Not necessarily true. There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the Webster dictionary) that grammar is measured up against. In fact, the main reason we have standardized spelling instead of people just writing what seemed right is because people actively tried to enforce a right and wrong way of spelling.
This is exactly wrong. Webster's is not prescriptivist; a dictionary describes a language as it is, not as it "should" be (indeed, there is no such thing).
For instance, the word "biweekly" now means both "once every two weeks" and "twice per week". I don't mind usage of that word for those two meanings. Obviously, linguists can gather data and analyze how it's being used. They may conclude that one meaning was more favored 50 years ago and the other meaning is now.
But when I'm reading an encyclopedia, I'd prefer it to avoid this ambiguous word.
Some time later, I came across the usage "X comprises Y and Z" and, based on my previous understanding that "comprise" == "compose," I took that to mean "X composes Y and Z" which, in other words, means "Y and Z are made up of X". But really, it means the other way around which is that "X is made up of Y and Z!" Only when I learned about the dual meaning of "comprise" did I correctly understand it to mean the latter.
To this day, I still have to actively juggle this arbitrary "dual-rule" in my head when I come across "comprise."
This is what an editor should do. What's the problem? Let them spend their time on it if they like, it seems like most times no one even notices the change.
It's not being pedantic if you are doing it to improve real life readability based on real feedback, even if it seems trivial.
What “bet”, “cap”, “rizz” and others used by the younger population isn’t wrong, it’s different and an evolution of certain terms.
I don’t study linguistics, but I can be sure there are terms we use today and take as normal-speak that were once the center of a younger generation’s slang vernacular.
An extreme example is the word retard. Years ago in normal speak you could say “After the EPA enacted stricter emissions regulations, this initially retarded the development of sports cars until new technology was implemented” other obvious examples are the medical angle of the word.
Today, you could use the word in such a way, it’s technically correct, however you’ll most likely get some odd looks.
Most uses of it today are either in specific comedic circles, or derogatorily towards another person/thing/animal etc
Some rate of language change has to be accepted, but it needn't be as fast as if we rejected all prescriptivism.
We each prescribe or refuse to prescribe language rules as we see fit, and thus the language evolves at some natural rate.
We do need some grammar/spelling pedantry.
More importantly, taken to an extreme, descriptivism describes language in the way a map describes the territory. Any time a person speaks and is understood, no matter how badly, end-stage descriptivism has to allow their diction as syntactically and semantically valid in the language in which they spoke. The most you can say is that some expressions are rarer than others (you see "was done well" much more often than you see "was done good").
But this is also a wrong way of talking about language, just as much the old prescriptivist way was wrong. People are not static language replication machines, learning how to speak purely from imitation of their elders and community, and observed from on high by language anthropologists seeking to observe how they behave. They are concept-builders, rule-learners. They have a sense for not just how to speak in particular cases, but also what it is to speak well. It is this public sense of correct speech that is the subject of evolution over time, and is therefore also the proper target for descriptivist accounts of language.
Writing is similar to speech, but in writing most people are even more keyed to correctness, and less keyed to achieving the bare minimum of communication. Rules are stickier. We ought to understand this Wikipedia editor not as a noxious outsider to the evolution of language, who like the anthropologist inserts prescriptivist rules where they are unwanted, but as someone who is part of the normal evolution of language itself and therefore part of the terrain to be described! There have always been people who have been sticklers for particular rules.
This is nonsense. Do you really believe language is subject to intentional human control?
(Of course if a dictator comes and kills half a million people for things including changing language like it happened in my country, then it is, but this is a very rare exception.)
Some, yes. You speak roughly the same language(s) as your parents, friends, teachers, etc. Their influence on how you speak and write -especially when you were young- is quite large.
Yes, as is not splitting infinitives. All nonsense. But "comprised of" is not nonsense. "Irregardless" is wrong". Etc. Not all prescriptions are nonsense.
seriously tho if descriptivists had the courage of their convictions they would just stop capitalizing, there's no reason to
Good usage improves clarity. This is why editors have style guides.
It may not be your personal preferred usage, but it certainly isn't "bad usage" if a major American dictionary approves.
For instance, I was once CC'd on an email thread at work where a senior leader made an obvious typo in reference to some Thing and everybody else on the thread blindly parroted it. This "alternate" usage was established and used systematically in the local context, but it led to a significant decline in general clarity and interpretability, and it was also not durable beyond the context of that thread. It was a mistake, simple as that.
"Comprised of" is probably past the threshold at this point, much like "rate of speed" and "how <thing> looks like" and so on and so forth. But—and I know this is shocking to some people—"correct" use of language does have significant advantages for communicating clearly, especially in writing. Prescriptivism and descriptivism both have their adherents because neither is right or wrong in the naive absolutist sense—balance is key.
In order to examine natural languages using the scientific method, linguists gather data (i.e. native speakers' spoken or written communication) and then analyze this (i.e. find predictive models of this data). Gathering data, then claiming the data is wrong is epistemologically unfounded. Languages simply are the way they are. This would be like gathering data from Hubble and then deciding photons are wrong because their behavior mismatch with Newtonian laws.