Says Who?

Curzan, a linguist and English professor at Michigan, writes a usage guide from the position that the “grammando” and the “wordie” are both real and both live inside most careful writers. She works through the contested cases — literally, singular they, irregardless, split infinitives, the passive — by tracing where each rule actually came from, showing how often the prohibition is younger and more arbitrary than the usage, and then arguing for choosing deliberately rather than deferring to an inherited rule.

Why it’s on the list: A usage guide organised around the provenance of the rules, which makes it a book about where linguistic authority comes from as much as about grammar.

Where I saw it: Michael Mauboussin’s favourite books of 2024, posted December 31, 2024.

Connections

• Language of Discourse — the portfolio idea this belongs to: who gets to set the terms, and on what authority.
• Rhetoric — the craft side of the same question.
• Michael Mauboussin — the curator whose 2024 list this came from.