ABSTRACT
Linguists are supposedly professional experts on one aspect of human behavior, the linguistic aspect, who are half frightened, half outraged by finding themselves challenged, on matters that they regard as within their professional purview, by amateurs. If real people seem to care little or nothing about language, linguists contend, and have appointed the linguists their spokesmen, and what the linguists want for their ungrateful charges is that they should be set free in matters of usage from the strictures of grammarians and prescriptivists. So when linguistic freedom fighters declare that no one is going to tell good Americans how to speak or write their own language, they don't really mean it. Disputes between the linguists and their critics, between the descriptivists and prescriptivists, rarely proceed very far before the former charge the latter with some form of bigotry, usually racial or sexual.
