#descriptivism always

[disabledunitypunk]

If a community disability term, such as neurodivergence, contains diagnoses that in your experience are too different to be related, you can opt out of the term, but you do not get to disagree that the term still includes both for other people with those diagnoses.

I don't actually care what the coiner's intentions with a word were that much, beyond, "if even one person finds a wider or more inclusive definition meaningful, the definition expands to encompass their usage of it".

That's descriptivism, the idea that words only exist to be useful to us and that we shape their meaning to that end. It is the counterpart to prescriptivism, the idea that words have concrete, strict, static definitions and that we have to use the right words as accurately as possible and can't use words if they fit badly enough.

"Words have meanings" is a prescriptivist take, but so is "I don't feel neurodivergence includes xyz".

I mean this in a way less aggressive than it sounds, but quite simply, neurodivergence doesn't revolve around your experience of it.

I also find it symptomatic of the extreme cartesian dualist bias most people haven't actually examined that "physical disability" can include everything from neurogenic pain to irritable bowel disease to limb deformities to cardiac issues to asthma to paralysis to visual impairment and more, but neurodivergence and neurodisabilities are often limited to, if not the more palatable and less disordered forms, even just things that are primarily cognitive or emotional in nature.

To explain, cartesian dualism is the idea that there is a separate, nonphysical "mind" from the physical neurological structure of your brain and body - and that therefore essentially mental illness and neurodivergence are sicknesses and differences of an abstract consciousness that is little more than a different word for the idea of a "soul".

It's very disturbing to me that people think that, because we don't fully understand how bioelectrical and chemical processes or neurophysical structure inform the phenotypical presentation of disorders and neurodivergence with an array of cognitive-emotional symptoms, that we can simply just say "eh, it's not physical in the same way physical neurological symptoms are.

Okay, that's a mouthful, but basically, our entire consciousness - emotions, thoughts, the places in our physical bodies we feel our emotions (and store trauma), the physical symptoms of our mental illnesses, and so forth - they all are caused by one of essentially three categories of things.

Either the electrical signals passing between neurons in a certain order and direction, hormones and enzymes and proteins being chemically processed by receptors in brain and other bodily cells (which, it's important to note, mental illness and neurodivergence exist as a conversation between brain cells and other bodily cells), or the actual physical shape of the brain.

From what little we do understand, we know that electrical activity, chemical activity, and physical differences in the brain are responsible in some way for the psychological phenomena we study. We mostly just don't understand exactly HOW.

The similarities between primarily physical neurological conditions and primarily mental neurological conditions is that they are both a result of what is occurring in the neurological system (and to a lesser extent, in where the neurological system interfaces and communicates with other systems).

Migraines, nerve pain, epilepsy, bell's palsy, Parkinson's, tremors, stroke, lateral sclerosis - these are very different from things like bipolar, anxiety, OCD, NPD, AvPD, SzPD, PTSD, DID, autism, schizophrenia, ID, and so on, for many people.

It's why you can opt out of labels like neurodivergence for conditions you don't feel it fits.

But, crucially, you don't get to make that decision and universally define the word for others. The most inclusive definition of the word prevails, because there are people who do find that their experiences with things in each of those category are similar, or so closely related they can't be separated, or simply worth grouping together for the fact they occur in the same bodily system via the same or similar mechanisms.

For me, my chronic pain, my gut health issues, my MCAS, my autism, my anxiety, my PTSD, my DID, my chronic fatigue, my brain fog, my schizophrenia, my ADHD, my tremor, my dysautonomia, my balance issues and struggles with spacial awareness and lack of awareness of my physical body, the alexithymia that I've worked so hard to manage, my language and sensory processing disorders... it's all closely and heavily interrelated.

Some of it causes or worsens other parts (or in some cases is minimally suspected to, but I'm mainly focusing on the ones that inarguably directly cause the others here). My anxiety and PTSD trigger my gut issues. Inflammation from my MCAS triggers my chronic pain and brain fog and POTS and makes my anxiety, depression, and DID worse. My dyspraxia and sensory processing are worse when I'm brain foggy or in pain. Getting excited about special interests can make my tremor worse than anxiety can. This is kind of a weird one, but self-injury from BPD has caused nerve damage. Autism and ADHD cause a large portion of my chronic fatigue.

That's without even getting into where the symptom sets overlap.

Anxiety comes with tachycardia, shortness of breath, feelings of dread/doom, stomach upset, tremors, dysregulation of my sense of temperature, flushing, and more.

POTS comes with... tachycardia, shortness of breath, stomach upset, tremors, dysregulation of my sense of temperature, flushing, and more. And MCAS covers the "feelings of dread/doom", so when they are flaring up together...

Chronic pain is a symptom of depression and PTSD as well as fibromyalgia and nerve damage. Chronic fatigue is a symptom of just about every disability that exists.

