prescriptivist

English

Etymology

prescriptive + -ist

Noun

prescriptivist (plural prescriptivists)

  1. (linguistics) Someone who lays down rules regarding language usage, or who believes that traditional norms of language usage should be upheld.
    • 2001 April, David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage”, in Harper's Magazine:
      The plutocratic tone and styptic wit of Safire and Newman and the best of the Prescriptivists is often modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same Twin Towers of scholarly Prescriptivism whom Garner talks about revering as a kid.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Translations

See also

Adjective

prescriptivist (comparative more prescriptivist, superlative most prescriptivist)

  1. Having a tendency to prescribe.
    • 2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes, page 312:
      In short, they tend to present Indian English as nothing more than "standard" English with a select collection of lexical peculiarities tacked on, as it were, many of which would be regarded as "errors" by prescriptivist language scholars.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Translations

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.