Precious Jewels, Precious Links

Every once in a while you start surfing and find a whole trail of gold. I even found the amazing web site Language Log, apparently venerable but spanking new to me.

Here are some treasured quotes from today, many of them from Language Log...

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From a pulse-pounding book review on prescriptivist vs. descriptivist grammarians:

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls a "horrid little notebook of nonsense," and debunks a number of Strunk and White's dicta.

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Which links to an overwrought but fascinating article on Dan "Hack" Brown:

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier...and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.

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And finally an attack on a beleaguered English word, with some pompous college activists as exhibit number one:

Yes, seeing is believing. That's two occurrences of whom in subject function, right there on a single defaced American flag...It's a desperately insecure clutching after a form that people no longer know where to use or how to control.

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Language Log also contains some rousing articles on bad language, including one with some great anecdotes and another on the phrase "the butt-crack of dawn".