Yugoslavia

FYI literally nobody in ex-Yugoslavia believes this, not even the most hard-line “yugonostalgic” leftists.

Evidently the birch was actually really good for preservation, in combination with the swamp(like?) terrain – the birch bark sunk into the ground with no oxygen to rot it away. And they’re still finding new ones, I saw news about a new batch just a few months ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism

This is what they were talking about

In 2008, the PSL’s presidential candidate recieved 0.01% of the popular vote. In 2024, their candidate received 0.11%. That’s a 1000%+ increase in their votership in less than 20 years

Political equivalent of this tweet:

That’s an angle I haven’t considered. I looked it up, and in my country, then a part of the Habsburg monarchy, the limit on serfs’ movement was abolished in 1785.

This article: https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-autistic-i-was-wrong Since it’s behind the paywall, a PDF copy should be available here.

Yeah, the richest families have stable residence. But the lower classes, it seems to me at least, moved around relatively regularly (not even close to the current situation, of course), mainly due to economic reasons, which obviously weren’t too nice for the average peasant. Over the last 200 years every developed country sooner or later underwent urbanisation, meaning a massive move of the population from the countryside into the cities. In my case, it was my grandparents and great-grandparents who moved to the city where I live now as well…

I’m a bit late with this reply, but oh well… It seems to me that you equate your acquaintance’s position with actual linguistic descriptivism. But no, what he and you show is just different preferences and/or normative relationships towards language. Descriptivism (as in, the position that should be taken by a serious linguist) absolutely does not want to “flatten” language, it does not take a normative position, though it can/should criticise normative positions that are unavoidably based on unscientific notions. Those can include preference for “simple” language. Dictionaries don’t follow what’s going on at TikTok, so that’s just a non-issue.

Like, imagine a Christian talking with an atheist, and calling the atheist a Satanist. This is the same sort of mistake.

You are free to enjoy books with one sort of vocabulary, he’s free to enjoy books with an another sort of vocabulary. This is more of a matter of aesthetics, which we could also discuss, but I’d prefer to leave that aside or we’ll have to write even further walls of text.

Old-timey paintings of towns are super super comfy to me, I guess it’s the same feeling

(Florence, by Hartmann Schedel, Liber Chronicarum, 15th century)

Oxen is historically a 100% English plural, just like child-children, it wasn’t loaned. (I should check, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same -en as in German plurals: das Auge, die Augen.)

Some of these Latin plurals can survive for technical terminology. But it’s pretty much only Latin ones, due to the historical prestige. Nobody talks of Soviet apparatchiki, it’s apparatchiks.

The whole idea of etymology is that you can figure out what a word means from its roots.

That was the idea in ancient Greece when the name of the endavour/field was created (etymon = “true”). In the 19th century when linguistics became a serious science it was effectively becoming abandoned, and quite clearly criticised by 20th century linguists. Words’ meanings and forms shift inevitably, they’ve always been shifting, and trying to pick one single stage of this process as the right one is basically like saying that the earth is flat because from any individual vantage point it looks flat to you.

If you throw all that out, you give up the scaffolding that makes words make any sense.

No, you don’t. 99% of people don’t know the etymology of 99% of the words they use. Not even linguists have definitive answers for the etymology of words such as ‘boy’ and ‘dog’. Words’ meanings are actually established by usage, by tradition as it’s handed down to us, with some leeway in how we accept and modify the tradition. (These mechanisms of language change are many and affect various levels of language.) Note that cultures that don’t have scientific etymology still have perfectly functional languages.

It seems like the argument for descriptivism is “let’s not be elitist when people become less competent with the rules of a language”

That’s one of the arguments, but as you can see I don’t think it’s crucial.

I suspect there is also a body of professional linguists who oppose your point for the same reasons.

There are some professional linguists who are active as prescriptivists. Their number varies depending on the country, in Anglophone countries their number is miniscule. In countries with a more pronounced prescriptivist tradition (as in mine, I’m from Croatia) their number declines through time as academia accepts and integrates modern linguistic theories, and the remaining prescriptivists’ positions soften. And I can’t help but notice that many of the current prescriptivists are shoddy linguists and ideologically motivated (elitists, conservatives).

The prescriptivists are actually quite thin on the justifications for their approach. They won’t theoretically or empirically defend prescriptivism, arguments for it amount to vague and unscientific claims of a need for order and clarity in language (which exist regardless of prescriptivist intervention), and such stuff. But even they usually don’t dare to go so far as to claim etymology is the source of correct meanings, because they know that holding such a position would immediately lead into absurdity and extremism. Leaf through an etymological dictionary and try to stick to the oldest meaning described there. You’ll quickly realise that the source of correct meanings can’t be the words and forms from 500, 1000, or 4000 years ago. In fact, I’ve seen prescriptivists attack usage that’s been around for centuries, or demand people follow semantic distinctions between words or constructions that never existed at all.

A book recommendation, if you’re interested: L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, Language Myths.

Putting aside the technicalities (it is not language that is prescriptive or descriptive, but linguistics), that’s a widespread position among perfectly literate people, including professional linguists. Nothing to do with the number of “likes”.

I’m a fire starter, wooden fire starter

Having politicians so deeply ingrained in your mind you dream of them is kind of horrible.