The Elements of Style!
One of my Christmas presents to myself was a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (inspired, like many things I do, by my relentless workaholism - I saw https://speakerdeck.com/nmeans/how-to-code-like-a-writer recently and wanted to read more of the original book).
One bit of it is an attack on linguistic descriptivism. I thought it was great, Verity thought it was great, and so I'm guessing at least half of the people who read this are also language nerds and will like it:
'The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn't. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has long been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.'
Other great things about this book are:
One bit of it is an attack on linguistic descriptivism. I thought it was great, Verity thought it was great, and so I'm guessing at least half of the people who read this are also language nerds and will like it:
'The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn't. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has long been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the ground of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.'
Other great things about this book are:
- the somewhat gushing description of "6 April 1988" as "an excellent way to write a date"
- the note in the 1979 introduction that Strunk "omitted so many needless words...that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself - a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times."
- the examples of stylistically barbarous sentences like "Wondering irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve".