That said, whenever I hear or read "begs the question" when "raises the question" is meant, it feels like nails on chalkboard. If more people recognized actual question begging our politicians and pundits would have to work harder to lie.
Apparently, one can be a centrist on the prescriptivism-descriptivism axis
> It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.
In this analogy, linguists are the ones who try to figure out why people like you tend to wear dark clothes to a funeral, why other groups do not, and how those distinctions occurred. Peevers are the ones who insist that all good people wear dark clothes to funerals, ill-bred mongrels wear other kinds of clothing to funerals, and resist any notion that their culture is not universal.
Moving back to linguistics: Linguists understand people have linguistic preferences. Linguists have linguistic preferences. Linguists are opposed to people dressing up their preferences as laws of nature and insisting that everyone must speak according to those preferences. Going back to physics: A physicist may wish for perpetual motion, but a crank insists they have it and demands everyone hail them as the inventor of the perpetual motion device.
Needless to say, the UK branch got closed down.
Your analogy with funeral attire and Hawaiian shirts is excellent.
[1] is a funeral with Hawaiian shirts, [2] is a funeral but likely not as you know one.
Anyway, I don’t see how those links disprove my point? Those cultures have different expectations; and my point is that those expectations are valid.
Last time I checked in at /r/linguistics that covered more than just your tacit assumption of the world at large.
Your point also seems to be both that cultures have expectations and that those that do not meet those expectations will receive criticism (that would be wrong to shrug off as "merely judgemental").
As someone who's travelled widely in the past few decades across a number of cultures I've frequently stood out like the only person in black in a sea of Hawaiian shirts; it's rare that I've been criticised, more common to have been thanked for attending.
I find communities that critically judge differences to their expectations to be relatively rare, many communities recognise that others have other behaviours, I myself do find that those communities with a rigid set of expectations that are overly judgemental of those that do not meet those expectations to be worrisome.
For example, the habitual be isn't part of any prescribed English dialect, but it still has its own grammar, and can be used correctly or incorrectly. The goal of descriptivism here is not to say "you can say anything you want, and others have to accept you", but rather to say "dialects spring up organically, and our job is to study them as they arise, rather than to define them from the top down".