this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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English usage and grammar

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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]).

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(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)

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How can I talk anymore? Is it time to start pronouncing the first "d" in Wednesday?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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.