Food sensitivities are as likely to be from neurodivergence as from eating disorders (which can be considered neurodivergent) as from GI issues. I see an allergist for my condition which is caused by dysregulation of gastrointestinal cells, which is suspected to potentially be related to trauma, which is also suspected as having a relationship with the dysautonomia present in my POTS, trauma for me which is as much a result of my neurodivergence and the casual ignorant and often nonmalicious ableism ingrained into every facet of society I faced as the abuse I went through. (And some of the abuse was a result of my disabilities, both primarily physical and primarily mental!)

There is no separating it for me. They are not different enough to deny myself a label that acknowledges that and never will be. Neurodivergence and neurodisability (a term I coined) as well are as much for people like me as people who have fully discrete separate symptoms.

I even find the separation of disabilities into "physical" and "psychological" to be a bit of a misdirection. Psychological disabilities are physical. They manifest through physical symptoms. Even emotional symptoms are experienced by the body on a physical level, though a lot of us neurodivergent folks struggle with awareness of that (I know I did and often still do).

Anxiety is often a rapid heart rate and sweating and shortness of breath. Depression is pain and appetite suppression and often low blood pressure. Sadness can be chest pain and throat tightness. Excitement often has near identical physical manifestations as anxiety. Happiness is usually felt throughout the whole body. Sensations of different temperatures, breathing, pulse, and gut functions are most primarily associated with emotion.

"Trust your gut" even means "trust your intuition", meaning your subconscious mental sense of safety vs danger, for this reason.

"My heart plummeted."

"My heart was in my throat."

"My stomach was roiling with nerves."

"I felt a cold sweat on my neck."

"I knew in my gut I could trust her."

These are how people describe emotions.

Even where the symptoms are either not identifiably physical or not experienced as physical in the consciousness (such as thought patterns), they are caused by physical processes in an actual physical organ. Their cause is the same at a fundamental level as a primarily physical symptom such as pain - while they may occur in different locations in the neurological system, or may be triggered by different sets of chemicals, at a basic level they are both physically occurring in the same bodily system.

Even separating out the brain as an organ from the rest of the body has actively limited scientific progress. It's only as modern science has actually been analyzing it in concert with the other bodily systems that it is responsible for both controlling and processing feedback from that large advancements in our understanding of neurology have been made.

The organ responsible for telling every other organ what to do and understanding what happens in every other organ cannot be compartmentalized and analyzed on its own. At least, not if we want any actual useful data.

I often wonder, for people who do have discrete symptom sets, is there a reason other than simply "it doesn't make sense to group it with my other neurodivergence" for saying they "disagree" with the definitions of neurodivergence and neurodisability that they are allowed not to use for themselves?

Is it possibly that neuroableism is so rampant in our society and even in disabled spaces that they simply haven't examined their own internalized biases and bigotry and they don't take neurodisabilities, including their own, as seriously as disabilities they consider more physical?

Is the idea that they have been as physical as their other disabilities all along scary or threatening because it means that in shoving them off into the realm of "mental" disability they've been pushing themselves past their limits to "overcome" something that is just as painful, just as harmful, and just as concretely, profoundly disabling as their other disabilities? That they were just as unable to do the things their disability prevented them from doing and hurting themselves just as much by trying to and then blaming themselves on top of it for the ways they "fell short" due to said disability?

This is not meant as an attack. I sometimes have the people who say this stuff unintentionally stumble on trauma triggers, but I don't dislike them. I wish I was more capable of having these conversations without really essentially running and hiding. I try to use this blog for that because I'm able to ignore it more easily than my main blog when I'm in a heightened state, and because it's more of a controlled environment where these conversations are intended to take place.

These are questions I'm asking specifically from analyzing past attitudes of mine. I didn't necessarily share them publicly, but there was a time where I felt similarly. I'm not asking out of some concern-trolling, either. I acknowledge that what I talked about is only one possible explanation for that belief, and if that is the case, I'd simply encourage the people for whom it's true to be patient with themselves and let themselves be disabled, whatever that means for them.

I don't even think it's necessarily a super harmful belief, although I think it crosses a line when the belief goes from "that's not how I use neurodivergent for myself" to "I don't think it's useful for neurodivergence to be defined that way in general". I think it's one we should all interrogate, sure. Providing a possible explanation is my way of trying to open up a conversation about that. Eliminating a possibility as wrong still gets us closer to a more accurate understanding, even at an individual level.

I think put quite simply though, if that is the case, I don't feel condescending and patronizing pity. I'm angry on all of our behalf that we live in a society that so deeply ingrains those ideas into us in order to uphold the oppression of all disabled people, and especially to sow disunity between us to disrupt our efforts at organization and liberation. I'm angry that we've been taught to hurt ourselves in this way. I'm furious that we've been convinced that this is the right way of understanding and dealing with disability.

