PUT THIS ON MY CHRISTMAS LIST!

Joseph Epstein, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, points us to the delights of the Vocabula Review, a refuge for all of us who aspire to clear writing. Scanning through the excerpts of this month’s articles, I was particularly taken by Carey Harrison’s "News from the Front, Once More:"

The

Teachers’ Union diktat, issued to the public schools in the 1970s,

which asserted that standardized English was a patriarchal conspiracy,

has never been revoked. Nor need it be; its consequences, along with

the half-baked liberal conceit that linguistic anarchy is a weapon in

the class war, will be reversed not by a counter-diktat enforcing

consistency of spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation, but by the

refusal of parents to tolerate the consequences of their offspring’s

sloppy English. This is already happening. The counter-revolution has

begun. The fact that America’s class divides are policed by degrees of

literacy is gradually being understood, along with the fact that class

divides will not be penetrated by certificates. If you write "she have"

and "he eat," it doesn’t matter what degrees you possess, your earning

capacity in the white-collar world will in all probability be limited —

unless you’re a genius in some extra-literary respect, which not even

the fondest parents can go on believing about their children for ever.

With any luck, they’ll also tell their kids to lose the short pants and backwards baseball caps, and get their own place to live, and a job.

Tip from The Best of the Web Today.

Update (8 December).  Oops!  I missed this indispensible feature, the Top Twenty Dimwitticisms, free to the public.