Talk:2394: Contiguous 41 States

Missing contiguous states: Delaware, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota 172.69.42.92 23:57, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I knew something was off, but I couldn't pinpoint anything until reading the explanation. That's so weird. 172.69.22.66 07:54, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Contiguous has more specific meaning that "share borders" - it means that you can travel (on land in the case of map) from any point to any point, and there would be no breaks and spaces in the territory. --JakubNarebski (talk) 09:56, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I know acting like descriptivism is the objectively correct approach to language is all the rage these days, but I don't think you can describe a linguistic event (a word catching on) as "descriptivist" or "prescriptivist", as the page proposed for "conterguous". That's like referring to an economic occurrence as "normative" or "positive". It's not either of those, it just happens. Descriptivism refers to a quality of linguistics itself, not to language; it means, well, describing language. It doesn't stand for organic growth (or the explicit endorsement thereof, which would actually be prescriptive, and there's nothing wrong with that). So I nixed the reference to it; I think the supplied top-down and bottom-up are apt enough to stand on their own for that tangent. 172.68.206.92 12:37, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I wondered. "Prescriptive" and "descriptive" identify, I reckon, 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' processes, both are required to allow a language to grow while remaining comprehensible to all its speakers, and, at the time, the idea of linking an absurd "rage" with an absurd word seemed too good to pass on. Thanks for the correction. ----

This is like a puzzle with almost fitting pieces, so by carefully removing some states, it results in a fake border, as shown here: https://imgur.com/a/W8RMKMF . 162.158.134.40 15:49, 5 December 2020 (UTC)