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Prescriptivism Must Die!

@mgrammar.bsky.social
242 followers 46 following 2.1K posts

Psycholinguist, and the guy who used to write Motivated Grammar. He/him. Erstwhile blogger: motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com Prosecute ICE and send Homan to the Hague.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 1h
He's also implying that Gary Marcus and others can't see clearly because they were proponents of methods that asymptoted. And sure, sour grapes are a real thing, even in science, but it also might be that they've gained some understanding of how even the most promising methods can stall out.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 1h
Yeah, and I think he also implies that continual improvement means performance can't asymptote. But continued improvement is a defining characteristic of asymptoting! Without new tricks, training data, etc., there's no reason to believe this is the one algorithm that won't asymptote.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 1h
I have been inspired by this message. I, for one, am willing to sacrifice for the American people by price-gouging them to make incredible profits for myself.
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American Dialect Society @americandialect.org · 4h
Linguists help us understand that many of our pet peeves are actually language change in progress and the linguistic diversity found in and across all communities of speakers. With this understanding, we can approach each other's language with more curiosity and less judgment. #TalkAboutHumanities
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Dana Houle @danahoule.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Good to see that the assassination of Melissa Hortman & her husband Mark, followed by the government murders of Alex Pretti & Renee Good, have convinced Minnesota Republicans to stop using dangerous rhetoric that could incite violence.
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Mark Grimshaw @markgrimshawtism.bsky.social · 15h
A fascinating editorial decision from the BBC, to make the headline a scaremongering “AUTISM AND ADHD ARE BEING OVERDIAGNOSED”, and then, four bullet points later, have the author of the report quoted as essentially saying “nah, that’s bullshit, actually”.
ADHD and autism at risk of over-diagnosis, says report, as author warns of rise in mental ill health
Summary
• An official review in England finds there is a risk of people being over-diagnosed with
ADHD and autism - three key findings from the report
• As well as neurodevelopmental conditions, the review looks at mental ill health, particularly in younger people. Our health correspondent explains the difference
• It was commissioned earlier this year after Wes Streeting, then the health secretary, said there was an "over-diagnosis" of mental health conditions
• Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme earlier, review chair Prof Peter Fonagy said Streeting was "with respect, completely wrong"
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 6h
But again, my point is that Tom is fine with using a word broadly to paint his enemies the way that he views them, but he can't tolerate his enemies doing the same. A faculty advisor being an antisemite in 2015 doesn't mean much for Tom's claim that anti-Israel protests are inherently antisemitic.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 6h
Obviously I don't want you to dox yourself to prove your point to me, but I can't find any evidence for this anecdote. Google search sucks and I'm not the best at finding stuff, but I'd expect a BLM faculty advisor accusing Mossad of false flagging an ISIS attack would have been a big story.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 19h
Wow. "These environmental differences are clear evidence of genetic differences" is a wild argument.
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I've been immersed in research on Reconstruction in Lousiana and it's a very difficult truth to absorb that the white terrorist movement in the South was among the most successful terrorist movements in global history. Took 10 years but it won a total & complete victory through murder and atrocity.
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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I notice that everything the press doesn’t like is “social contagion” now, except for the escalating crankery of the press, which is an organisation of a couple of thousand people mostly concentrated in one city, who largely all know each other - one thing that definitely *is* social contagion.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 08/10/2026
It's telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans' role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting. Telling, that is, in that it shows how financial capitalism and patriarchy work together to dissuade men from doing "unprofitable" labor, like the work of care.
X post from AI industry insider Alvin Sng :

My wife: Can you read our baby a book?
Me: I can just play an audiobook from my phone.
My wife: But then it won't be in your voice.
Me: I can train a voice model.
Parenting hits different when you work in Al.