So, to loop back around and neatly tie this post off with my original point: I would like to motivate people to examine WHY they label certain diagnoses as neurodivergent/neurodisabilities and others as not. I would encourage them to remember that an umbrella label including diagnoses of theirs that they don't want to use that label for doesn't make the definition wrong. I'd remind them that they are absolutely welcome to use a more restrictive definition individually without challenging the general definition, because words can mean multiple things.

And I'd say that the most important thing is just to remember when discussing this is that other people may consider a shared diagnosis to be neurodivergent where you don't, and that "disagreeing" with them is fundamentally "disagreeing" with their identity and how they experience it, which however well-intentioned is still bigotry. It doesn't make you a bad person, but it is a harmful action and the right thing to do is whatever needs to be done to not continue to harm others. Whether it's as simple as just stopping or as complex as analyzing the entire lens through which you view neurodivergence, the important thing is respecting that neurodivergent identity means different things for different people.

And after all, at least in English, 95 percent of the 3000 most frequently used words have multiple meanings, as do 100 percent of the top 1000 most used words. Words like go and set have upwards of 300-400 definitions! Rather than treating definitions like a math problem, right or wrong, let's treat them as interpretive, and facilitate communication by asking people which they mean.

#prescriptivism #descriptivism #mod stars #unitypunk #neurodivergence #neurodisability #disability #physical disability #neurology #neuropsychology #cartesian dualism #cw brief self harm mention #ableism #neuroableism #trauma #adding this in the tags: a good example is how lqbtqia+ people can opt out the reclaimed label queer #whether your identity is always considered valid as a queer identity or faces bigotry at every turn you can choose to demand inclusion #no matter whether or not you use the label queer #that's important

[myriad-rainbows]

#eta: OH GOD I MISSED A CLOSING PARENTHESIS THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING #poll #punctuation #writing #language #it's not that I am trying to make the sentence long on purpose it's just that I want to include all the relevant information #unfortunately Everything Is Connected so this means my sentences often end up long #anyway my answer is a consistent rule and i feel in my heart that the rule i use is Correct #but my heart is not always good at descriptivism so sometimes i have to be like “shhhh. it's okay.”

[obnebulant-mogai]

Linguistic Anarchy

[PT: Linguistic Anarchy /end PT]

Linguistic Anarchy is a subset of descriptivism (the idea that following linguistic rules is not always strictly necessary, read more about it on the wikipedia page) that emphasizes the bending or ignoring of linguistic rules to create more inclusive and accommodating language for queer people (especially neopronoun users) and preserving and recording language in an effort to oppose colonization.

[ID: A flag with three equal horizontal stripes. In descending order, the stripes are faded orange, faded yellow, and faded blue. The lower half of the flag is covered by a black triangle. In the center of the flag, there is a black circle with a white outline. In the middle of the symbol is a birdlike creature. End ID.]

The illustration in the center is a wug, which you can read about here.

Linguistic anarchy supports:

neopronouns, nounself pronouns, and emojipronouns

decolonization

degendering of language as needed

typing quirks with translation provided for accessibility

being accommodating and patient with people of neurodivergencies that make spelling and/or language difficult (i.e. dyslexia)

being accommodating and patient of those with OCD or similar who may feel the need to correct grammar or spelling

reclaiming slurs

normalization of Ebonics and similar

learning languages for communication or educational purposes (cultural appreciation)

Linguistic anarchy does NOT support:

spreading misinformation or disinformation about preexisting linguistic rules or concepts (i.e. folk etymologies)

getting rid of languages

misusing slurs or other offensive, marginalizing, and/or culturally appropriative language

prescriptivism

capitalism and associated concepts

bigotry

tagging @radiomogai (idk if this completely fits sorry)

#fresh scones #punk #pride #mogai #mogai flag #mogai safe #liom #mogai coining #liom safe #pro mogai #liom term #leftist #antifascist #anti capitalism #decolonisation #decolonize #decolonization #linguistic anarchy #descriptivism #idk what to tag this #linguistics #neopronouns #pro liom #liom coining #liomogai #anarchism #anarchy

[mlembug]

Hope you don't mind me asking, but does bi lesbian mean? I've not seen it before and get the impression that googling it might give a negative impression.

