A brief note on linguistic descriptivism

Written originally as a footnote in "On Linguistic Inflation", but then split into a separate post because this is important to my philosophy. You'll see crossover with the topics/examples from that post.

Previously titled: "A brief note on language before I continue"

When I say words are “wrong” here, I mean they are being used differently from their original, specialized meaning. At the time of writing this, I’m in the “linguistic descriptivist“ camp, in that I believe that language should only be described, not prescribed; we shouldn’t try to dictate how others use language, as long as the language that they use is effective at communicating what they want to say. (I.e. we shouldn’t forbid people from using slang or other kinds of informal language simply because it’s not the ‘right‘ way to speak or write — I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t discourage people from antisocial behavior via language, like insulting or disparaging others.) We should understand how language has evolved, rather than lamenting its change.

So I haven’t yet decided my opinion on whether the informal use of ”dopamine”, “libertarianism,” and other specialized terms to mean things outside of their original meaning is a legitimate usage. I‘m thinking about adding an exception to my beliefs for jargon, because it‘s usually only used by people with knowledge about a topic and informal use will probably result in confusion (i.e. It wouldn’t satisfy the “meaningfulness” criterion) but I’m not confident either way. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m putting those beliefs aside; I’ll pretend for a moment that I think words have one single, inherent, and original meaning because otherwise this concept is really hard to describe.

Here's a tweet to sum it up:

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1623834697167151105?s=61&t=GsvcJQlf5g9i8tekyF_yUg

(I'm sorry, I swear I'm not a twitter user I just opened it up for the first time in like three months and now it's reappeared)