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Regarding the purported rules of En­glish syntax, we tend to divide into mutually hostile camps. Hip, open-­minded types relish the never-­ending transformations of the way we speak and write. They care about the integrity of our language only insofar as to ensure that we can still roughly understand one another. In the opposite corner glower the curmudgeons. These joyless, uptight authoritarians are forever muttering about clunky concepts such as "the unreal conditional" that nobody's ever heard of.

I've thrown in my lot with the pedants. Yes, language is a living tree, eternally sprouting new shoots as other branches wither . . . blah, blah, blah. But a poorly cultivated plant can readily gnarl from lush foliage to unsightly sticks. The internet has turbo­charged lexical fads (such as "turbo­charge") and grammatical decay. Rather than infuse En­glish with a new vitality, this degeneration spreads the blight of sheer ignorance. So this month we address a set of developments in the prevailing conventions of the En­glish language whose only commonality is that they drive me crazy.

I don't really agree with her stance but I appreciate the way she argues her side.