Thursday, April 16, 2009

Bashing Strunk&White

What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their pernicious little volume than to give it the smackdown it deserves?

As the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language summarizes,
So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

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