Them's Good Grammar

The singular they: I'm all for it. I use it frequently. I've heard no other eloquent alternative suggestions, except possibly to recast the sentence in a way that avoids the need for it. But that isn't always effective. I'm going to continue to use it when I see fit, and I don't want to hear any whining from the Prescriptive wing. I'm not going to gripe that your he or she is about as eloquent as a frog fart, so you can just as well keep respectfully silent when I bandy about my singular they.

Can one be a Prescriptivist and still embrace Shakespeare and Joyce? I'd like to hear someone reconcile that.

I caught a split infinitive in the New York Times today: "While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's..." I don't particularly care - why shouldn't the English split an infinitive just because Latin was incapable of doing it? Out of reverence? I just wonder if this is a case of ignorance or defiance.

I stand in favor of defiance. Why should we be bound by arbitrary rules some ornery schoolteacher came up with three hundred years ago? There's no order to English - it's the result of linguistically raping and pillaging every other language it came across in its spread. Why pretend it was carefully constructed in some germ-free laboratory? Embrace its chaos. That's what makes it such a great playground for writers.