Gonna paste a conversation that happened the last time I asked a bi lesbian this. A: I'm ignorant on the subject. Who are "bi lesbians"? Bisexual women who like men, but like women even more? Bisexual women whose "women I'm attracted to" set of people is larger than "men I'm attracted to"? Something else? Asking you because while I could just look it up, a person who's completely in the dark can encounter bad info. B: Depends what it means to the person using this label for themself B: I know that personally I use it as in bi adjective, lesbian noun As in I'm 99% lesbian, but I add bi to it to respect my 1%, and to respect the potential non-binary people I could get in a relationship with that wouldn't want to be considered women/women-"lite" C: Lesbian is also not necessarily an exclusive term B: Lesbian was never an exclusive term until proto-terfs came along in the 80s and made it one B: Heck even if you prefer prescriptivism over descriptivism: I'm not into men, but I am into non-binary people - I am into more than one gender identity, which also qualifies as bi by the 1991 bi manifesto definition, therefore my use of bi is justified even by "strict definition" standards, and my main, primary and default attraction being towards women, lesbian is also justified B: like you could come up with 50 different justifications for using bi lesbian as being more appropriate for you personally than either used alone A: yeah, these answer my question; thanks for your time answering B: But exclusitionists don't care, they don't know LGBT history, they don't know that lesbian defined as "exclusively attracted to women/never ever attracted to men" was pushed by transphobes and racists in the 80s that were angry that trans women and black women could be lesbians A: "angry that [...] black women could be lesbians" what B: yyeeep B: welcome to political lesbianism from upper middle class british white women from the 80s B: they were a fucked up bigoted bunch B: where they defined lesbian less as "likes women" and more "hates men" B: It's also thanks to them that we have the "gold star lesbian" label for any woman that hasn't "slept with the enemy" if I were to use their words B: I mean, hey, while I "understand" where transphobes are coming from (but not agree with them obviously), having encountered their logic nearly all my life, I can't even begin to comprehend the "logic" of that one B: like the idea that you can be a "lesser" lesbian… You'll find it popping up multiple times in lesbian discourse, and if you do the historical digging, it always, without fail, wraps back to UK white upper middle class bigots B: anyway that was my discourse for the day, thanks for listening~

[ofpd]

second priority is descriptivism. first priority will always be being annoying

#txt

[msamba]

Why Do Experts Always Defend Language Mistakes

Practice critical thinking and become a smarter news consumer by subscribing through my link https://ground.news/drgeofflindsey to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Plan. So often linguists seem to be defending language errors simply because they’re all ‘woke’. In this video we look at prescriptivism and descriptivism, standards, language ‘rules’, arbitrariness and the way emotions…

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#comparison #Culture #history

[saddude69]

Smol — Today at 9:48 AM Like, I can get down with let's go read the text together, what I cannot get down with is I won't read the text you're talking about, because it's all just idle talk and actually not engaging with anything, and just preventing dialog when you gatekeep that someone needs to go read a stack of nazi authors in order to read one of them. I don't read right wingers, unless they actually have something interesting to say, and Nietzsche is definitely not a right winger, in my view, the lumping in of Nietzsche with Heidegger in terms of Naziism, first of all he wasn't even around when the Nazis were around, and it shows a profound misreading of his texts, to think that he stands for what the Nazis stand for, when he actually said that once he felt antisemitic things, and then he reproached himself for feeling them, if I remember a Todd McGowan episode on Nietzsche. He also attacks antisemites.

Nietzsche also, is an author who I have journals on, for several of his books, and is an author who I have spent all sorts of time grappling with. I approached Heidegger thinking I would find much more Nazi ideology than I actually found. What I found, like I said, was a descriptivist project, which was trying to explain how we bring being into the fold. I don't mean to imply the Leibniz book the fold by Deleuze, but the unfolding of things, the way that we perceive being as it is, as opposed to what we want it to be. This is the central conceit in Heidegger which I have grappled with which seems questionable to me. But I also feel as though, he's not doing analytic philosophy. He has a different doxa than Deleuze, in that he thinks that we bring things into being which were already there as eidos, or ideas in greek. Deleuze thinks that time is immemorial, and precipitates the ideas of Plato, whereas actual Plato scholars will say that Plato's ideas are not representations, so the way that Deleuze thinks about Plato is actually not the way modern Plato scholars think of him.

In a way, sense precipitates everything, like Plotinus's one. And if you look at what Heidegger valued in the essay on the world picture, you'll see that he was actually questioning representation. Kent Palmer, who I worked with on several books by Heidegger, Hegel, and Hyppolite, read a book which inspired Deleuze called Logic and Existence, and you can do your own work in finding where in the text the ideas come from. It's not always like they come out and say who their influences are. You can see the way that philosophies play with one another when you actually deep read them. Everyone should know, who is a mod, that that is my project is an intertextual dialog between the texts of various authors. So now that I have understood the problem in explicating my positions on Heidegger, I will have to get to work on writing more about why I think upon revisiting several key texts from Heidegger, that what there is to critique in him, which is also what my Heidegger professor thinks there is to crtique in him, is the descriptivism. From what I am told by my professor, he didn't write anything praising the nazis later in life that my professor knows of. Pertaining to his works, many great thinkers have been inspired by Heidegger. What has happened in this server, is a hysteria, and I don't mean that in a genered way, but rather a questioning, an unwraveling of nothingness. It's literally a fear of nothing, something very few people, as a matter of fact, have read. And the ones who have in history, tend to make history.

