The cause of good writing is not served by griping pedants, writes Steven Pinker. Many people have strong opinions on the quality of language today. They write books and articles deploring it ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Full text is unavailable for this digitized archive article. Subscribers may view the full text of this article in ...

It looks like I may have been on to something, On Monday, I exhorted i readers to rise up and join my campaign against the debasement of grammatical standards, which I coined the pedants' revolt.

I tried to explain that it was a slip of the tongue. I own a Subaru Outback now, I replied, and it’s basically the same model as the one I bought in 1988. But some couldn’t let it go. “You ...

Call it the circular firing squad or the pot calling the kettle black or the hoisting of the jackanapes on his own petard (actually, please call it that last one). Years ago, esteemed Hit & Run ...

When I use the term "decimate" in reference to what's happened to the Democratic Party in the era of Barack Obama, I admit that I am using the word in a way that would annoy those same pedants.

In the context of this rousing set of balanced alliterative couplets (politicians are good at these), Harding's "normalcy" achieved two ends: it popularised the word and it irritated the pedants.

For those who find themselves wincing whenever they hear a “could of” instead of a “could have”, or a “less” when it should be “fewer”, it may not just be a passing annoyance. A ...

Bryan Henderson has corrected the same ungrammatical phrase on Wikipedia 47,000 times. With one gear-change he’d be a satirist ...

His line, “The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants,” made me pause before blithely relating that the proper way to punctuate a forceful ...

More than 10 years after Waterstones “enraged pedants everywhere” by dropping the apostrophe from its name, it has been “forgiven”, said The Times.The bookshop chain made the alteration in ...