Subtle like a pre-emtive nuclear strike

From Book Reviews. WMU Libraries - American Tongue and Cheek:

[Author] Jim Quinn (I bet he doesn't like to be called James), is an unabashed populist seeking to prevent the English language from being corrupted by what he calls the new pop grammarians, who themselves also claim to be crusading against debasement. These include self-appointed purists such as Edwin Newman, William Safire, and John Simon among the new experts, and H. W. Fowler, Wilson Follett, Theodore Bernstein, and Bergen Evans among the older authorities.

Few of the grammar watchers are women, thus making, as Quinn points out, the epithet "schoolmarm" inaccurate, if not sexist. According to Quinn the so-called guardians of the language are often ignorant of the history of English usage; they are also usually snobbish, devoid of humor, have tin ears, and far from conserving correctness, they are really radicals seeking to preserve impossibly genteel, over fussy "standards" which most speakers and writers not only ignore, but should ignore.

[. . .] But Quinn indulges in over-kill. After a few chapters, despite his wit, I became just as tired of his zealotry against the purists as of their pomposities. Quinn spends too much time trading nits with the nit-pickers about mere points of grammar, rather than discussing what to me are far more important questions such as: unnecessary jargon, the deceitful use of euphemisms and circumlocutions, the over-reliance of the passive voice to avoid taking responsibility; and other examples of deceitfulness.

To be fair to Quinn, he is not out to get all the purists. He rather likes the late Bergen Evans, in fact. And he does make a good case defending Black English. He is often a fair-minded descriptive linguist. He loves language and seems authoritative without being pedantic.

Help keep my ass honest, kids. You notice me using the passive voice -- almost wrote in that response to Elayne, "people who aren't pissed off at me" rather than the much more accurate "people I haven't manged to piss off recently" -- thought I gotta admit, this doesn't seem to be a problem with AAVE, something I was researching half-assedly when I stumbled upon the book review -- gently or not-so-gently remind me that the shit did not just happen, that I had an active role in making it happen.

Figure no reason to burden Garrity with sole responsibility for playing Jiminy Cricket to my dumb ass. So let's try the distributed computing model.

Which reminds me, saw this on MeFi yesterday:

FightAIDS@Home: FightAIDS@Home is the first biomedical distributed computing project ever launched. It is run by the Olson Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, and uses your computer to assist fundamental research to discover new drugs, using our growing knowledge of the structural biology of AIDS.

It's like seti@Home, only useful.

Ain't installing it on my work computer, and forgot to put it on the laptop last night because I suck, so this is another of those little reminders to myself. Because those always work so well. . .