You’re the one who started with the insults and half-truths, so don’t accuse me of wanting to take the gloves off. And as to the “partly humorous tone” of your previous comment, I didn’t think it was worthy mentioning. You obviously intended the criticisms seriously, so I addressed them seriously.

1. Personally, I hesitate to ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by other means. The simple fact is that linguists use technical terms to communicate ideas more readily to their colleagues and students. The unfortunate side-effect is that they often forget that not everyone shares their specialized knowledge and vocabulary, thus leading to what you perceive as “obscurantism”. As I said before, I think linguists are doing a terrible job of sharing their knowledge with the rest of the world.

2. It’s true that the mere presence of citations in the OED does not make something wrong or right, but it can certainly provide evidence for one to decide whether something should be wrong or right. As goofy said, if the evidence doesn’t matter, then what does? How do you first decide that something is a solecism?

3. Halpern certainly doesn’t refrain from lobbing little bombs himself, and neither do you. So I guess we’re all hypocrites.

It’s too bad you merely fall back on Halpern instead of attempting to make the argument yourself, because throughout your comments it looks like you’re simply parroting all of his points. I’m attempting—though not always successfully, I’m sure—to express what I’ve seen on both sides of the debate from my experience as an editor and as a linguist.

I also try not to assume that if I’ve been misunderstood, then it must be that the other person is thick. Furthermore, I try to refrain from armchair psychoanalysis of the person I’m talking to. I would recommend that you do likewise. Sincere discussion is always welcome, but I have little tolerance for those tactics. Oh, and one last point:

“You do know the difference between a style manual and a grammar manual, don’t you?”

Interesting that you should ask that, since I had an eerily parallel discussion with another Kevin S. a little while back. He seemed to imply that Geoffrey Pullum was putting down S&W in order to promote his own competing book, A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, which is in fact a linguistics textbook and not anything remotely resembling a style guide. But I’m sure that’s a completely different Kevin S. with a fondness for five-dollar words and a sneering disdain for linguists in general and Pullum in particular.

*No one* is claiming that just because Shakespeare spelled his name different ways means that we can ignore spelling rules. What we’re saying is: look at the relevant evidence. Shakespeare’s spelling isn’t relevant because there was very little in the way of standardized spelling in the 1500s. Nowadays we have standardized spelling, and it makes sense to adhere to it.

Since you seem to want to remove the gloves, I also won’t mince words: Your “rebuttal” to my comment is more breathtakingly obtuse (read, “stupid”) than much of what I’ve read in Pullum’s Chronicle article from this past Spring, and that is no mean feat.

First, the partly humorous tone of my post seems to have escaped you entirely. Anyway, to the various points….

1. My point here is not that the technical jargon in itself is bad. It is that descriptivists use it as an obscurantist weapon–what Foucault called “terrorist obscurantism”–and that often what they write is sheer nonsense. I do not have time to educate you on this point, but the writings of Mark Halpern offer an excellent critique of descriptive linguistic blather.

2. You missed my point completely regarding my mocking the misuse of quotations by famous writers to underpin descriptivist arguments. (Mark Halpern rightly calls these quotations “the OED Fallacy”). Just to make everything crystal-clear for you: If Shakespeare spells his name seventeen different ways, or if Jane Austen uses a plural verb after “none”, then how, exactly, does that make it right? If Austen decided to write a paragraph that forgoes capitalization and punctuation, then does that fact make it right for all of us to do so, too? Like most everyone, descriptivists play the “appeal to prestige/authority” game when it suits them, and that was my point. Even great writers commit solecisms, and might does not make right.

3. In their air of assumed authority as linguists, descriptivists do try to lord it over non-linguists, all the time. For instance, Pullum does so egregiously in his Chronicle piece. Sorry if my remark stung, but the stupidity is on your side if you don’t think that descriptive linguists hide behind their Ph.D.s while lobbing their little bombs. Halpern has some very pertinent comments on this phenomenon, as well.

For the rest, I won’t even bother rebutting the little support group-style mutual sob-fest about all those evil prescriptivists who’ve damaged your self-esteem. It’s painfully obvious that the tide has very much turned toward the descriptivist camp, so really, you should be celebrating.

I would simply add that pedants’ abuse and misunderstanding of Strunk & White’ stylistic suggestions (You do know the difference between a style manual and a grammar manual, don’t you?) should not be laid at the feet of Strunk & White, themselves.

“And sorry to say, I don’t see the same sort of stubborn and ill-informed arguments coming from the descriptivists’ camp. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a descriptivist who resembled the straw man that Kevin S. constructed.”

That’s because your perception is highly selective, and your blinders are firmly in place.

Now, go get some bandages and ointment to heal those sore wrists from all the ruler-slapping they received, and try not to let past indignities occlude present vision.

And wait, you can’t use first-person or passive in that class?! Are you supposed to write in a pro-drop language?