Smol — Today at 10:13 AM I also think that to misunderstand Heidegger fundamentally is to not understand what authenticity for him means. Authenticity for Heidegger is how when you're caught up in the they, the gaze of the other, the generalized otherness of the subject, you're inauthentic. Lacan agrees with this, when you are a part of the subject, you are not making decisions for yourself. Most of the time we are inauthentic, we are caught up in the ways of the other, the gaze of the other, the desire of the other - our desire is the desire of the other when we are inauthentic. Lacan is the opposite side of things, which makes us caught up inauthentically in the they, as Heidegger calls it. The they, we could consider Oedipalization, a no which we say to ourselves, which makes us see ourselves as other than ourselves, and we detach ourselves from ourselves, so that we can take a detached, and so called neutral view of our own actions - displaced into the sublimation of the superego, which reacts to past socializations in order to uphold the structures it is trained to uphold. So you can see, how in upholding the desire of the other, we are inauthentic. For Heidegger, to say that you must be a nazi, would be to be caught up in the inauthenticity of the they. That is what he means, he thinks that people are inauthentic most of the time, he thinks the nazi party is inauthentic most of the time, and he thought that he could help them realize a mode of being which was actually pretty non violent, even if it was neutral. It involved seeing other daseins as ends in themselves. That's not what he upheld in his actions, by joining the nazi party, and I made sure to grill the professor on Heidegger about this. But he said that yes, that is how he's a Nazi is the descriptivism, sweeping the good, which Plato sees as part of being under a rug. The is, without the ought. That is my only reproach to Heidegger, otherwise, he is a magnificent writer.

Smol — Today at 10:21 AM And to say that Heidegger does not embody emotions, that he is all about descriptivism, that is not exactly true either. He thinks that one's mood is fundamental to how one interprets. Relaxed moods allow for one to focus better, they allow conflict resolution on a high level of detail, whereas the mental image of the conflict which one constructs becomes hazy and foggy when one approaches it from the perspective of a hostile 1 on 1 debate, aimed at making one person submit to the other side's views. In that situation, you can see how the circumspection, or how one circumscribes the possibilities of the situation, based on one's mood, onto the future to organize how they react to the past, future, and react in the present. If you take Heidegger seriously, actually you'd see it as a pretty good reason for an ethical reflection on his work. If we look at the way in which people present themselves, meaning unfold the gift of whatever they have in store, waiting potentially, or precipitated spontaneously from one's rhizomatic pathways of desire, then one might say that either way pathways are being blocked, or allowed. Certain pathways, are directed towards debate, when we clearly have a rule against debate. Pathways are directed towards enjoying at other people's expense. So the best that we can do is learn to respect other people's boundaries

Smol — Today at 10:33 AM I also want to point out that if we really consider the neurotic to be something which is Oedipalized, then the hysteric is not something which we would want to become, if we are taking the view of the hysteric as one who is simply obeying a neurotic command, maybe somewhat like an automoton. In today's philosophy, it is not fashionable to talk as though we have any freedom. If we do, our freedom comes from an fantasy institution, which has laws it makes up which regard our freedom relative to it. But we all know that it's might which determines power, not any word of an instution, or goodness or freedom it provides. So if we look at the neurotic as one who questions the master, but does things for the big other, or the law of society, and questions things in an open way in a way which unwravels things - what I mean is the way we approach Heidegger, having not read him, and then critiquing him, is a form of hysteric emotional compuslion. It sounds really rational, and logical, to say hey I read this secondary on an author by a professor who thinks Heidegger's work is all nazi because of the black notebooks, when you haven't read Heidegger yourself, or saying that I must have simply overlooked the nazi stuff, because I'm too stupid, that's imposing rationality when really it's just implying I know nothing about naziism, and then proceeding to shit on my reading of Heidegger, which no one understands. It's actually not very rational when you think about it, it's actually more like what Deleuze calls "the problem." The problem is continual, it's not a solution. The solution is not Heidegger is a nazi, that's a representationalist, same way every time way of looking at Heidegger, the post-modernist way of reading him is to return to his text to mine for new interpretations. You treat the text as though it were a bulleton board, and not a canvas, on which to reflect oneself, and the good which one sees through their own authenticity.

Heidegger would say artwork brings about being, but for me, the unique, which is not singular or multiple, but proceeds both, brings about things which bear a unique mark.

