Cottleston Pie

My response to Mony's comment on my prevous entry became involved enough that I thought it warranted a new entry.

Prepend contributes to the perpetuation of the abuse of append, which is bad because the abuse of append created, I believe, prepend, so they are self-reinforcing.

The abuse of append is bad if writers assume that their readers know and will only understand the suffix-only meaning but the readers understand the more-inclusive meaning recorded in dictionaries.

If the other readers are also technical users, segfaults and other software malfunction may well be the result. Woe to the hospital patient whose heart monitor silently suffers a software crash or the city launched into gridlock as all lights go blinking red. Or even the home or business user who has better things to do than restart crashed applications or computers because the programmers suffered a failure of communication.

It is also bad because it is only widely used amongst programmers and other technically oriented people, and when these people write instruction for wider audiences, their instructions are ambiguous. The writers might suggest appending something and some educated but non-technical users may well find the instructions inadequate because prefixing does not work.

So, my strong opinion on this matter is quite practical. Unless one is talking to oneself, all language communication between people relies upon some agreement about the meaning carried by symbols.

The Beowulf comment was entirely off the mark. Beowulf and other very old, irregular texts require deep study for meaning extraction because the English language was so non-standard. Very few people could read it and understand it when it was written and very few people can read it now. It is not a stellar example of good communication, not that any exist from that time so long before dictionaries and standardization.

I myself am glad that Mr. Webster, the members of the Philological Society of London, and many others have taken it upon themselves to study the meaning of words and catalogue the meanings. And as students, we study language usage in school so that we can balance unfettered use with some prescriptivism so that we can understand each other.

Giving up completely on prescriptivism is giving up lifelong learning of the type performed in language classes and suggesting that your choices are now entirely free of error.

1954 College English XV. 395/1 Professor Bloomfield comes to the conclusion that what is taught in an English class must be some form of..prescriptivism, checked by the limits of fact as established by linguistics. Ibid. 395/2 Bloomfield defends prescriptivism first because it has social utility. That is, the public judges..our students by the language they use.

1971 Archivum Linguisticum II. 54 We are probably all aware of the operation of even weaker collocational constraints as we search for the 'right' choice among, say, achieve, accomplish, effect,..etc. to associate with plan or project or proposal.., and a certain inescapable 'prescriptivism' informing language choices is perhaps worthy of note in passing.