JAN FREEMAN SHOULD BE better known than she is, she wrote a great column on language for the Boston Globe, she is far more careful in her scholarship and claims and so her erudition is really erudite as compared to the more widely known language nags, scolds and dolts.
Here's a short interview with her about her annotation of the late 19th, early 20th century cynic and general asshole, Ambrose Bierce.
Jan Freeman On A Way With Words
She issued an annotated, revised publication of Ambrose Bierce's prescriptive language-style book "Write it Right" from shortly before that ass Strunk did his. Bierce at least had a career as a writer that people read and respected (When Dean Howells said that Bierce was one of the three truly great American writers, Bierce said that the other two were, no doubt, Dean Howells and Dean Howells). Freeman points out there was a fashion for writing that kind of language nagging and snobbery around then, her comments on it and that kind of thing in general are very sensible in ways that are rarely heard in the media,. I would guess that that is because like Geoffrey Pullum, her fellow critic of Strunk-White, and almost none of the suckers in the media, on faculties, in the college-credentialed who buy that tripe, she knows something about grammar and language so she knows when it's peddling horse feathers.
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