saying that no behavior at the dinner table can be deemed inappropriate if the diner succeeds in stuffing his face with food. No descriptivist has ever said that. It’s precisely the way that prescriptivists persistently _misrepresent_ descriptivism, however often they are corrected. Since you insist on restating the trope that descriptivist linguistics means “anything goes”, here’s my response again. It’s preposterous to claim that prescriptivists are the ones who truly understand the concept of “rules” in language. Most prescriptivism essentially derives from _misunderstanding_ the concept. I’m talking more about grammatical rules below, but the same applies to semantics. > [@Between you and I, what's up with the misuse of "I"?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/between-you-and-i-whats-up-with-the-misuse-of-i/764748/63): > > …All of the true rules of language are empirical rules that everyone agrees upon. We all know that “Henry cheese eats” is not grammatical in any dialect of English (although it is in Japanese). There are many other such rules that we all tacitly (and usually unconsciously) agree on: if you take a dozen words, only a tiny fraction of the millions of possible arrangements of those words are grammatical, and all native speakers know instantly which are valid in their language. > > Descriptivist linguistics (among other things) studies empirical language and works out what abstract unconscious consensus rules native speakers are following. > > We take for granted the vast majority of rules in our language - we absorb them unconsciously when we learn language as young children, and every native speaker of a given dialect follows and agrees on the same rules without conscious effort. Most of us can’t consciously articulate what those rules are, yet we use them flawlessly to build sentences. And nothing in this vast majority of real rules requires prescriptivists to coach us. > > So how do prescriptivists fit into this picture? Prescriptivists ignore the vast majorty of rules that I have described above - of course, because we all agree on them and follow them effortlessly and flawlessly. Instead, the prescriptivists obsess over is a tiny fraction of insignificant semi-rules. These are either situations on which there is no clear empirical consensus - perhaps something in flux in the language, or variation between close dialects or registers; or they are completely invented notions, not rules that native speakers ever follow at all in practice. And prescriptivists generally express a concern that if we don’t all follow their precise recommendations on the tiny proportion of “rules” that they obsess about then nobody will be able to communicate clearly and civilization will rapidly disintegrate. (See also the subsequent discussion in that thread.) No true rule of language is ever going to get any attention from a prescriptivist. If all native speakers of a dialect follow a rule flawlessly, why would they care? Any “rule” promoted by a prescriptivist is always going to be something where variant usages are prevalent, otherwise there would be nothing to peeve about. Here’s a reliable rule: any rule described by a prescriptivist is not a rule. If you want to understand the actual rules of language, talk to a linguist. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-pull-oneself-by-ones-bootstraps-flip-meaning/822619)._