Ascertainment

Entertainment / Literature / Ascertainment: The Enlightenment's desire for and obsession with standardization and regulation of the English language--i.e., making grammatical rules (often based artificially on Latin grammar or mathematical principles, or based on creating style and spelling guidebooks for 'correctness' of usage, and so on). A. C. Baugh quotes Samuel Johnson's definition of the word and argues that it and argues this term sums up Enlightenment desires for prescriptivist grammar (Baugh 257-58).
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