I always liked z's description of prescriptivists as "peevers."
My brother has started a thread on his FB page about his pet peeves. Of course, many of them are about words. Here is his most recent:
"Pet peeve of the week: Webster’s defines “flied” as “hit a fly ball in baseball.” It’s a word that has been around a long time. Unfortunately some baseball announcers have decided that it is not a word and started to say, for example, “Christian Yelich flew out to right.” What did he do, sprout wings?"
I see his point. However, I see nothing wrong with "flew out," though he tells me that is "wrong."
This post made me think about the word "peever." Is it actually a word, or did z just make it up? I found this article , written in 2012. From it:
quote:
Finally we get to peever, in the sense of one given to grumbling and complaint, often unfounded, about about errors in English and the supposed decay of English. It has not yet landed in the OED or M-W. The only entry for peever in the OED is "the stone, piece of pottery, etc., used in the game of hopscotch. Also: the game of hopscotch itself," dating from the nineteenth century.
I just checked, and as of 2019, the OED still only has that definition for "peever." It kinda reminds me of "epicaricacy" never getting into the OED.
Originally posted by Kalleh: One thing I've learned here is that if you know what is meant, it is not wrong.
Anything goes, huh? Writing or speech can be tedious, pompous, ungrammatical, and poorly phrased, and I can still understand what is meant, but that doesn't make it right.
No, of course I didn't mean that. But, to me, it is tedious to hear the on-and-on harping of pedants, where what they are passionate about doesn't matter at all. Indeed, as EB White so eloquently showed us in his books, those "rules" (which he authored with Mr. Strunk) often lead to poorer writing. The FB group, Extreme Pedantry, is my best example of tiresome, arrogant entries, which mean nothing in the history of linguistics.
