Thread by @Katja_Thieme

@ETVPod @Pathdom I think we're dealing with two types of wrong here. Only one is a matter of prescriptivism.

If many people in a language community believe that the term "woman" means only ciswomen, then that is what they believe. A linguistic documenting in a descriptivist way would note that.

@ETVPod @Pathdom But we're not linguists here. We're not arguing about how to document language use in a descriptivist way. Benjamin would like to limit us to this position, that's his ongoing gambit. It leaves him free to be prescriptivist in the way that he prefers while denying us the same. 2/

@ETVPod @Pathdom He's as much a user of the language as we are. We are arguing as users of the same language, not as linguists examining and documenting language from a descriptivist position.

And as users we have all right to stake prescriptivist claims. 3/

@ETVPod @Pathdom As user of this language, I can tell someone that it's harmful and wrong to refer to women as only ciswomen; that I want them to stop; that I think it's immoral; that it pisses me off if they do it in a malicious way. I can say all those things. There's no elitism to it. 4/

@ETVPod @Pathdom Benjamin's game is to tell us--by appealing to us as academics & telling us we need to remain quiet and polite about it otherwise we lose credibility--that we're being elitist and wrong if we assert our more prescriptivist ideas as users (& researchers!) of the same language. 5/

@ETVPod @Pathdom Meanwhile, he keeps asserting his by gesturing to how the majority of users uses those terms, which fully aligns with how he wants to use (and wants others to use, I presume) those terms. 6/

@ETVPod @Pathdom Language use is not just a matter of "what does this term mean," it's also a matter of what moral, social, and political positions are expressed or implied or created, and what action occurs by or follows from them. Language pragmatics, in other words. 7/

@ETVPod @Pathdom The argument about moral/social/political positions, as expressed among other things through use of certain terms, being wrong or right is different than the descriptivist argument about what does this term mean among users, did I get its meaning wrong or right? 8/

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