Having said that, I will join you in this fight.
See also: exponentially.
I suspect some people are literally having conniption fits about this…
You can’t take a descriptive dictionary and then claim it is prescriptive.
IIRC both the OED and CED list figurative uses for the word, do you know any publications considered more authoritative than those for English? Webster too, for those who prefer simplified English.
The Académie do publish a dictionary every few decades though, there was a new edition recently, so there is a prescriptive dictionary for French even though it carries little weight in reality.
French is the only living language to attempt it to this extent, though the existence of one is enough to make my “there are none for living languages” point incorrect. It is difficult to pin a language down until no one really speaks it day-to-day (so it doesn't evolve at the rates commonly used languages do).
I'm not sure what would even make a dictionary prescriptive other than an explicit declaration that it is so or, ridiculously, a law declaring the same.
there are no 100% correct descriptive dictionaries. Any prescriptive dictionary is automatically correct.
… in the view of their compilers.
I could write a prescriptive dictionary far more easily than I could get others to accept it as correct.
Yes you would have to be involved with a regulatory institution first
The "literally" ship sailed centuries ago. Sorry, but that battle has been lost. Even so-called "prescriptive" dictionaries would be categorically incorrect if they ignore nearly three centuries of common vernacular.
Another paper of his that I really like combines a few elegant ideas into a simple implementation of bitvector rank/select: https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~gnavarro/ps/sea12.1.pdf
During this time I got really excited about succinct data structures and wrote a Rust library implementing many bitvector types and a wavelet matrix. [2]
My interest came from a data visualization perspective -- I was curious if space-efficient data structures could fundamentally improve the interactive exploration of large datasets on the client side. Happy to chat about that if anyone's curious.
[1] Paper: https://archive.yuri.is/pdfing/weighted_range_quantile_queri... though it's pretty hard to understand without some background context. I've been meaning to write a blog post explaining the core contribution, which is a simple tweak to one of Navarro's textbook data structures.
[2] The rust version is here: https://github.com/yurivish/made-of-bits/tree/main/rust-play... and an earlier pure-JS implementation is here: https://github.com/yurivish/made-of-bits/tree/main