Eugene Volokh quotes an excellent letter on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in language, or why it’s OK to say “NU-kyu-ler.” H.W. Fowler, author of Modern English Usage, the greatest of all “prescriptive” guides, had this to say (under the heading “pedantry and purism”):

Pedantry may be defined, for the purpose of this book, as the saying of things in language so learned or so demonstratively accurate as to imply a slur upon the generality, who are not capable or desirous of such displays. The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, and someone else’s ignorance….

Purism is like pedantry, except that it does not necessarily imply a parade of superior learning. Now and then a person may be heard to ‘confess’, in the pride that apes humility, to being ‘a bit of a purist’; but purist and purism are for the most part missile words, which we all of us fling at anyone who insults us by finding not good enough for him some manner of speech that is good enough for us…. Pure English, however, even apart from the great number of elements (vocabulary, grammar, idiom, pronunciation, and so forth) that go to make it up, is so relative a term that almost every man is potentially a purist and a sloven at once to persons looking at him from a lower and a higher position in the scale than his own.

And Fowler was supposed to be a prescriptive grammarian. My own experience with language pedants is that the less they know, the likelier they are to insist on some particular niggling point or other.

(Modern English Usage appears not to be online. As a dictionary, albeit a highly eccentric one, it would be an ideal candidate. Fowler’s other book, The King’s English, is, but it isn’t nearly as good.)

VodkaPundit writes about using “SteveCase” as an obscene epithet to circumvent the AOL chat police, and that works just fine for the standard four-letter epithets. But if you hit your thumb with a hammer, it’s just not satisfying enough to say “SteveCase.” You need something richer, more mellifluous — something like “Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” (brief pause between the two Boutroses). Or maybe “Buttafuoco,” which enjoyed a brief epithetic vogue in the early 90s, when Joey was making the scene at Moomba. It did. Really.

Sasha Castel mused on the difficulty of telling the characters apart when reading royal history, since all the players marry their cousins and have the same names in the first place. She also wrote “Sasha’s Ketchup” on the ketchup bottle in indelible magic marker. Jim of Objectionable Content explained why Francisco D’Anconia is his favorite character in Atlas Shrugged. Megan McArdle stood up in front of me and I said, “Oh my God, you really are six two!” She really is, too. This got a big laugh but maybe you had to be there. Clay Waters and I agreed that what counts is not just what your convictions are, but how you arrive at them. He claims to like Light in August but has forgotten the plot. Fortunately he has an extra month’s reprieve before he has to leave town, and I hope it’s enough. I argued to Orchid of the Daily Dose and Allan of Rough Days that alleviating envy is a profound psychological force behind religion in general and Christianity in particular. Orchid agreed; Allan didn’t. Allan tried to sell me on an E.M. Forster essay on anonymity, with some success, and fantasy fiction, with less success. Ken Goldstein claimed that a WTO protestor told him, seriously, that “property is theft,” and further, even less believably, that he didn’t answer him “Theft of what”? He made it sound convincing. Asparagirl got Pejman on the cell and passed him around the room but I didn’t talk to him. Many silly name tags were worn.

You sure can learn a lot of neat stuff from reading an atlas. According to Rand McNally’s 2000 World Atlas, for instance, there are no dictators anywhere on earth. It says so right in the “World Political Information Table.” Sure, there’s the occasional “socialist republic” — noted garden spots China, Cuba, Egypt, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria and Vietnam. The Golan Heights is “occupied by Israel,” and the West Bank and Gaza Strip are “Israeli territor[ies] with limited self-government.” Sounds way nicer to be an “autonomous region,” like Tibet.

The United States is a “federal republic,” a distinction we share with Austria, Brazil, Germany, Mexico and Russia. Which makes it difficult to understand why we’d be going to war with a fellow (albeit neither federal nor socialist) “republic” like Iraq.

Afghanistan is listed, uniquely, as “transitional.” Heh.