Smol — Today at 10:43 AM But of course we are not simply singularities, we are multiplicties of singularities, in chains, forming machines which are also multiple. There is no global person which makes up any person, but regions of chains of sociohistorical singularities, each multiplying their meaning as they shine forth from the real, in all of its partial object and flow connections on the surface of the body without organs, where everything is recorded. We act through history, you can see everyone acting in accordance with the unfolding of the they, or the fossil record, the recording surface of our everyday interactions. We all come into being through past interactions, and we are shaped by them. So we have to unlearn many ways of behaving which have been invoked into us by repetition. Sometimes I wonder if Freud's philosophy was all about his incestuous feelings towards his mother, and other times, I think without Freud, we would have no ability to think that way. We would have no way to question the intention of what people say and assume that there's some deeper unconscious motive. This is what is so insidious about everyday discourse, is we think that we can understand sublimation without a deep understanding of a person's personal history. We don't know what goes into the past ways that people understand things, and the way that they say them, in which there is no normal relation to the symbolic order even for Lacan. To dismiss all of psychoanalysis would be a mistake. We can see psychoanalysis has many implications which, like any author, are probably useful in some regards, probably others not so much. It's a case by case basis, and there is a whole history of people reading authors, and reading the authors against themselves as not true enough to their own practice. For instance, we can say psychoanalysis wants to heal people, yet it dissolves material relations. What do we do? The fundamental fantasy is communism, reverse the tables on the Lacanians.

[vardasvapors]

—Rosario Castellanos, tr. by Julian Palley, from Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry; “Two meditations”

#wild beings whose shrieks shatter this bell jar #i’m making it a tag #poetry #rosario castellanos #mexican poetry #descriptivism always #smitten.

[zukkas]

hi what’s that thing you’ve talked about a couple of times that’s like ??? people who are really picky about grammar rules

i think what you mean is prescriptivism!

so basically, in linguistics, there are two ways to talk about language. one of them is descriptive, where you describe language as it is, without making any value judgment on it. prescriptivism, on the other hand, is when you say this is how language SHOULD be, and everything else is wrong. an example of prescriptivism would be someone saying you absolutely NEED to use the oxford comma and that if you don't, your way of writing is incorrect, while a descriptivist would instead just say that the oxford comma is a thing and note its use cases without saying whether it's correct or not.

descriptivism is one of the core principles of linguistics, because we acknowledge that language is varied and changes over time, something that has been observed time and time again, in pretty much any language. so for example, the dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive; instead of saying this is how you should use these words, it merely describes the way they were used at the time of publication, and are always subject to change.

this isn't to say that grammar isn't real or important, but moreso that grammar is more varied than we think. a construction like "i been saying" is perfectly grammatically consistent with the rules of AAVE (african american vernacular english), but prescriptivists would try to say that it's wrong because it doesn't align with the grammar of standard english.

that got away from me a bit, but i hope my explanation made sense! if you have any other questions let me know ❤️

#asks #linguistics #descriptivism #prescriptivism

[drank-the-gender-fluid]

descriptivism over prescriptivism. labels are meant to describe the commonalities of individual experiences, not to taxonify people based on their perceived differences. there are many different ways in which people can relate to each others life experiences, and they may not always be for others to understand. often times it cannot be reduced to one definition because the human experience is vast, beautiful, and complex.

#transmasc #trans #ftm #mtf #lesbian #bisexual #queer #gender queer #please god stop arguing over definitions

[posi-pan]

It's late and this might not make sense but I think one of the reasons exclusionists are Like They Are is because they're too fixated on there being an objectively true way to interpret queer identities (and that the way they have decided to interpret them is that truth) instead of everyone having something different to say about the way they interpret theirs and other identity labels it's like descriptivism vs prescriptivism in language except instead of getting mad when someone uses the word literally to mean figuratively they send death threats to strangers online for daring to use bad label word me no like

yes to all of it. queerphobia within the community always boils down to people feeling threatened by others being queer differently than them so they fabricate reasons why that queerness shouldn’t be accepted.

#asks #catboy jesus #exclusionism

[finestoftheflavors]

The concept of “down” as a multipurpose metaphor

I find myself thinking about this all the time, and personally I think this simple metaphor works as a visualization of various concepts involving things being “subjective” vs “objective” which endlessly confuse people. Off the top of my head, we can easily resolve “morality: objective or subjective?” and “linguistic prescriptivism or descriptivism?”

Suppose we’re standing in the same room together. What direction is “down”? [points finger] It’s that way. Simple. But suppose we change the context a little, for example by travelling some number of miles north. Eventually you’ll be able to measure that my “down” arrow has changed direction by some number of degrees. Turns out the concept of “down” is not so simple! Suppose we call our friend on the opposite side of the Earth. What is eir idea of “down”? We might all compare notes and decide that “down” means “toward the center of gravity of the Earth”.

