If you see the phrase "10 items or less" in a supermarket and immediately cringe and complain that it should be "10 items or fewer"... well, you are not going to like this week's video.
There are two types of linguists.
Prescriptive and descriptive.
Pretty much every academic linguist -- those that study and analyse languages -- counts themselves as a descriptivist.
This means that they describe languages, but never say that they should be a certain way.
They look, they learn, and they work out how people communicate.
On the other side are the prescriptivists.
Who prescribe, in much the same way as a doctor prescribes a suppository.
They're the people who say that this is how a language should be, damn it, and how on earth are we supposed to communicate cleary--- Irony!
[OFF SCREEN LAUGHTER] Can we roll back a little?
