Hello,
A friend and I are having an (friendly) email argument about adjective opposites. He replied to my email by thanking me for the "non-information." I replied by correcting his grammar and soon found myself in the middle of a linguistic argument. I have done some research on the internet, but I have never taken any linguistic courses. I was wondering if anyone could help me counter his argument. As it is not particularly personal, I have pasted a portion of his last reply below:
try googling it. noninformative priors, it has been used in stats for 40+
years.
Nice use of the dictionary, prescriptivist. Simply because it does not
appear in the dictionary does not mean it is an incorrect english utterance.
I guess wiki or blog aren't english either... Or any recent slang, face it
you can't win the argument. All living languages are in a constant state of
flux. If a competent english speaker make an utterance that is understood
by other competent english speakers, then well its english.
Your stance is a really old fashioned linguistic theory, like 1800's old,
and has been completely discredited by all modern linguistic theory,
beginning say from the turn of the 1900's. The rule you are citing is an
arbitrary stylistic rule and can be broke and be understandable. Compare
that creation of a rule to one that stems from the deep grammer of a
language which cannot be broke and maintain intelligibility. Consider
'There is no need to notify us about problems that we are already aware of',
ending a sentence with a participle versus "ran car do after You". The
former although 'wrong (arbitarily, it stems from an unbreakable rule in
Latin)' is understandable, the latter is nonsense.
Next you'll tell me that the utterance 'Eat yet?" isn't a correct english
utterance.