Wherein we post
insights we have found deep in meditation upon the mysteries of the universeI am a Grammar Communist. I believe that the means of word production (i.e: dictionaries) should be seized, for the good of the people.
We are succeeding. You can tell, because the Oxford English Dictionary made an emoji word of the year.
This is not only a clever snowclone of "Grammar Nazi", but also the polar opposite of Grammar Nazism.
There are two opposing camps when it comes to the study of linguistics -- linguistic prescriptivism and linguistic descriptivism. Linguistic perscriptivism is the attempt to
prescribe, i.e. dictate and standardize language, dialect, and usage based on criteria such as clarity, aesthetics, and cultural purity. Linguistic descriptivism, on the other hand, permits language to evolve on its own, and merely records the results. This, of course, is an oversimplification, but these two approaches to linguistics are diametrically opposed, and the middle ground between them does form a sort of sliding scale -- much like the traditional right-left model of politics, which puts fascism on the far right and communism on the far left.
Thus, we can say that Grammar Nazism is the extreme of linguistic prescriptivism, idealizing a world where the language and its usage by all speakers is frozen in time in a perfect state, whereas Grammar Communism is the extreme of linguistic descriptivism, idealizing a world where the dictionary is filled with net slang, emoji, and the most fleeting of trendy buzzwords.
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Topic: that's deep, man (Read 5728 times)