In an article entitled “Speech Crimes” in today’s New York Times, Patricia O’Conner reviews When You Catch and Adjective, Kill it, by Ben Yagoda and The Fight for English by David Crystal. Reviewing these two books in a single article allows O’Conner to juxtapose Yagoda’s centrist position between language prescriptivists (those who try to preserve the language by stressing rules) and descriptivists (those who merely observe changes in language) with Crystal’s strong descriptivist leanings.

Yagoda’s book—which contains a “surprisingly entertaining” chapter on conjunctions—sounds like the more interesting of the two. After all, how can I resist a book by an author who, according to O’Conner, can get “lexically aroused by the likes of ‘a’ and ‘the’”?

The subtitle of Crystal’s book is “How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left,” an allusion to one of my favorite grammar books, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: a Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss. According to the review, Crystal takes issue with “self-appointed language watchdogs” like Truss. I must admit, I’m in the same zero tolerance camp as Truss, which explains why I enjoyed her book so much. Nevertheless, since O’Conner calls The Fight For English “fascinating and insightful, often funny,” it might be worth a read.

What’s your position in the prescriptivist versus descriptivist debate? Are you prepared to go with the language flow, or are you a stickler like me? Leave a comment below.