I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole post was too long. This topic gets under my skin. Beyond that, I would say that man

I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole post was too long. This topic gets under my skin. Beyond that, I would say that many of the things prescriptivists discuss are not grammatical mistakes. They are often disagreements about usage where reasonable people can disagree, but more importantly many of them are literally myths. That is, many of these so-called rules have never had good support in English usage or etymology or linguistics. In many cases, they are just usages that bothered someone in the 19th or 20th century who made a lot of noise. (For some discussion, browse through the hits to this search: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 or here: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-grammar-day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/ http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-gr... ) For what it's worth, I find poor usage and poor grammar very grating as well. My point wasn't that we should celebrate it, but that cranky rants aren't good ways to deal with bad writing or speech. It helps to write well. It helps to recommend good writing. It helps to point out to people why one way of putting something might be more effective than another. But the Andy Rooney style of complaining (which, I'm sorry, I thought the article belonged to) isn't helpful.