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by Terr_ 188 days ago
Yeah, but that's the same lax descriptivist school that also tell you "literally" and "I could care less" should somehow be accepted as the exact opposites, they're just wrong. :p

Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?
2 comments
aspenmayer 188 days ago
As we don’t have an official or authoritative body that determines “proper” English usage as other languages do, appealing to a dictionary strikes me as a mite better than prescriptivism or pedantry, though I don’t think was your intention either.

> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?

That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” as in multiple distinct groups of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.

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rerdavies 188 days ago
The entire English language is a series of unambiguous errors that have been rescued by the popularity of the mistake. Were it not, we would be speaking some version of Ur-German.
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Terr_ 188 days ago
That's just survivorship bias on a very long timeframe: Given enough time everything accumulates the status of "historical mistake", but what about the hundreds of thousands of words that didn't change and the days they didn't change in? Quite reasonably, we just don't pay attention to the mistakes that were squelched or whose trajectory never broke the ceiling of temporary slang.

There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.

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