Archive | July, 2007

A commenter asks, “Why is it OK to prescribe, and indeed proscribe, vocabulary, but not syntax?” My sense is that descriptivists — and certainly this descriptivist — think that the guide to vocabulary is usage: An English word means what English speakers use it to mean. Dictionaries that reflect a word’s meaning also tend to […]

I vaguely recall hearing two phrases about language, which were roughly: 1. Understand as the learned, but speak as the common. (This was apparently a translation from Latin.) 2. Unlike with morals, where our goal should be to act better than one’s neighbors, with language our goal should be to speak just like our neighbors. […]

Over at SCOTUSblog, Tommy Goldstein follows up his post on the Democratic short-list with a new post on a Republican short-list. Once again it’s all speculation, but it’s interesting speculation. A few comments:    First, assuming the President replaces a retiring Justice who is a white male, I don’t think a future GOP President is […]

A commenter asks a good question: “What do anti-prescriptivists tell their own children?” My children are 2 and 3, and I’m told that at those ages it’s more effective just to speak around your children the way you want them to speak, rather than setting rules for them. But I’ve certainly thought about what I […]

One thing that bugs me about many prescriptivist claims (not all, just many) is that they just don’t do much to prove that the prescription on which they are relying is indeed in any meaningful sense authoritative. Even if one accepts that “proper English” is to be defined by The Authorities, one needs to further […]

I was in London on Friday and visited the Old Bailey, London’s famous criminal court that has been operating since the 17th century. Unfortunately I arrived too late to see any trials. However, when googling around for directions I learned that a group of universities have posted the complete Proceedings of the Old Bailey from […]

An article in today’s New York Times (here) discusses a Virginia law governing dogs that have been declared dangerous by a court for attacking a person. The dogs go on a public registry, similar to a sex offender registry, and the owners are required to carry a $100,000 liability insurance policy. The registry seems a […]

Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting column warning that an ill-conceived and poorly designed cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions will not do much to control emissions or encourage environmentally responsible development in poorer nations. It would be great if carbon policy could get out of its timid rut: energy bills that raise fuel-efficiency standards, subsidize windmills […]

I didn’t see the trial, so I don’t have an opinion whether the verdict was justified on the facts. But more pertinent to me is what strikes me of the infantilization of people who should be considered adults. According to this news report, the “kid” holding the party was 18 years old. Two “teens” who […]

I’ve argued earlier that the Court has been right to treat content-based speech restrictions much more harshly than content-neutral speech restrictions. But this left open the question: Why should the Court be so skeptical even about modest content-based regulations, which don’t entirely ban certain ideas but merely restrict them while leaving open ample alternative channels? […]

Today’s Washington Post reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has continued to make subsidy payments to farmers who are deceased. The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, […]

This morning, the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy posted my contribution to an exchange on the impact of Massachusetts v. EPA on climate change policy and the future of administrative law. The first essay, Breaking New Ground on Issues Other than Global Warming, is by Professors Kathryn Watts and Amy Wildermuth. They argued that Mass. […]

Last week, I wrote a post posing some questions about Book 7 of Harry Potter and giving my predictions about the answers. Here’s how I did. Note: if you want to avoid SPOILERS, you should stop reading NOW. UPDATE: Due to popular demand, I have put the spoilers below a fold. However, I think that […]

The most important shortcoming of the Harry Potter series is its often unconvincing depiction of evil. Creating a plausible ideology for the “bad guys” in a fantasy series is an important challenge that many writers try to sidestep. There are all too many fantasy books that include a “Dark Lord” who seems to be evil […]

NOTE: There are a few spoilers here, though no absolutely critical ones. With the Harry Potter series now complete, I want to summarize what I see as its main strengths and weaknesses. The former are, to my mind, well-known. Perhaps the most important is the impressive depth of character development. In addition to the central […]