What makes books about the decline of traditional grammar and usage so popular? Books like Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves lament the downfall of traditional punctuation standards and promise a return to good old days gone by. But there never was a golden age of language, because language itself is in a constant state of flux. Yet we still pride ourselves on speaking and writing “well” — even when the definition of “well” is a moving target.
How can we think about grammatical “correctness” when grammar’s rules are always evolving? These three books give some needed perspective to a lively — and heated — linguistic debate.
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