E.B. White is an evil, evil man. Not only did he kill Charlotte, he's been giving bum advice to impressionable young undergrads. But don't worry--a pretentious Cambridge grammarian will save us all!
Choice excerpt: 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.
Yeah, that's the problem with the world today. Grammar angst. Also, I'm sure his outrage has nothing to do with the fact that his own doorstop grammar manual has sold 1,733 copies over seven years, while Elements of Style has sold 1,214,022 over ten years. Hmm.
God knows I'm picky enough about grammar (sometimes it's okay to say "and me," people!), but this dude is insane. If it comes down to having to choose between solid and accessible (if imperfect) grammar advice and snooty academic potshots taken from a snooty academic platform, I'm siding with the "grammatical incompetents." Or is it "the side which I will choose is that of the 'grammatical incompetents'"? I'd say the former, but apparently all of my grammatical knowledge is built on a foundation of lies and cotton candy--so what do I know?
1 comment:
What did I tell you about SPOILER ALERTS?!
But yeah. If more people were angry about grammar, the universe would be fixed.
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