When I posted about a reader who was critical of The Sun’s headlines at “So our headlines stink,” I drew the attention of Arnold Zwicky at Language Log. While Professor Zwicky found the reader’s criticisms “nutty,” to use a technical term that I can endorse, he presents a deeper analysis of the source of such criticism. It’s worth your attention.*

What he sees as a root of unthinking or rigid prescriptivism can also be found in an approach to editing that hampers the work of some of my colleagues on copy desks: a narrow right-or-wrong, black-or-white, 1-or-0 approach to language and usage, combined with a tendency to elevate a guideline or a particular practice into a universal rule.

This is an attitude that looks for sacred texts — Strunk and White, the Associated Press Stylebook — and converts guidelines or a direction for a limited set of circumstances into rules to be applied regardless of context, occasion or audience. It leads to application of those rules instead of judgment. It leads to the kind of editing in which every comma and hyphen is in its supposedly correct place, every number-one has been changed to No. 1, but the article itself has no more organization than a haystack. It leads to a coat of battleship gray slapped onto every surface. It leads to a kind of tunnel vision that really cheeses writers off.

And, perhaps more to the point, it leads to a resistance to hearing — from this blog, from Merriam-Webster’s or Garner on Usage, from Language Log — that the rule is not a rule, or that it has been misapplied. As Samuel Johnson ruefully observed, “We are more pained by ignorance, than delighted by instruction.”

* Professor Zwicky has turned off the comments function on his post; feel free to comment here.