unless you are using words bad for algorithms.

I would much rather have a cw than all of these childish euphemisms for serious things.

It's so jarring watching something online and noticing the person awkwardly skirting around the most accurate words to describe what they're talking about.

Just sucks that the chuds just want permission to say the n word and make lazy transphobic jokes.

Some of those that work forces...ARE THE SAME THAT BURN CROSSES

UGH

Unaliving in the name of

You could argue shit like "unalive" and "ahh" is actually prescriptivism since it was indirectly forced onto people because of social media soft censorship, nobody actually wanted to use those words, they just had to come up with something.

There’s a museum/memorial for Kurt Cobain where they fucking say that shit. It’s gross. Like baby talk or something but for mod filters and now it’s leaked into the real world

Yeah that self censorship is so grating to me, i hate the way that the capitalist surveillance state has reached its tendrils all the way into our daily language

I'm the same with people using AHHH instead of ass.

When I was a kid language was getting more swears and fewer slurs, when did ass become a bad word again?

Expressing yourself on TikTok often makes you wish you were Ricky from Trailer Park Boys so you could invoke the people's freedom of voices and choices act so you could express yourself.

Barely on topic: The idea that "literally" has changed to mean "figuratively" is completely false and is the only instance I know of where people tried so hard to be descriptivists that they failed and did prescription.

The example "I literally died" is referenced the most, but "died" doesn't even mean "got murdered" here- it means shut down, in an emotional sense.

If someone said "I dropped my pencil in front of everyone, I literally died" someone could say "really though" and the reply would be like "okay yeah not literally, I just got a little flustered over it."

Literally died means yes, I actually had such strong embarrassment that it mentally incapacitated me, I didn't just blush.

Actual dictionary writers have misunderstood this and included "figuratively" as an alternate meaning even though nobody has ever used it that way except when they're talking about descriptivism. It's actually embarrassing.

Notice that they did not redefine the words seriously, actually, immediately, really, for real, unironically, or honestly. Even though those can all be used in the same situation, "oh my god I seriously died"... Linguists you do not have to edit the dictionary to retroactively prevent people from lying or being imprecise, ok?

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

I can't stand it, but my darling 💚 uses it in her vegan advocacy social media posts just to avoid bans. She would flat out say "killed" if she could.

I dunno, how "prescriptivist" is it really to notice something about how people talk, and know where it comes from, but still strongly dislike it on a personal level? Like you aren't arguing that "unalive" is somehow a misusage of the word, or that it's ungrammatical — you're just saying that you find the word "unalive" grating, right? And the reason why you find the word grating is presumably because of the context around where it's used and how it proliferated. I think we all know deep down that if we weren't in the context of worldwide average screen time being six hours and forty minutes per day, with capitalists creating these Skinner boxes with robots carefully curating content, thereby forcing people to invent all sorts of bizarre euphemisms... That "unalive" would be exactly as grating as "red rum" or "kick the bucket" or "curtains" or any of the other less serious sounding euphemisms for death or murder already out there.

Honestly, it's like how I go to the grocery store and I notice it says "peanutbutter" and "hotdogs" instead of "peanøttsmør" and "pølser". Like I'm not going to act like American English having a profound impact on the grammar and vocabulary of Norwegian is strictly "incorrect", because, like, my own Norwegian is noticeably Americanized, I literally grew up speaking American English at home and I know that it's generally bad for one's mental health to act like one's natural way of speaking is incorrect and needs to be fixed... But I still dislike "peanutbutter" and "hotdogs". And more specifically I dislike the context and implication of it. In other words, whenever I speak Americanized Norwegian, it's self-expression, it's a cohesive and beautiful lect shaped by unique circumstances; but whenever others speak Americanized Norwegian, it's the Great Satan imposing its culture and language on the rest of the world in the name of capitalist exploitation and yadda yadda... And I honestly just think it's OK to be opposed to that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you know?

So yeah, all in all, like, being a "descriptivist" shouldn't have to mean emotionally dulling yourself, you know? It shouldn't have to count as "prescriptivism" to notice how the world around us shapes the way we talk and, in disliking the current state of the world around us, being disturbed by how it manifests in our speech. The important thing to understand is that the language is a symptom, and so it is the cause that should be treated.

descriptivism is linguistic tailism, humans have the ability and responsibility to shape their shared language for the benefit of all instead of letting anything and everything happen with no consequence as if entropy and random chance and any kind of capitalist or fascist modifications of language are holy and beyond reproach. as a niche leftist community there is not much we can do for the moment but analyze, however a strong centrally organized revolutionary communist party of some kind should absolutely 'prescribe' how language is used to shape society for the better.

The weird thing to me is why people don't just use existing euphemisms like "punched their own ticket" or "catch the bus" for suicide, or even just a different phrase that doesn't even count as a euphemism like "took their own life". Mangling words like this just feels unnatural.

Imo the point is prescriptivism requires power or organization, otherwise I'm just an old manby yelling at clouds. That's why "unalived" and things like it are becoming commonplace, they (supposedly) have evolutionary advantage due to censorship from an entity with the power to censor.

And when it comes down to it the symbols people use to represent concepts aren't as important to me as the concepts themselves, so idrc if language evolves. Energy better spent elsewhere usually.