Anne Curzan thinks that two parties within us struggle to prevail over how we understand and use the English language.
One party she calls the grammando (think "stickler" or "pedant"), avid to enforce The Rules (even when some of them are bogus). The other she calls the wordie, whose response to encountering a new word or usage is "Wow, that looks interesting."
In Says Who? (Crown, $29) she looks to strike a balance.
The formidably titled Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan writes with authority, but in an easy, conversational style. If she drops in the occasional technical term like "metathesis," she is quick to explain that it means the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, as in ask/aks. But mostly she writes as if she were sitting across the table from you talking about language and how we use it.
And she covers the territory: the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, terminal prepositions, singular they, who/whom, true and false passives, the instability of the apostrophe, and dozens more. (I agree with her on every point, so we can see that she is a genuine authority.)
Her subtitle, A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words, indicates what she is about. The grammando will have to unlearn some rules that are not actual rules and loosen up about words and usages outside formal written contexts ("funner"), and the wordie will have to curb their enthusiasm when formal contexts merit formal precision. She is "comparing what speakers and writers actually do and what we're told we're 'supposed to do' in formal contexts, in order to come up with our own, informed decisions about what effective usage is, based on context."
The project, then, is not to bring The Rules to bear inflexibly, or decide that Anything Goes, but to "weigh the the benefits and drawbacks of our language choices, given what we know about the usage rules, the judgments others may make based on our adherence to those rules, our own preferences and purposes, our knowledge of our audience, and our understanding of how the language may be changing."
This is a book by a savvy, approachable authority who aims to equip you to make those informed decisions about how you speak and write. It is worth your time.
