Sociolinguistic Artifacts

Short opinion piece addressing the tendency for prescriptivism to override legibility. In this case, the host of This American Life had violated the dangling modifier rule by saying: "As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch --- TCM." The "correct" phrasing would be, "As a middle schooler, I always wanted to watch one channel." As columnist John McWhorter puts it: "We don't need to be training people to look down upon perfectly comprehensible speech." McWhorter argues that with the encroachment of improving AI technology, "we need to sweep away linguistic cobwebs, like grammar rules that serve no purpose. It requires people to know a password to gain entrance into respectability, one of the last permissible outlets for classism." [Published on 04-16-2026]