Let's just take this remark of Mark Liberman's (here) and repeat it in a bolder format for greater visibility, OK?
| Someday, someone will explain to me why private theories about the logic of language so often turn into public crusades of moral awakening. |
Exactly. That's what we want to know. How private worry about hyphens or apostrophes will so often turn a person into a punctuational avenging marauder, a ruthless grammatical Genghis Khan. Why does this happen? I wish I knew.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at October 4, 2005 06:22 PM