Alison Bechdel, creator of the outstanding comic Dykes to Watch Out For, which I have been reading for the better part of two decades, announces on her blog that she's been appointed to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. This sounds like completely fun and delightful work and I am very envious of her.
I'm a teensy bit disappointed, however, to learn that she is a prescriptivist:
But I must confess—although I’m a social liberal, lexicographically I’m a hard line conservative. I will defend the proper pronunciation and spelling of “chaise longue” to the death.
Aww, too bad. "Proper pronunciation?" If these prescritptivists had their way I suppose we'd all still be speaking proto-Indo-European. I hope she's less rigid about usage than she is about spelling and pronunciation.
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