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”.
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.