The editors of The Atlantic must be in a combative mood. The February issue of that venerable magazine featured, as its cover story, an excerpt from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s aptly titled book The Assault on Truth. Just two months earlier an assault on traditional grammar by a Stanford University linguist named Geoffrey Nunberg made its way onto The Atlantic’s cover. This Geoffrey hasn’t received the notice, almost universally unfavorable, that the other has managed to arouse. Nor should he. In its own quiet way, however, Nunberg’s article participates in an intellectual tendency that ought to worry us far more than it has. “The Decline of Grammar” needs to be answered not only because it is wrong on particulars and wrongheaded in general but because, concealing a political agenda beneath its “nonpartisan” facade, it would hasten the condition it sets out to describe. Nunberg’s logic would make literary culture a casualty of a liberal society. One takes what consolation one can in observing that what Nunberg practices is not liberalism but a debased version of same.

“The Decline of Grammar” advertises itself as “an argument for a middle way between permissiveness and traditionalism.” At least these are the words that appear in italics above the title and by-line. And indeed Nunberg does make a show of evenhandedness. He presents himself as the referee in a wrestling match featuring tag teams of has-been grammarians in one corner and up-and-coming linguists in the other. But though he tends to