In You Are What You Speak, Robert Lane Greene takes on “grammar grouches, language laws, and the politics of identity” as he argues against a prescriptivist view of language. Greene notes that there has always been a set of people who see the glory days of a given language rooted firmly in the past (probably in the time of their youth) and take new slang, usage change, and the speech of second-language learners as proof that things are only going downhill. Greene notes that this has always been the case, that no language has ever degraded, and that language change is just a natural thing. Reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Beowulf is evidence enough of this fact.
Greene’s sort of secondary point is that language policing is a marker of a kind of reactionary politics that in itself is not good. All in all this is an enjoyable look at language and language use written for the amateur that is not going to tell you when to correctly use whom or how to correctly tone the end of your sentences. Give it a shot.
