As he later argued against Quine, "[t]he revolt against the dualism of the analytic and the synthetic rests on a confusion of the logical analysis of (artificially fixed) languages with the historical investigation of (growing, shifting natural) languages" (Feigl 1956, p. 7 8).
The dictionary's ostensible purpose of settling and "fixing" the language was a chimera.
Johnson admitted that "he had flattered himself for a while" with "the prospect of fixing our language" but that thereby "he had indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience could justify".
In 1712, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet on the subject, pouring scorn on sloppy usage and insisting that "some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever" – arguing that English should not merely be exhaustively surveyed, but that its users should be forced to obey some rules.
Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about.
Of course, fixing the language on a Help page isn't the same as addressing the issue of continued tracking.
He was sympathetic to the desire of that age to "fix" the language, but he realized as he went ahead that "language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived".
It may have been his desire to fix the language by his work, yet he realized that languages do not follow prescription but are continually changing.
And yet Lakoff had spoken for 12 minutes and then answered questions at the U.C.L.A. forum with Huffington and Frank, and not once had he even implied that the Democratic problem hadn't been entirely caused by Republicans or that it couldn't be entirely fixed by language.
A large deal of the research concerned one or a small number of fixed (L1-L2) language pairs.
