Strunk and White

The problem with The Elements of Style is that people who worship it have turned it into the inviolable laws of writing. Geoff Pullum and others over at the Language Log blog (link) has written many entries on Strunk and White, and his conclusion is that it does more harm than good. My favorite bit of statistics is that White in his own writings totally ignores the that-which restrictive non-restrictive clause rule. Then there are the death to adjectives people one mets online and in style guides. They have misinterpreted the whole write concisely style suggestion as some kind of adjectival-adverbial zero-tolerance exceptionless law. This probably strikes a sympathetic chord with the need many have of finding a single word for some thing rather than using a phrase. And finally we have blaming it the Internet, which in the '50s was blame it on TV, and before that who knows what. The language is never in a state of perfection, for it is always in a state of fall and disintegration. The Cassandras who think this way always hearken back to the halcyon days when grammar was beaten into students with a wooden ruler and small style guides masquerading as books of grammar.

Ceci n'est pas un seing.