Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Plural form of
prescriptivist .
Etymologies
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Examples
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The really annoying trait of prescriptivists is that more often than not they simply get the facts or history of a usage wrong.
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There is a correlated phenomenon: wherein prescriptivists use a word in a new way, but presume their usage is standard and correct without realizing that it’s a new (ish) meaning.
Some words whose meanings have changed without controversy « Motivated Grammar 2010
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The descriptivists call the prescriptivists bloody-minded pedants, cantankerous old cads, or angry old coots.
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The descriptivists call the prescriptivists bloody-minded pedants, cantankerous old cads, or angry old coots.
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Patricia O'Connor, reviewing two language books for the New York Times Book Review, writes:Get a few language types together, and before long someone will bring up the great divide between the preservers and the observers of English, the "prescriptivists" and the "descriptivists" — those who'd rap your knuckles for using "snuck" versus those who might cite Anglo-Saxon cognates in its defense.
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They’re the good kind of prescriptivists, the kind that are complaining, by and large, about really egregious errors — ones that stand in the way of understanding what people are saying.
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I glad you think we’re the “good kind of prescriptivists” because I think you’re the good kind of descripivist.
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They’re the good kind of prescriptivists, the kind that are complaining, by and large, about really egregious errors — ones that stand in the way of understanding what people are saying.
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If prescriptivists want to argue that you should not use “disinterested” to mean “not interested” because some people will judge you for it, fair enough.
Robert Hartwell Fiske strikes me as a prig and a bully « Motivated Grammar 2009
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Teaching people to write and speak better is crucial to the effective transfer of ideas, but the silly little rules that prescriptivists propose just detract from that goal.
Robert Hartwell Fiske strikes me as a prig and a bully « Motivated Grammar 2009
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