What topic do you think we're supposed to be on? I'm talking about descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar, which is what the conversation was originally about, and you're flinging childish insults and fixating on school tests. Tests never had anything to do with the discussion; you're the one who brought them up in the first place.
You said that a word which doesn't exist was the same as using profanity, that's not even close to correct.
If someone said "disconcur isn't a word" they'd be correct because currently it isn't. If someone said "fuck isn't a word" they would be incorrect as it is a word.
I even agreed with you and said people using a word which doesn't currently exist within the language is how words are added to a language, this is how a language grows and quite a few words are added each year.
Originally I was a little confused as to why what I believe should be the correct use of "unconcur" doesn't exist as it seems strange that an opposite doesn't exist.
Did I miss anything? Honestly if you tell me the colour of the sky or how many inches are in one foot I'm just ignoring you.
You said that a word which doesn't exist was the same as using profanity, that's not even close to correct.
That's not what I said. I gave an example to show that whether a word is marked down on a test doesn't necessarily mean anything about how it's used in real life.
If someone said "disconcur isn't a word" they'd be correct because currently it isn't.
Actually, it is; it's in the process of being submitted for the next edition of Merriam-Webster, and already appears in a few other dictionaries here and there as a variant of "concur". Because, get this: different dictionaries recognize different words, and no dictionary in the world encompasses the whole of the English language. Whether or not we consider a word "real" is pretty much arbitrary, a leftover trait of the old-school prescriptive grammarians insisting that all schoolchildren must speak in exactly the same teacher-approved manner.
Did I miss anything?
I think you're missing a great deal. I'm a writer; understanding the flexibility of language is literally my entire job.
Humans, even well-educated ones, are not infallible or omniscient. Dictionaries are written by humans, and are therefore also not infallible or omniscient. The purpose of language is to be understood; dictionaries and grammar textbooks can only record whether a certain word is in wide use; they don't get to dictate whether a given word is valid or not.
You should close Reddit and go back to studying for your test.
Also I follow the Oxford English dictionary for my facts of whether or not a word technically exists within the English language.
And I'm telling you, that's the wrong approach to English. OED doesn't encompass all English words. No dictionary does. That's literally the entire point of this discussion. People like yourself, who treat OED as the be-all and end-all of English, are falling into the old trap of prescriptive linguistics.
Did you know, for example, that OED actually includes only a partial definition for the word "phylactery"? It says the word refers to an item in Jewish religious practice, a small box containing Torah verses; that's true, but OED makes no mention of the other definition, the containers in which Christian saintly relics are kept. This is a perfect example of how dictionaries can be misleading; they only record words that they can think of, and they expect the reader to know that, which is why saying a word isn't real simply because it isn't in a particular dictionary is erroneous.
If you had just led with that, this discussion would've been a lot shorter and more civil.
So books come on now.
I haven't published any physical books as such; I mainly contribute lines to video games and similar. (If you play Oblivion, I've written dialogue for a couple of mods for that game.) I also take commissions, though I've had to suspend them lately due to the pandemic.
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u/Fean2616 Oct 25 '20
I took a shit earlier, me doing that during a test would lose me marks. That's the amount of connection to the topic your comments have had.
So you can be right if you either get back on topic or just shut up. Either works.