When you work with language as a profession, few things are more frustrating than the fact that language debate is always dominated by raging prescriptivists - the people that want to tell you how you should use language; rules and regulations make for easy headlines, but language is a complex business.
Descriptivists - linguists who think it's more worthwhile to examine how language is used and to compare it to the rules we do have than making up new rules - are rarely making themselves heard at the same volume.
One of the best blogs around for descriptivist commentary on current language issues is the Language Log, home of linguists Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman. Go check it out.
Among the more entertaining reads: this piece explaining why Dan Brown is "one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature". Good, geeky fun.
And lots of links to other parts of their ongoing crusade against the poor writing in Brown's novels.
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