Walsh Bill. Yes, I could care less: How to be a language snob without being a jerk

St. Martin’s Griffin Edition, 2013. — 316 р. — ISBN 978-1-250-00663-9These are interesting times for word nerds. We ate, shot and left, bonding over a joke about a panda and some rants about greengrocers who abuse apostrophes. A couple of young men took Lynne Truss’s aversion to substandard signage a step further and documented a vandalism spree across America. We can go on Facebook and vow to judge people when they use poor grammar. The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style inspired sentimental reveries. Grammar Girl’s tally of Twitter followers is well into six digits. We can’t get enough of a parody of the Associated Press Stylebook, of all things, or a collection of “unnecessary” quotation marks.
You might think all this interest in English usage would hearten the smartest people in the room, the men and women of linguistics. But you’d be wrong. Click away from the Fake AP Stylebook tweets for a moment and check in on a Web site called Language Log, where you’ll learn that caring less and not caring less are, in fact, the same thing, and have been for decades. Same with literally and not literally. Copy editors? Morons. The Elements of Style? A “little piece of trash.”
Mercy! But the learned spoilsports have a point, up to a point. Strunk and White did offer up some rules that they didn’t follow (and that we shouldn’t, either). Language does evolve, it does sometimes defy logic, and it does depend on context. Different words can mean the same thing, and the same word can mean different things.