this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
17 points (94.7% liked)
English usage and grammar
399 readers
1 users here now
A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.
If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]
).
Online resources:
- Cambridge English Dictionary
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
- Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. This is a great and witty reference about usage, its history, and its controveries
Sibling communities:
Rules of conduct:
The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.
(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I believe the language ought to be descriptive not prescriptive. But I'm not an absolutist about that. It's kind of weird, but I don't like some things that have happened, like flammable and inflammable. They just seem lazy and I feel like we should have forced correctness down people's throats on that one.
Aren't the French notorious for wanting language to be prescriptive? I may have that wrong, my information is probably from the late 1960s early 1970s. Lol.