More on the language police:

My friend Glen Whitman points to this post on The Language Log, which starts:

Can’t anybody use a dictionary anymore? I enjoy a good curmudgeonly rant about how English is going to the dogs these days, I really do. But why can’t the journalists who crank out such screeds check their lexical prejudices against a good dictionary or two?

A couple of months ago, I complained about Cullen Murphy, who “drew the line” in the Atlantic on the meaning of three words: ‘Notoriety does not denote “famousness,” enormity does not denote “bigness,” and religiosity does not denote “religiousness.”‘ As I pointed out, a quick peek at the OED reveals that the three senses that bother him are earlier (even original) ones, sanctioned by centuries of use, and only recently falling out of favor. I don’t recommend that everyone start using those senses — I agree with his judgments that they’re no longer quite the thing — but to see this as holding off the forces of cultural degeneration is like “holding the line” against gingham bonnets and beaver hats.

Yesterday, John Powers weighed in (“A Loss for Words”, Boston Globe 2/8/2004) with another triadic tirade:

We say “transpire” when we mean “happen.” We say “momentarily” when we mean “soon.” We say “livid” when we mean “angry.” This growing imprecision of usage may not be what fictional professor Henry Higgins declared “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” But it does matter if you don’t know what you’re saying. If you don’t, how will I?

. . . .

For the rest, read the post; I haven’t double-checked all its assertions myself, but they strike me as quite right. By the way, to stress again: It may be that the usages that Murphy and Powers criticize are some usage is ugly, confusing, or otherwise suboptimal. The poster’s objection, which I share, is to claims that somehow the usages are objectively wrong, that some word “does not denote” something that is in fact listed as one of its dictionary meanings, or that people “don’t know what [they’re] saying” when what they’re saying is in fact one of the dictionary meanings of the word they’re using.