6-11-12: You Don’t Say

John McIntyre

One of our favorite blogs here at Maryland Morning is You Don’t Say, which contains the musings and grammatical instruction of veteran copy editor John McIntyre.

He’s the night content production manager for The Baltimore Sun, and this morning he returns to our program to tell you what he thinks about the War of 1812, and the brouhaha over prescriptivism and descriptivism sparked by Joan Acocella’s New Yorker review of Henry Hitchings’s The Language Wars: A History of Proper English.

Web extra:

1. McIntyre on the demise of the Queen’s English Society

2. McIntyre on the mobs during the War of 1812 that helped earn Baltimore the moniker “Mobtown.”

3. McIntyre on the legacy of the Civil War–both compared to the War of 1812, and in his own family.