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Nick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
LLM (Large Line Man) solves math problem
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Social contagion is when you have the same reasoning as your dumb friends. Insightful analysis is when I have the same reasoning as my smart friends.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 08/10/2026
I hate how good this is.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Yep, I could've. You could have read what we were talking about.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Also, why can't any of you guys spell his name? bsky.app/profile/gent...
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Oh, hey, just saw this: Tim Walz (hardly a leftist or academic) making a very closely related point to mine. bsky.app/profile/thet...
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
How is he worth listening to on some issues if he holds such repugnant and easily countered positions on so many others? He's clearly not some great thinker if he both believes and argues for such incorrect positions. And your snippet here is apologia, tolerating his racism as merely "right-wing".
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
No, read the article, asshole.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Speaking of having a memory and being able to read: the magazine Tom writes for wrote a profile recently to rehabilitate the eugenicist/white supremacist Richard Hanania. Tom never condemned this, tho he's associated with this more tightly than anyone here with Ha www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
The Anti-Populist
The writer and former white supremacist Richard Hanania was once the toast of MAGA-curious tech barons and reactionary intellectuals. Now he thinks Trumpism has broken their brains.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I get mad at Tom because he thinks that he (and anyone he agrees with) can be loose with what they say, but the second anyone he disagrees with is loose, he jumps on them and pretends they're the stupidest fools he's ever met for doing the same thing he does.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
My point was about Tom being too loose with his terminology. Even though some people who supported Bush were fascists, Tom doesn't think it's right to call Bush a "fascist". Same here: Ha was a secret antisemite, no question. That doesn't mean that people/movements he hides within agree with him.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
That's terrible! That's also one professor, who is clearly unstable, and was specifically targetting one colleague. If you went to any of the groups that Tom was complaining about and asked people there if this is antisemitic, they'd say yes, and if you asked if it was acceptable they'd say no.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
They're even cheating with the graph, since they say they're double counting dissertations that contain multiple types of music. If you really wanted to argue that people are ignoring "central" topics, you'd plot the % without the central topics. Ugh, thanks for sharing
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
After a few months of thinking that baseball was a fun sport and a good time, I have once again remembered that it is actually terrible and I hate it. I look forward to remembering this fact until late March when I'll somehow forget it again.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 06/10/2026
This is a good illustration of how so much of AI theft isn't indirect (ie, data sucked into a model to train the chatbot) - it's actually **direct** copying, but *enabled* by GenAI. Of course it is: chatbots absolutely suck at creating good, new stuff.
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Mignon Fogarty @grammargirl.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
And my husband says I don't have hobbies. Sheesh! Amazon gets me. (This is from the profile Amazon makes of you that people are talking about. I think maybe you can see yours/edit/delete it here: www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useA... )
Interests & Hobbies: Maintains comprehensive data backup system
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
As Mathias says: he "would have you believe the same calipers he’s used to measure skulls his entire adult life are more *liberal* calipers this time. He swears." The people platforming Hanania all agree with him that calipers are needed and only bicker about what shape they have.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I find it deeply disturbing just how much crypto(?)eugenics is accepted within elite American circles. Nathan Cofnas, Richard Hanania, and so many other mediocre minds are feted as geniuses for finding slightly less obvious ways of saying "you and I are superior and everyone else is inferior".
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
when @letsgomathias.bsky.social pitched this to me, i knew it would be evergreen. but i didn’t expect it to be relevant already like four times in the less than two months since it was published.
thehandbasket.co
You don’t have to hand it to Richard Hanania
The so-called "former" white supremacist's work doesn't show accountability—or that he's actually moved on from his earlier views, Christopher Mathias writes.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Off topic and I hope this isn't out of line, but I clicked your profile and I saw your recent post about your mom. We're all united in our experiences of loss but I know that doesn't it make feel any better in the moment. I'm sorry for your loss and wish I could offer a more satisfying condolence.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I personally disagree that the campus protests were broadly anti-Semitic, though I agree that certain actions within certain protests were. But I'm not trying to argue that point, and I'm not trying to argue with you -- I'm narrowly focused on Tom's hypocrisy.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I'm not saying the left is free from anti-Semitism, and neither are the center or right. I agree it's rising and needs to be fought. My concern in my post to Tom is that he is too flippant with how he uses the term "anti-Semite" in the same way he complains that others are with "fascist".
