Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked by what his colleague described as a “lynch mob” of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
Ballal’s whereabouts are now unknown after Israeli soldiers then seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, his co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said on X.
Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said in a separate post featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers “attacked Hamdan’s village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones”.
Do we? Because I didn’t have any issue with the word as used. To me, a lynching is a violent, usually race/ethnicity-based mob attack on a person. And this pretty well fits the bill.
You’re the one doing linguistic prescriptivism here. The only difference is that what you’re prescribing isn’t what’s in the dictionary, it’s what’s in your own head.
Only to prove a point, I apologize if the meaning was lost.
But it is in the dictionary, that’s the point I was getting at. From the same source as the previous poster, note the second definition of both the noun and verb forms:
If that seems like I’m just cherry picking definitions to exclude the common parlance (which, to clarify, is what I am doing), then why likewise exclude the definitions of lynch which do specifically equate it with execution just to make some sort of “umm akshually” point?
To be clear: at no point did I make any reference to rape or the definition thereof. I was only referring to how you and others were using lynch.
Apologies if I misunderstood what you were referring to, in that case.
The point I am getting at, though (or failing miserably to, apparently) is that no one here should be confused by the multiple people in the thread who question OP’s use of the term “lynched,” because more than anything else, it “especially” implies an execution by public mob, which did not happen in this case.
Just because a dictionary gets to, well, dictate the various definitions of a word, doesn’t mean that it should be used without consideration for its generally accepted meaning, as dictionaries are often poor authorities.
This is my point. You are deciding that your “accepted meaning” must be the “generally” accepted meaning. That’s prescriptivist. I understood what was meant, because my understanding of the word comfortably allows for this. And since dictionaries generally aim to describe real-world usage (usually listing “archaic” or “rare” where appropriate, which most dictionaries will do with alternative definitions of rape—see attached image), I feel pretty comfortable in asserting that your attempts to prescribe a more limited definition are wrong. Especially given this was seemingly an attempted execution—in a country with rule of law, it would very likely be tried as attempted murder.
I’ve said pretty much all I can say on the topic, so I’ll just call it here and award you the internet points of the day. But just need to clarify that pulling in more dictionary definitions to justify a particular use of a term as being more or less correct is the opposite of negating prescriptivism. A survey or other statistic would probably be more applicable on that front.