In this week's New Yorker we learn of two competing schools of language scholars: The stodgy, old-school prescriptivists, who think there should be set rules for speaking and writing English, and the ...

At “War of the ‘iptivists” on Language Log, MJ asked in a comment, “What would a real prescriptivist look like?” In context, he meant an actual, respectable, principled prescriptivist rather than a ...

Last night's excursion into presidential humor (some self-depreciating, some not) reminds me of this blogpost we ran here six months ago about the use of the word "self-deprecating": Think the fights ...

Do you remember being taught you should never start your sentences with "And" or "But"? What if I told you that your teachers were wrong and there are lots of other so-called grammar rules that we've ...

TEXTUALISM in law and prescriptivism in usage are, in some ways, estranged cousins. It is fitting, then, that Antonin Scalia, textualism’s most prominent advocate, and Bryan Garner, the face of modern ...

On June 3, at 6:13 p.m., President Trump was evidently in a bad mood. He had heard or read one too many times that he uses bad grammar and eccentric capitalization. He tweeted: After having written ...

Bryan A. Garner, the founder of LawProse, is the author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” and the editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary. Robert Lane Greene Robert Lane Greene, an international ...

Professor Stefan Collini of the University of Cambridge says in a recent review article in Prospect Magazine: For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage ...

I WOULDN'T have expected Kingsley Amis to be the one to nail this just right, but he did. His son Martin wrote an essay for the Guardian a little while back about Kingsley's 1997 usage book "The ...

The positions attributed to prescriptivists, even in your own work, almost never align with positions taken by Fowler, Partridge, Nicholson, Bernstein, Gowers, Follett or me. Instead, this ...