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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

How does descriptivism deal with people who are just plain wrong? To pick one example among many, a recent trend I've noticed is people who use "equivocate" when they really mean "equate". Should they be corrected, or should we simply accept that because a lot of people are doing it and we can understand from context what they really mean, it's now an appropriate usage? Where exactly is that line drawn?

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In general you can find accepted and common usage in a dictionary. I doubt you will find this meaning of "equivocate" in any dictionary today.

Prescriptivists usually go beyond the dictionary to enforce ideas of language that they got using the problematic methods described in the linked article.

There is no line. To take another example, in British English, alternate does not mean a kind of alternative, whereas in American English, this is now accepted usage. Is this wrong? Not really any more, and certainly not to a large enough group of speakers to normalise the usage. Language often evolves through mistakes, particularly in words which sound similar (see loose versus lose for another example which will probably change from an error to a change in common usage over time). So I imagine most descriptivists would simply refuse to accept that there is a clear line between error and evolution in language usage.

If they're understood, they're not wrong. If they're causing confusion (and you can understand them only because the rest of the sentence makes it clear - you would understand just as well if they had said "foo" rather than "equate") then that's worth questioning. The way we use many words now (condone and fulsome spring immediately to mind) would have reasonably been described as "plain wrong" twenty years ago.

Replace "right" and "wrong" with "effective" and "ineffective" and I think it better captures what you're saying.

Well, given context, they could use any word at all, even the opposite of the correct one, and could be understood. The problem is that it seems foolish to allow that the person is correct in using the incorrect word, or that the word in question now means the same as the correct word. Effectiveness is a continuum, too - would they have communicated more effectively by using the correct word? Then that word is preferable, though not necessary to impart the meaning in the greater context.

> If they're understood, they're not wrong.

Not quite. Merely being understood isn't the only possible goal of human language. Usually, speakers also want to appear educated and reliable, and using grammatical rules that the largest possible portion of your audience agrees with is a good way to do that.

'Cloud' used to mean hill.

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