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Tag Archives: assertionist
Conflating the Issues
I’m once again dipping into the miasma that is political language for this week’s vocabulary word: conflate. It’s a word on the march, or at least under stress: it’s got a mostly neutral past, but it’s been slowly taking on … Continue reading
Posted in Words
Tagged ahd, ambiguous, assertionist, conflate, conflated, conflation, confuse, merriam-webster, normalcy, oed, political, politics, prescriptivist, propaganda
14 Comments
Oh, the enormity…
I’ll bet you think you know the meaning of the word “enormity.” And I’ll be that at least 8 out of 10 people are wrong…at least according to dictionaries. Enormity does not mean “very big.”
Posted in Words
Tagged 9/11, assertionist, enormity, enormous, enormousness, etymology, evil, hindenburg, large, law, legal, nunberg, oed, skunked term, volokh
3 Comments
My Prescription for Description
Or maybe I should title this “My Description of Prescription.” It depends on which side you come at the issue from. Are you a descriptivist or a prescriptivist?
Posted in Grammar, Superstition, Things you should know
Tagged assert, assertionist, assertive, comics, describe, description, descriptive, descriptivist, language log, prescribe, prescription, prescriptive, prescriptivist, rules, safire, teaching, tolerance, usage, volo
1 Comment
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