Emphasis in bold mine
Apparently, questions which actually ask about aspects of the English Language which might be interesting to linguists, etymologists or serious language enthusiasts are now banned on EL&U.
No, that's not true.
They're not banned, they can be placed on hold for lack of research, which is not the case here. They can be closed for being duplicates, which didn't happen here. Questions can be placed on hold for being unclear, but nobody cast their vote for this reason. And finally, they can be migrated to ELL, which is exactly what happened here. Therefore, if we really want to be picky, the question has not been banned, it has not been closed, it has been relocated. However, I believe only the mods at ELL can bounce this question back to EL&U.
Certain types of question, for example grammar, syntax, phonetics and etymology questions – that may often be answered by linguistics professors or real language enthusiasts – should be protectable by users who have sufficient reputation in relation to that tag, or related tags in order to stop them being closed by careless users.
Who or what defines a "real language enthusiast"? Presumably any user who has been a member for at least six months and has answered perhaps thirty unrelated questions could qualify.
Let's look at the numbers. The first user who cast their vote to close the question has over 10,700 rep; the second has just over 6,000 rep and has been a member of EL&U for almost six years. The third user has earned nearly 10,500 rep, but the fourth is a relatively new member (only 4 months); and the last user, whose vote meant that the question was doomed to be migrated, even if they voted for a totally different reason, has also been a member for nearly 6 years and has nearly 40,000 rep to their credit.
[I also feel that people whose primary tag is for SWRs shouldn't be able to close-vote questions which don't have a SWR tag, but that's another question]
I think each and every one of these five users have as much right to cast their votes as an esteemed linguist or student of linguistics. In addition, not one of the five users has the SWR dupe hammer, but each and every one one has SWR as their highest tag. On the other hand, Araucaria's most successful tag is pronunciation. But he too has as much right to close a single-word-request, meaning or word-choice question, as any of us who have earned that "privilege".
UPDATE
The question is back home. Yay!! Among the two users who cast their votes in favour of migration (it was visible on the ELL page) are two users who have the SWR dupe hammer, one of them was me. The other was JOSH (who I don't think will mind my mentioning his name). If we had been prohibited from casting our vote, it's likely that the question would have taken longer to migrate, so bear this in mind the next time you (Araucaria) are tempted to take a (gentle) swipe at those users who have the SWR dupe hammer. We kinda get it when a question is worth saving.
P.S. Only one reopen vote is required, to unblock "The carrots need being chopped" and "The carrots need to chop"