Yes. Ling PhD here – after teaching for 10+ years, the thing most people consistently do not understand about language is: the dictionary does not define what words mean. Dictionaries at best are a representation of what words meant at one time, and those meanings change quickly and pervasively enough that there is constantly a non-zero* number of words for which the dictionary is already wrong.
*in actuality it’s probably significantly higher than what is connotated by “non-zero”
Yes, this is the excuse I use too when I mess up the pronunciation of a word and people have an issue with it. They understood the meaning so the communication was successful which is the point.
100%. If people get the point, that’s a successful transfer of information. You may have transferred more than you wanted (like the implication that you’ve never heard the word before), but you did complete the transfer.
While I don’t support language prescriptivism just for the sake of it, there should be a common understanding what words mean.
Otherwise language loses its function to accurately and effectively transport information, no?
There is, though: that’s exactly why we can communicate in the first place. The fact that one can have spoken language mastery without literacy also suggests we really don’t need to be defining words explicitly in order to use them effectively.
Similarly, I’d speculate thay the word “blog” was likely in usage for years before it showed up in a dictionary. It would have been added to that dictionary based on its existing commonality – so I don’t see how shared written word definitions really help at all, even with new coinages.
Defining words in a meaningful way (pun intended) is actually a really difficult proposition. A lot of that comes from the fact that context means a whole lot, and words may also have different meanings to different people. It can be useful in some situations to have some written definitions – e.g., legal proceedings, where word meanings need to be locked down to avoid possible ambiguities. Mostly this is done as a matter of convenience, though, and within a very specific domain.
Modern dictionaries are (mostly) descriptive, but I would rather they were proscriptive and absolutely forbid misusing words; even going as far as giving examples of why one use was right and another wrong.
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… but… that said, I firmly believe that ‘affect’ should relate to ‘affectation’ and ‘effect’ should relate to ‘change’ and ‘result’, but I realize the world will say I’m wrong in phrases like, “the pandemic effected everyone.” When I put ‘affected’ in there, I read it as the pandemic suddenly anthropomorphizing itself to literally act like humanity – acting like it was ‘everyone’.
Yes. Ling PhD here – after teaching for 10+ years, the thing most people consistently do not understand about language is: the dictionary does not define what words mean. Dictionaries at best are a representation of what words meant at one time, and those meanings change quickly and pervasively enough that there is constantly a non-zero* number of words for which the dictionary is already wrong.
*in actuality it’s probably significantly higher than what is connotated by “non-zero”
Yes, this is the excuse I use too when I mess up the pronunciation of a word and people have an issue with it. They understood the meaning so the communication was successful which is the point.
100%. If people get the point, that’s a successful transfer of information. You may have transferred more than you wanted (like the implication that you’ve never heard the word before), but you did complete the transfer.
While I don’t support language prescriptivism just for the sake of it, there should be a common understanding what words mean.
Otherwise language loses its function to accurately and effectively transport information, no?
There is, though: that’s exactly why we can communicate in the first place. The fact that one can have spoken language mastery without literacy also suggests we really don’t need to be defining words explicitly in order to use them effectively.
Similarly, I’d speculate thay the word “blog” was likely in usage for years before it showed up in a dictionary. It would have been added to that dictionary based on its existing commonality – so I don’t see how shared written word definitions really help at all, even with new coinages.
Defining words in a meaningful way (pun intended) is actually a really difficult proposition. A lot of that comes from the fact that context means a whole lot, and words may also have different meanings to different people. It can be useful in some situations to have some written definitions – e.g., legal proceedings, where word meanings need to be locked down to avoid possible ambiguities. Mostly this is done as a matter of convenience, though, and within a very specific domain.
Modern dictionaries are (mostly) descriptive, but I would rather they were proscriptive and absolutely forbid misusing words; even going as far as giving examples of why one use was right and another wrong. … … but… that said, I firmly believe that ‘affect’ should relate to ‘affectation’ and ‘effect’ should relate to ‘change’ and ‘result’, but I realize the world will say I’m wrong in phrases like, “the pandemic effected everyone.” When I put ‘affected’ in there, I read it as the pandemic suddenly anthropomorphizing itself to literally act like humanity – acting like it was ‘everyone’.