And but so English

This is good. David Foster Wallace, writing for Harper’s in 2001, covers the Usage Wars and standard written English, in (of course) his own idiolect (which idiolect¹ (q.v. Infinite Jest) makes the hard parts go down easier). Wallace was a walking liberal arts education.

¹ I thought including a footnote to illustrate DFW’s writing style would cross the border into parody, but I couldn’t help it when I discovered, upon checking to make sure “idiolect” really meant what I thought it did, that one of Wordnik’s usage examples is a reference to DFW’s own.