Described the history of prescriptivism as "bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism, and educational malfeasance" BUT ALSO "a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests. Instinctively, we find the arbitrariness of existence hard to accept. Our desire to impose order on the world, which means inventing the forms of language rather than discovering them, is a creative act." He describes the quarrel between descriptivists and prescriptivists as a mad confederacy "each party thrives on lambasting the other"