Abstract

ANGELS CHARACTERISTICALLY attract me to their side, so of course I'm sympathetic with the NCTE attack on public doublespeak. But I'm uncomfortable about the efficacy of some weapons in our attack. They seem too reminiscent of materiel from the last linguistic wars, the lost campaign against Webster's Third or the losing battle of dialectal purism. In fact, we seem to cling to our purist attitudes even as we tell ourselves we ought to and want to shed them. I propose in this paper to examine some problems related to these attitudes, particularly problems about our image and our view of language itself.' The work of Hugh Rank, the original chairman of the NCTE Committee on