 | This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
@ Ollieinc: Regarding "protagonist" in this article, modern dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive. They list common uses of words whether or not they are properly deemed "correct" in their field or by careful writers. For example, some dictionaries now include for the word "literally" the wrong meaning that people have been giving to it in recent years, as in "I literally hit the ceiling", said most frequently by people who never went near the ceiling.
This sort of misuse is particularly horrendous because it negates the impact of the correct use of the word. If I say "literally" to convey the point that what I'm saying actually happened, that I'm not being figurative, its value for that purpose disappears if people think it means "figurative". It's absurd to have to say "main protagonist" for the benefit of people who don't know that "protagonist" already means "main character".
That many people have less than thorough understandings of words and use the language sloppily and with imprecision is no reason to prefer that sort of use of the language on Wikipedia. There's no excuse for us to condone that here. The proper definition of "protagonist" is "the main character" in a work that has one such identifiable character. —Largo Plazo ( talk) 10:58, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
- My pleasure. And thank you. :-) I've restored my revisions. —Largo Plazo ( talk) 11:22, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
|
| This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
@ Ollieinc: Regarding "protagonist" in this article, modern dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive. They list common uses of words whether or not they are properly deemed "correct" in their field or by careful writers. For example, some dictionaries now include for the word "literally" the wrong meaning that people have been giving to it in recent years, as in "I literally hit the ceiling", said most frequently by people who never went near the ceiling.
This sort of misuse is particularly horrendous because it negates the impact of the correct use of the word. If I say "literally" to convey the point that what I'm saying actually happened, that I'm not being figurative, its value for that purpose disappears if people think it means "figurative". It's absurd to have to say "main protagonist" for the benefit of people who don't know that "protagonist" already means "main character".
That many people have less than thorough understandings of words and use the language sloppily and with imprecision is no reason to prefer that sort of use of the language on Wikipedia. There's no excuse for us to condone that here. The proper definition of "protagonist" is "the main character" in a work that has one such identifiable character. —Largo Plazo ( talk) 10:58, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
- My pleasure. And thank you. :-) I've restored my revisions. —Largo Plazo ( talk) 11:22, 30 September 2015 (UTC)