Speakeasy wrote:Cainntear, your assertion “there is such a thing as right and wrong thought” evokes the very worst aspects of political and religious dogma … “thoughtcrime” would be Orwellian formulation.
Cainntear and Serpent, your representation of prescriptivism as being inexorably linked to “discrimination, wrong thought, favouritism by birth, racist ideas” requires substantiation. Putting your hyperbole aside for the moment, I wonder if you could please direct us all to some widely-accepted sociological studies that provide objectively-verifiable support for your points of view? Uh, that is, something other than subjective pseudo-studies supporting a “new” dogma.
So I don't have the energy to address all of your requests right now but I wanted to address two of them even though I neither Serpent or Cainntear. To your first bit in terms of whether or not there can and can't be wrong thoughts. I think I understand where you're coming from but at the same time I would say that somethings are just wrong. Thinking that someone is a lesser human being because of a Y race race or being X nationality for example. That's not ok. Sexism? Also not ok. Yes we all have implicit biases but I also think we should work on dealing with how to unlearn them.
I'm confused what you mean in terms of a "new dogma". Linguistics as a field has been pretty anti prescriptivism for decades so it's nothing new. It doesn't take a lot of Google scholar searching to find linguistic prescriptivism linked to discrimination. Also would you define what a "pseudo-study" is and give an example of where one has been cited in this thread? I will admit to having skimmed a chunk of it a while ago.