(Part 2) Top products from r/badlinguistics

Analyzing languagejones

• comments per month: 51.4 ^I ^have ^an ^opinion ^on ^everything
  
• posts per month: 1.5 ^lurker
  
• favorite sub linguistics
  
• favorite words: you're, really, speakers
  
• age 0 years 11 months
  
• profanity score 0.6% ^Gosh ^darnet ^gee ^wiz
  
• trust score 77.3%
  
  
• Fun facts about languagejones
  
  • "I'm a native speaker of AAVE because of my childhood speech community."
    
  • "I've studied that has a written tradition."
    
  • "I've only ever heard people claim "two negatives make a positive" and then give an example of multiplying negatives."
    
  • "I am very careful to separate out of my data."
    
  • "I've seen look like they were made in R, using the R Color Brewer package."
    
  • "I'm a geospatial n00b, so I started with this book)."
    
  • "I've never seen it as "linalg." I like that, but I'm uncertain how to pronounce it."
    
  • "I am just in the process of learning some French equivalents."
    
  • "I am not familiar with the concept of unconscious bias."
    
  • "I've got a speaker who has just a long nasalized schwa for "I don't know." There is, however, a nice pitch contour."
    
  • "I've been talking with Dr."
    

I feel similarly whenever I see a popular science/philosophy/crackpottery book with "Dr. Archibald Cornelius, PhD" or whatever on it. It makes me feel that their argument is weak enough that "hey, I have a degree!" is the best way to support it.

Serious scientists do this too sometimes, but not very often.

> I think too often the linguistic community ignores prescriptivism as a meaningful social construct

Linguists don't ignore prescriptivism; they reject it as being unscientific. Much of what prescriptivists claim we ought to say or write doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the face of the linguistic evidence. That's the point.

It's not true to say that if you a descriptivist, you can't advocate for using formal language in an essay, or advise people on how to deliver a presidential speech. You just do it from an informed scientific point of view. For example, Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive psychologist, wrote a style guide a few years ago as a modern descriptive alternative to Strunk and White et al.

On Strunk and White, this podcast episode by John McWhorter (Against Strunk and White) will give you more insight into the folly of prescriptivism. Well worth listening to.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Turkish-Language-Reform-Catastrophic/dp/0199256691

Ataturk has implemented a policy that attempted to purify the language from arabic, persian and to some extent western words.

The Language Hoax by John H. McWhorter.

This