Interesting Links for 12-08-2024

[andrewducker]

1. The innovations in drone warfare in the Russia/Ukraine war will change warfare forever

(tags:war military technology drone Ukraine Russia viaDanielDWilliam )

2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Labour's Post-Rwanda Immigration Plans

(tags:UK migration )

3. Why Scotland may have avoided far right unrest

(tags:scotland nationalism riots racism )

Comments

[wildeabandon]

Sadly I fear that a lot of language choices come down to compromise between grace and precision. You could probably get away with "assume the premise" and leave the reader to infer the rest, in much the same way that you could use 'beg the question', and allow the reader to figure out from context in which sense it was meant, but in either case you have to accept the risk of being misunderstood. Perhaps the solution is to just use 'petitio principii' which is both short and precise, but I'm not sure that would enhance understanding overall.

I entirely agree that part of recording how words are used includes recording differing viewpoints on how they should be used, and Merriam-Webster do just that here. I don't think that there's anything wrong with letting people know that some people would find their use of language glaringly awkward, especially in the context of editing a journal, where your input has been specifically sought. It's the generalisation from "these are the styles that we prefer" to "this is objectively correct and other choices are wrong" that I struggle with, particularly when the other choices are considerably more common.

I would, in all honesty, probably be a bit more open to prescriptivist approaches if I hadn't spent so much time running into it in the form of "specific singular 'they' is incorrect", which unlike nitpicking over novel uses of philosophical and musical technical terms does real harm to real people. And although it wouldn't be fair of me to place all the blame for that harm at the door of prescriptivism generally, it does enable it, which I guess sets the bar for me to be willing to consider it worthwhile as pretty high.