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Usenet Posted 21 years ago
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From the companion volume to PBS television's *Do You Speak American*

Do You Speak American is a program which will appear on the US television network PBS ("Public Broadcasting System," a government-owned network) and will have Robert McNeil discussing the various dialects of American English. The other day I took a look at the companion volume to the series: "Do You Speak American?: A Companion to the PBS Television Series by Robert MacNeil and William Cran. Publisher: Nan A. Talese: Doubleday, copyright 2005.

The subject discussed in the first chapter, "The Language Wars," is prescriptivism versus descriptivism. John Simon appears as an advocate of the first (and others are cited) and Geoffrey K. Pullum and Jesse Sheidlower as advocates of the second.
For example, Sheidlower discusses a charge Simon makes against the editors of current dictionaries:
(quote)
Sheidlower denies Simon's charge that they are regarding as law whatever ordinary people say. "Absolutely untrue," he says. In fact, it's still the case that what the educated say is the law, because a language feature used only by the uneducated would always be described as just that." What Sheidlower means is that his dictionary makes the distinction between what is accepted in correct usage and what is still seen as "slang" or "informal."
(end quote)

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com
  
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