The Case Against the Grammar Scolds

These are boom times for linguistic pedantry. Never before have there been more outlets for opinionated humans to commiserate about the absurdities of “irregardless” or the impropriety of “impact”-as-a-verb or the aggressive affront to civil society that is the existence of the word “moist.” This is an age that found Bryan Henderson, Wikipedia editor and empowered peeve-haver, taking all the instances he could find of the phrase “is comprised of,” within the vast online encyclopedia, and replacing them with “is composed of” or “consists of”—more than 40,000 word-swaps, in all. It’s an age, too, that found Lynne Truss, author of the usage polemic Eats, Shoots & Leaves, garnering plaudits and book sales by offering readers rallying cries like this one: “If you still persist in writing, ‘Good food at it’s best,’ you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”

The vitriol is ironic—and, yes, , Alanis-wise and otherwise—and not merely because it puts the pendants in a precarious place, karmically. (The subtitle of , one might point out, itself contains a usage error: might more properly be written as “.”) The irony is broader: To engage in such peeveryplayful or otherwise,is also to ignore the long, chaotic, and deeply creative history of the English language. It is to assume that someone’s adherence to the moment’s current rules of usage is a signifier of that person’s education and worth.