When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.