contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane

a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction, I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to . . . ?”

Homiletically speaking, the only difference between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists is that the latter’s got a bigger choir.