I adore Stephen Fry.

I came across a YouTube clip of Stephen Fry recently, and was charmed by his rebuke of the sort of people who run off on grammar rants and see them as a sign of moral or social superiority:

"Most of the people who actually think they're the ones who care about languages—the kind of absolute asswitters who write letters to newspapers...moaning about the confusion of 'disinterested' and 'uninterested' and thinking that they're terribly educated, they really understand language, they knew the derivation of the words, someone has said 'less' when they meant 'fewer,' and so on. But that's not being a guardian of language. Being a guardian of language is enjoying language, is understanding it. If people understood it for a second, the philologies or the histories of it, they'd understand that language is changing, all the time."

Lovely and eloquent. It's the kind of attitude I try to take into the writing classroom.

This coming fall (we're still in summer, here—quarter system means classes start on September 21st) I'm teaching intermediate composition, and I'm really hoping that I'll have some time to challenge my students on the prescriptive notions of grammar they've been fed most of their lives and introduce the idea of grammar as rhetorical and dependent on the rhetorical situation.  If I have time, I'll follow up with another post on some teaching ideas.