I didn't notice myself, but a number of writers have been pointing out the fiftieth anniversary of a familiar classic, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. I got the book halfway through its run. Somehow it seemed older to me then than it does now.
Geoffrey Pullum would like to see the Elements forgotten, as he argues in a long essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education that Strunk and White were "idiosyncratic bumblers" when it comes to real English grammar. Pullum is famous in anthropology circles as the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax ; he frequently writes at Language Log, the famous linguistics blog.
You'll find it an odd essay if you hate grammar Nazis -- Pullum makes Strunk and White look like Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz, but he has to go into full-on Brit-Lit Conan the Grammarian mode to do it.
It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.
Those who have studied historical linguistics a bit, or the history of English in particular, will recognize many of his points. For example, the split infinitive is a natural construction, and nineteenth-century writers used "that" and "which" almost interchangeably.
Still, students could use a good, short book to make them think about the words they write. That's certainly what Strunk and White did for me, and even if some of the examples make a linguist cringe, they did quite a job of anticipating the writing problems that students still produce, even fifty years after the fact. Besides that, it's a joy to read compared to the French style book I had to use in college. If you think English grammar Nazis are bad...
