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Comment by cdrini | Hacker News Reader

I love to see language evolve like this! Dictionaries and grammar rules are not prescriptive, they follow what/how people speak, not the other way around. They do influence in the opposite direction as well, as a bit of a normalizing/consolidating force. I feel like for the last few decades (at least) we've treated dictionaries like gospel, with very strict, almost mathematical definitions of "correct". I think giving a bit of freedom to allow new words/etc to develop naturally, like they have since the dawn of human language, is quite nice! I.e. Make fetch happen!

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Just to clarify, I think you have the terms reversed. Descriptivism is, as you say, describing a language from its everyday usage. Prescriptivism is when you follow a rules body or dictionary to say what is “correct.”

Darn thank you for the correction! I forgot a "not" in there. Fixed!

tru dat! Language be evolvin like craZy n we shuld just roll wit it! Dictiunarys try to tell us wut 2 do but we aint gotta lissen! Its lyk, who needz rulez when we can make up wordz as we go, amirite? Letz just keep makin fetch happen!!!

Hahaha within reason!! I want to see eg authors just introduce new words in books, like Shakespeare. New words shouldn't generally make the language less internally consistent (goodness knows English has enough of a problem with that as it is!). I mean new words like... "He was a carrapticious old fellow. Always alert, and, despite his old age, had the mischievous sparkling eyes of a boy who has just told a bad joke".

But who's to say which new words are "acceptable" and which aren't? Of course if you ask old people they will give these Shakespearean answers, but they are not the ones defining the future of a language. It's the young generation. And they have a very different approach to creating new words. Why should their new words be worth less? And the example in the original post is actually the worst kind according to your definition, because it makes the language less consistent.

I think the people decide; if folks like a certain word, they'll start using it, creating traction. A natural selection of words of sorts. Then the dictionaries, being non-prescriptive, will have to add those words since they're needed to understand common parlance.

And completely agree about young generations, I've actually been super pleased at how many new words gen z is creating! I feel like the previous few generations created way fewer words. I disagree with things like introducing inconsistent spellings like "lyk" in terms of adopting that as a standard, because it just makes the language a headache to learn. But creating words for things that don't have existing words (like carrapticious in my other example), or even creating new sort of word variations which kind of grow/evolve into their own words (like rizz) seem like a nice expressive way of extending language. (I'm a bit more mixed on the value of the latter, though).

Language is a social and cultural phenomenon. That doesn’t mean there are no rules. It means that the rules are implicitly decided collectively by the community of speakers rather than by a centralized body.

If you spend enough time among the right communities, you'll find tons of people speaking that way or any other way. Especially among the uneducated demographics. The very same ones that created this new rule in the original article (hence the name "idiot's" apostrophe). Now should we listen to them or not? I see highly conflicting statements here.

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