God of the Machine has a fine language rant (“‘The people’ cannot take English back, never having surrendered it in the first place”); furthermore, the first comment in the thread (by that loquacious fellow Anon) is a fervent recommendation for one of my own favorite language books:
You remind me of Jim Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek. I’ve never seen a better case made for American English as a living breathing thing and not the dead set of rules pushed by language mavens like Safire and Edwin Newman (Remember him?). Quinn wrote with just the light touch such an argument requires. Sad to see the book is out of print, while Safire keeps rolling along.
(Thanks, Tatyana!)
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