Suppose we get on a rocket and fly into space. At some point we realize the concept of “down” has again become more complicated! Of course we can still point toward the center of the earth -- let’s call that direction EarthDown. But we’re in zero-gravity now, with no gravitational pull does it make sense to point down anymore? We accelerate our rocketship in some direction, suddenly we can stand again, now we can intuitively point “down” which is the direction our rocket came from. Or maybe we have a rotating cylinder or ring on our spacecraft, that cylinder will have its own sense of “down” which is away from the center of the spinning cylinder. Neither of these other “down” directions have anything to do with EarthDown.

Now we land on Mars. It will be immediately obvious now that we have a new “down” direction that we’ll call MarsDown. While you’re on Mars you could still point toward Earth and call that “down” if you want. For that matter, the whle time you were on Earth, you could have pointed at Mars and called that “down” too, if you’d thought to do that for some reason. But if somebody you’d known on Earth had a habit of doing that, you probably would’ve said e was nuts. The Martians will think you’re nuts if you insist on saying “down” while pointing to Earth and then saying “the direction of Mars’s gravitational pull” while pointing to your feet. The Earthlings and Martians would clear up a lot of mutual confusion if they stopped arguing about whose “down” is the real one and instead talked about EarthDown and MarsDown.

You know the AlphaCentaurans have their own “down” too. They’re so far away, to them the directions EarthDown and MarsDown are approximately the same thing.

So of course I’m using this as a metaphor for different systems of morality, or cultural differences, or languages. Feel free to say that your own culture’s concept of morality is EarthDown in the metaphor. Some other concept of morality, like traditionalist Roman Catholicism, is represented by Mars. If you’re visiting a society of social conservative Catholics then you can expect them to judge things by a Catholic idea of morality, just like if you’re visiting Mars then you can expect Martians to think of “down” as “the direction of Mars’s gravitational pull”, even though the standards of right and wrong, as well as the concept of “down”, are different where you’re from.

Wherever you go in the universe, you can still always point to Earth and say that’s EarthDown and you’ll be correct. A person whos standing upright by EarthDown standards has eir feet pointed to Earth and eir head pointed away from Earth, we can call that EarthUpright and observe that people on Earth generally stand EarthUpright while people on Mars generally don’t. The Martians will have their own, different, intuition about what they should call “standing upright” -- over there, they’ll stand MarsUpright instead. Alternatively, we could say “standing upright means standing upright relative to the planet you’re on” and that’s a coherent statement too.

Let’s reattach the metaphor -- what does it mean to be morally upright? You could say, “being morally upright means being moral according to the standards of the society you live in” and that’s a coherent statement. Alternatively, we could say that being morally upright by secular liberal standards means being moral according to the standards of a secular liberal society. And being morally upright by religious traditionalist standards means being moral according to the standards of a religious traditionalist society. We can observe that people in secular liberal societies behave (or at least try to, or claim to) according to secular liberal moral standards, while people in religious traditionalist societies don’t. Whatever society you go to, you can always point to your own secular liberal moral standards and say, “this is right/wrong (by my morals)” and you’ll be correct.

I hope you now realize that the question of whether there’s an objective morality, is a silly question. Exercise for the reader: apply my metaphor to similarly dissolve the topic of linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism.

#religion #politics #may have been inspired by a scifi movie #in which Muslim characters on another planet prayed toward Mecca by forming a circle and addressing the sky instead of facing one direction #you see they were facing the direction EarthDown

[protoindoeuropean]

I’m always fascinated by people who are saying “language is made up, fuck the rules!!” & are in general against hard prescriptivism —EXCEPT when it’s woke or sth not to be and then suddenly, using Mayans instead of Maya, Goys or Goyims instead of Goyim, pronouncing quinoa as [kwəˈnoʊ̯ə] (for example) instead of [ˈkinwɑ], Qur’an and Islam with [æ] instead of [ɑ] and generally pronouncing things as it would be natural to English speakers (this here all refers to English, where we see that happen most often) ... is a sign of ultimate ignorance (which, like, it is ... but in the literal sense of *not knowing*, which is to be expected – words don’t spread with usage notes included lol) and a priori considered wrong (descriptivism who?). Half the stuff that is expected of English (and its speakers) would never fly in other languages....

Phone substitution (replacing a sound in a foreign word by a sound that’s proper to the recipient language) is sth that inescapably will happen and often according to patterns that are not obvious at first sight (like how English and German words with open /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ will often get borrowed into Slovene with close /e/ and /o/, even though Slovene does have open /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ too). Not to mention the influence of orthography, which is the reason why most of the languages that borrowed jungle from English treat that u as real, with pronunciations like [u] or [ʊ], even though it was just used to render the sound [ʌ], which is the English substitution of Hindi/Urdu [ə] ... There’s tons of things like that and if you want to be consistent in your relaxed approach to language and have more descriptive rather than prescriptive outlook, then that’s something to consider.

