It is true that, as a SNOOT, I am naturally predisposed to look for flaws in Gove et al.’s methodological argument. But these flaws still seem awfully easy to find. Probably the biggest one is that the Descriptivists’ “scientific lexicography”—under which, keep in mind, the ideal English dictionary is basically number-crunching: you somehow observe every linguistic act by every native/naturalized speaker of English and put the sum of all these acts between two covers and call it The Dictionary—involves an incredibly crude and outdated understanding of what scientific means. It requires a naive
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