Well, that's interesting.

[conuly]

I am firmly (firmly) of the belief that saying "temperature" when you mean "fever" is wrong, possibly even morally wrong.

And yet, I also believe that prescriptivism is wrong, possibly even morally wrong.

Well, it's easy enough to see how I reconcile this. Like most people, I'm fully capable of holding two totally contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time, without exploding. Really cool, huh?

That is the sort of thing that people will rail against. It's just silly, illogical (and not "illogical" like Spock seems to think) thinking, and It's Simply Not Right.

People do a lot of that sort of thing. People are prone to amazing leaps of mislogic, and amazing amounts of superstition (the current fad for antibacterial everything is, as far as I'm concerned, no less superstitious than crossing your fingers, especially when the evidence all shows that it's detrimental to make the world sterile), and all sorts of "bad" things.

But it occurs to me that there's probably a reason for all this. I mean to say, the human mind has lasted us a fairly long time, and it hasn't let us down yet, it might not altogether be wrong to have all these "flaws". Don't know what the advantage might be to any of them, but until any of us actually has a firm idea of how the human mind works (not likely), I'd rather avoid catagorizing them as good or bad facets of how we think.

Does that make sense? It made sense in my head, but it's currently in the 100s over here and my brain might be frying.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

For example, I am a descriptivist. But I believe we should move our language into a direction where it works well. Removing precision or adding ambiguity is not beneficial. So even though I believe language should evolve and that if enough people use it that way it does mean that, I feel that people are decreasing the value of the language by doing so, and that they shouldn't do that. Use your powers for good - change the language in good ways. The planet also changes due to the things we do, but that doesn't mean changing it in bad ways is a good idea, just that it really will change like that.

[conuly]

Of course, you could argue (and you'd be technically correct) that the language can only take so much ambiguity before the speakers find a way to add that precision back in.

I just don't have to *like* it.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Sure, but it doesn't make a swing toward ambiguity good. Just something we won't suffer forever. Nor does it make your two views contradict.