Linguistics webcomics--just what I was waiting for!
Dinosaur Comics examines the finer points of linguistics.
The (serious) problem implied is a large one; you obviously can't completely formalize living languages because they're continually changing based on the whims of individual speakers at the end of the day. "Language is in a constant state of change," my first linguistics professor would intone frequently. As a lover of nice bright lines, however, I certainly don't want linguistics to devolve into some relativist mess; the language couldn't function without some fundamental order anyway (and I mean really fundamental stuff like the difference between nouns and verbs, "Verbing weirds language" aside).
In my undergraduate thesis I sidestepped the issue by framing the moral issue in a hypothetical imperative--you ought to use whatever linguistic effects/rhetorical ploys/speaking style you need to convey whatever it is you want to in whatever context you're in--which makes it contingent on intention and context, which are knowable things, rather than dependent on absolute rules or relative to anybody's feelings. (I'll also admit to concentrating on the moral issue because it was more interesting than the epistemological one--even though the epistemological issue, how precisely we're supposed to arrive at definitions for words other than majority decisions once we recognize straight prescriptivism as misguided, is the more fundamental problem.)
So as a lover of nice bright lines and logical consistency I can sympathize with Dromiceiomimus--and as a lover of geekery in general I can feel slightly ashamed that I hadn't noticed that particular meaning before--but pragmatically, I wouldn't count on such a particular distinction to spontaneously reintroduce itself into the language, regardless of how cool it would be.
The (serious) problem implied is a large one; you obviously can't completely formalize living languages because they're continually changing based on the whims of individual speakers at the end of the day. "Language is in a constant state of change," my first linguistics professor would intone frequently. As a lover of nice bright lines, however, I certainly don't want linguistics to devolve into some relativist mess; the language couldn't function without some fundamental order anyway (and I mean really fundamental stuff like the difference between nouns and verbs, "Verbing weirds language" aside).
In my undergraduate thesis I sidestepped the issue by framing the moral issue in a hypothetical imperative--you ought to use whatever linguistic effects/rhetorical ploys/speaking style you need to convey whatever it is you want to in whatever context you're in--which makes it contingent on intention and context, which are knowable things, rather than dependent on absolute rules or relative to anybody's feelings. (I'll also admit to concentrating on the moral issue because it was more interesting than the epistemological one--even though the epistemological issue, how precisely we're supposed to arrive at definitions for words other than majority decisions once we recognize straight prescriptivism as misguided, is the more fundamental problem.)
So as a lover of nice bright lines and logical consistency I can sympathize with Dromiceiomimus--and as a lover of geekery in general I can feel slightly ashamed that I hadn't noticed that particular meaning before--but pragmatically, I wouldn't count on such a particular distinction to spontaneously reintroduce itself into the language, regardless of how cool it would be.