This site coming across my shared Google Reader items is quite timely as I've been reading David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, Consider The Lobster, which includes the title essay. It also includes a review of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage that goes by the title of "Authority and American Usage" in the book but originally appeared in Harper's magazine as "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." It's a bit long, but certainly interesting. I'm sure I know a few people who will greatly appreciate it.

(If you're wondering, DFW defines "SNOOT" as his "family's nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic" and it was the family joke that "S.N.O.O.T. stood for 'Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance' or 'Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time' depending on whether or not you were one." Later he says SNOOTs are "the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else" which I'm sure would apply to more than a few AE readers.)