(no subject)

[msmemory_archive]

"Bank of America has always strived for higher standards" but apparently has not striven for better grammar.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Well, bear in mind that she's not just a linguistics major, but a semi-professional proofreader. That's a job that requires a prescriptivist view.

I am, of course, a hardcore descriptivist, precisely *because* of my lesser but still non-trivial linguistics background: I see modern language's prescriptivist approach to be a weird anomoly that has nothing to do with how human language actually works. If you want a good course that illustrates why I feel that way, borrow The Story of Human Language from me sometime -- it's a really delightful course on how language actually works in practice, with lovely illustrative examples. (Such as the fact that some of English's greatest weirdnesses are precisely due to mistaken prescriptivist notions in the 17th century, which mucked up the language via false analyses...)