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Read this: is is from the chair of outside advisors of the Iowa civics center imposed on campus. He thinks he is describing current faculty but he is perfectly describing himself and his fellow travelers
"I think there's a fundamental tension," Lowery told Inside Higher Ed. "We've had a sort of ideological takeover of the universities where you have ideological administrators hiring ideological faculty and they will do everything they can to prevent other ideas from being represented on campus."
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 27/09/2026
I love this paper so much. If I had my way every single journalist, pundit, analyst, and politician in the US would read it & then read it again. I want to quote all of it. www.frontiersin.org/journals/soc...
frontiersin.org
Frontiers | The problem with polarization research in an age of extremism
"I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block i...
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Atrios @eschatonblog.com · 05/10/2026
linkrot is so maddening. basically nothing that's linked to from my blog in the aughts exists anymore. my still-looks-like-2003 blog is all there, absent some images that got lost at some point.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Nice! It's a shame that so much good tech advice is so clickbaity. I can never tell whether I love or hate when clickbait pays off. It's great when it does, but then it also gets me to click on a further 20 stupid things before it pays off again.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Similarly, it's not much of a flex to complain about the rest of us by saying "Oh yeah? Well, you guys were the ones worried about fascism rising in the Republican Party."
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I didn't say that you were wrong to be worried about anti-Semitism on college campuses. I said you were cheapening the term by applying it to a broad swath of people on college campuses who opposed Israeli military action -- just like you said others did with "fascism"!
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Yes, there are assholes on the left who are anti-Semitic. But there are assholes everywhere who are anti-Semitic, and most in the center and right have a hell of a lot more power than college students. Pat yourselves on the back for putting out a minor fire, I guess, but the big one rages unabated.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The university I teach at changed its rules on protest to prevent student protests against America's support of Israeli bombing, but didn't change them to prevent a preacher from coming to campus to yell that all non-Christians (incl. Jews) are going to Hell. That's so much more anti-Semitic!
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Like whom? Elon Musk? Trump? Curtis Yarvin? There are big big anti-Semites out there with real power enabling all this, and yet all the effort to stamp out anti-Semitism goes toward pro-Palestinian kids in tents on college campuses.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
You're right, of course, that you and Bush and Reagan aren't fascists. You're just collaborators in its rise, wringing your hands that this shouldn't be done, but never doing anything effective to stop its rise; just tut-tutting both sides.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Bush created ICE & approved torture in America's name, and now we have ICE murdering people in the streets, running internment camps. He's never tried to stop ICE, or apologized for his creation becoming a fascist agency. I'm not too broken-up about people shortening "fascist enabler" to "fascist".
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
You can be loose with your words, man. You have been with AES. We all are occasionally, especially on social media or at protests. Or other places where emotions run hot and there's a sense of urgency, like the last time we started a war of aggression with an "IRA*" nation and had no exit strategy.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Well, that justifies it. "Many" other people are anti-Semites, so this person expressing an anti-Zionist position is too because you read into what they say. But we're wrong for reading fascism into GWB-era Republicans, who were approving torture and went fascist within a decade.
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Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
All Dem quotes must be twisted into the least generous interpretation ever while all Trump quotes must be tortured into coherence.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The SA wasn't a "warning sign", and these guys weren't a paramilitary force. You're misinterpreting what this person said to pretend they're a fool.
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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Bud, you hyperventilated that student protestors and folks on here were anti-Semites because you read a dog-whistle into their protests and their explanations of anti-Zionism. I'm sorry that nobodies from two decades ago were too loose with their anti-Bush rhetoric, but you're not one to talk.
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