13 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. Who says it's not a word? Not a word, simply because lexicographers have not recognized it? When a lexicographer recognizes it, it has already been in use! Even Mr. Fiske says it is a word, although he obviously disprefers it.

      by the time a lexicographer recognizes it, it has already been in use

    2. I have become a dyed in the wool descriptionist because of Language Log, and have been known to cite entries here in battle against of the prescriptionistas of the Axis of Evil within the blogosphere.
    1. At the entry for irregardless, we provide a paragraph in which we note that the use of the word is still met with considerable objection, and we even go so far as to advise the reader to use regardless instead—which is about as close as we get to offering a usage prescription in our dictionaries.
  2. Oct 2023
    1. usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style
    2. In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader
  3. Aug 2022
  4. Jun 2022
    1. If you’d like to give this approach to executing projects a try, now isthe perfect time.Start by picking one project you want to move forward on. It couldbe one you identified in Chapter 5, when I asked you to make foldersfor each active project.

      At least two examples of the book attempting to engage the reader in carrying out the principles within.

      I wonder how many tried?

  5. Nov 2020
    1. I like to keep the ‘verb’ + ‘noun’ structure when writing button labels — this makes the action more prescriptive, e.g. ‘Save post’, ‘Next step’, etc, as opposed to ‘Save’, ‘Next’
  6. Aug 2020
    1. my point is that using "into" in such a case is just as incorrect as using "inas" would be. The fact that people make mistakes doesn't change this.

      "Log in" is the only correct way to spell the verb, and the only way to be consistent with 1000s of other phrasal verbs that are spelled with a space in them.

      We don't need nor want an exception to the general rule just for "login" just because so many people have made that mistake.

    2. In a sentence like Log in as "admin", you'd never write "*inas" as one word. Same thing with "in" and "to" when they just happen to end up next to each other in a sentence.
    3. That sounds like a pretty prescriptive attitude towards the language.