#j #lang #edited: i just noticed i used à in a priori as if it were french lmaoo #that's what writing in french the whole day does to you.... #pop

[thefiresontheheight]

I'm not going to be rude to you in any way and I hope you'll do the same for me. You can always ignore this ask if you want to. I'm just going to lay out the facts and ask a few questions if that's okay. I was wanting to know what you think a woman is. A woman is an adult female and it isn't something you can identify into. What do you define a woman as? Without using the word "woman". Or saying "I just feel this way and that trumps biology" (1/?)

Okay, long post incoming.

First, you said that a woman is an adult human female. If asked you’d probably say being female has something to do with producing eggs. Presumably both of these definitions originally came from a dictionary. But that raises the question of where the dictionary got the definition, which is why I’m going to be talking about the philosophy of language.

Broadly speaking, there are two major ways of approaching language, grammar and definitions: prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism is the belief that there are certain correct ways of using a language, and that definitions and grammar can be incorrect. A descriptivist, such as myself, would view a definition as only being a reflection of common usage. I would argue this position because trying to affix a word to a specific definition will inevitably run afoul of linguistic and cultural drift, such as has occurred around the word “queer.”

So then, let’s look at common usage. When a stranger points me out in a crowd they typically use language used for women, such as she and her. In short they perceive me as a woman, both strangers and friends. I am legally a woman. In my records with the doctors I go to I am a woman. So in common usage me, and a lot of other trans women, are women, so, since definitions follow common usage, the word woman must encompass trans women.

I’m not going to make what is, in my opinion, a far more compelling argument, stemming from ethics, since I don’t think you’d accept it, but suffice to say I still think that if you can make someone happier through using different pronouns or language you have a moral obligation to do so, since it comes at so little cost to you.

As a descriptivist, I’d say that any definition will be reductive, but here’s my stab at a definition. A woman is an adult human belonging to a group characterized by possessing some, but not necessarily all, of the following characteristics: the ability to produce ova, XX chromosomes, higher estrogen levels and lower testosterone levels, the absense of external genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts, and greater fat deposits on the hips and thighs, and the absense of others such as facial hair, fulfilling the social roll expected of women, social recognition as a woman, performative actions declaring themselves to be women, use of language used for women, and an internal conception of themselves as women.

Note I did leave out a more compelling argument, and that other trans people can and will disagree with this line of reasoning. (And if any of my followers do I’d love to hear from you.)

A lesbian is a woman who loves only other women. More or less, keeping in mind that with all things definitions will fall short of reality. Since, as previously established, I am a woman, and so is my fiancée, and I have no interest in men, I am a lesbian. This is also true in common usage. When I tell people I am engaged to a woman they describe me as a lesbian, or other less choice words.

Butch/femme culture arose in bars catering to women who loved other women. Butches were associated with certain sexual roles, and also with protecting femmes. Butches were more likely to be working in one of the few jobs open to masculine presenting women, or even to go stealth as men in order to make a living. Butches asked femmes to dance, and were more likely to be targeted by police. With the increased ability to be openly attracted to women outside of bars, butch/femme identification waned, but, in the modern day, some lesbians, myself included, identify as butch by choice, because we see butches in history, and around us, and want to be like them. We aspire to that.

[sam91092]

Descriptivism Vs. Prescriptivism

As I was listening to yet another linguistic podcast today, it hit me that maybe not very many people know that much about linguistics. So, here I am to spread the word!

I think the first wonderful point I want to make is very much apart of linguistics 101 and it is a way of thinking that I hope more people can at least be aware of.

Linguistics are what is called descriptivists. Meaning, we more want to describe language. Many "grammar nazis" as they are known, are called prescriptivist. Those are the people who love to point out when someone makes a grammatical error or likes to correct people when they talk. To do this, however, they must know each and every grammatical rule in Standard English? But, what is Standard English? Of course we make that distinction but many could argue what is standard and what is not. And there are many grammatical rules that I would think a good number of people don't understand. For example, there's a rule saying you can't end a sentence with a preposition. A good example of this might be, "Where are you coming from?" From is a preposition. To me, this sentence sounds natural and acceptable.

Another argument might be formal vs. informal. I will agree that we have different types of writing based on what context it is in. You would not use the same language in an email to your boss as you would in a text to your friend.

That being said, my point is that language is always changing and with it, so are the rules.

My hope is that more teachers, like myself, can understand that while there are rules for English, we don't need to focus only on those. It is important to teach students the standard way of writing and speaking, but it is also okay if they use their versions/ dialects in the right contexts.

[ofpd]

it was a great post and it resonated with people. im really sad you changed it. it was genuinely sweet but people on tumblr always have to be cynical and mean about everything :(. nothing allowed on here unless its totally ironic and cynical.

me saying “linguistic descriptivism <333” was incredibly sincere

#also the post resonated w me too that's why i posted it. you literally dont know me #asks #anon