August 23, 2007 — The Wall Street Journal published What Did U $@y? Online Language Finds Its Voice, in which Robert Hartwell Fiske, the editor and publisher of The Vocabula Review, was quoted.

Also in Vocabula: The Decline of the Dictionary by Robert Hartwell Fiske

Soon afterward, Grant Barrett — though he was interviewed for the WSJ piece, his words were not used — on his blog, wrote Robert Hartwell Fiske isn’t a linguist. He’s a self-involved curmudgeon—that’s not a compliment, but a criticism of his intellectual limitations—who is the go-to guy for the same kind of dismissive claptrap you’ll hear from anybody who’s speaking on language outside their area of expertise.

In response to this, I commented, also on Barrett's blog:

Grant Barrett sounds terribly upset, but perhaps I would be, too, if I were not quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

You need not have a PhD to have some knowledge of or views on the English language, and the notion, as Barrett suggests, that you need an advanced degree to have a sense of how the language is, or ought to be, used I am sure is abhorrent to a great many people, virtually all of whom have views about how the English language is used.

I, no doubt, disagree with much of what Barrett and the heap of ding-a-linguists and laxacographers at the American Dialect Society, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Dictionary Society of America espouse. That Barrett resorts to name calling likely means I am having some small influence.

Barrett, ever clever, replied:

Please quit, Robert. You've got a third-rate act playing for smarm circles in the few minutes after the Kool-aid is served and just before everyone starts reaching for their throats.

But that's hardly the end of the matter: Catfights: Teh New Talk-Ways Make Olders Mega-Sad, Super-Catty

The less well we use the language, the less thoughtful, cogent, and communicative we likely are. If people continue to heed laxicographers and descriptive linguists (fascinated as they are by leetspeak, slang, and other kinds of "new usage"), the words will not matter: "Any spelling, any usage, any meaning" — the motto of all ding-a-linguists.

Barrett, the leetspeakers, the slang-worshippers must drool over this sort of talk.