I have a distinguished colleague who unceasingly tries to persuade me to see that my attempts at descriptive grammar really have a prescriptive subtext. We were both participants in a workshop on the ...

Is it prescriptive grammar day, where we would mark people off for violations of standard English? Or is it descriptive grammar day, when linguists get all huffy about the ignorance and narrow ...

And, in what I hope is my last post on foreign policy realism for the day, I think there’s a general problem with the oft-elided distinction between descriptive and prescriptive realism. Descriptive ...