Talk:History of linguistic prescription in English

Weak article

This seems to me to be a particularly weak article. It was tagged as unsourced almost 15 years ago, and since then little has been done to it apart from some minor wikification. For a history of such a complex topic it is far too brief. The focus on a couple of hackeyed old examples belies the range of issues involved. One would think that the change of attitudes in the 20th century was a sudden Damascus Road experience for the whole of society and the resulting situation uncontroversial. There is no discussion of what is to be included under the term "prescription": the unspoken assumption seems to be that a thing is prescription if it is a bad thing, like a teacher advising a pupil to follow an antiquated rule that the commentator doesn't like, but not if it is a good thing, like a teacher showing a pupil how a different choice of words can improve communication; but actually both of those are equally prescriptive. To talk about right or wrong spelling is prescription, and while linguists don't use those categories, society as a whole finds them useful. So there is a complete lack of nuance here. Our article linguistic prescription does a better job, but is also too simplistic. To be honest, unless someone wants to do something radically new with this article, it should probably be deleted. Doric Loon (talk) 09:15, 21 July 2023 (UTC)