PSA: The word "aesthetic" is a noun, not an adjective

>shitting on descriptivism
If you want someone to tell you how to use language, maybe move to France.

>Languages can evolve, doesn't mean we have to get lazy with it.
A lot of language changes (and writing system changes) come down to ease of articulation, so if we want to be dicks about it, language probably evolves far more often due to laziness than other factors.

GHet mailurgh eblodfru ek Orpfeir dan ghards sizle? Dhyeim ghucte podleus, fucking faggot

I'm an artfag and at art school when things were described as aesthetic this was used as short for 'solely beautiful/lacking substance', when transferred to fashion I read this very much the same way. Simple/safe, but usually elegant and pleasing to the eye.

Language is a system that relies on cultural exchange. If you're the only asshole doing something within a language (maybe to attempt a tepid argument), then you're going to need to be okay with everyone ignoring you.

so your a english teatcher and one a youre students turn in a paper wroten like this. not only that ,but all a the othr students all so made the same mitsakes on there papers. clearly thes children our just agents of the evolution of langage and grammer, so you give them al A+s and pat there backs

wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsage.pdf

DFW left Descriptivism's asshole wide, bloody, and gaping back in 2001. Time to let go.

Or...I establish at the start of the writing task that our language has different registers and corresponding audiences (who can have fairly rigid expectations), and while using emojis or whatever is acceptable in text messages to their friends, those same features aren't acceptable in their papers. The only caveat to this is if the student had a sound rhetorical reason for using the feature, but most college undergrads can't accomplish such a feat, so I don't that situation would arise often.

>a post-modernist is railing against descriptivism
I think you may need to re-read the article.

Why would you willing subject yourself to a Babel-ification of your language? Why would you take the path of direct democracy when we've far surpassed it with the underlying philosophy of a republic? We should subject ourselves to our language unless making a point, not the other way around.

The role of a dictionary in a descriptivist language is both paradoxical and impossible. Where do you draw the line between one person making a mistake and half the population making that mistake? Where do you draw the line and finally list the word's new definition? Unless you accept a level of prescriptivism, you'd need to log every single mistake any speaker of that language ever made in their speech

I think you may need to both actually read the article and actually learn what DFW was before saying something as stupid as what you just said, buddy.

you're retarded

I pity you and those that pay for your educators wages.

If we buy into even a bit of what Derrida et al. were saying, the task of the dictionary is always already an impossible one.

But I don't draw any lines regarding our language as a whole because I'm a single person. Should I deem the English spoken abroad as incorrect in pronunciation, syntax, etc. because it might differ from mine, even when the group that uses it agrees on the terms of its usage? Ultimately, I'm not in control of the language. If a new lexical item gains enough cultural inertia to spread and wind up in dictionaries, then how on earth would I mount a defense? The only measure of perscriptivism I can divvy out is in writing, where I—were I a teacher—could train students to recognize audiences and audience expectations.