A colleague drew my attention this morning to a post of advice on grammar and usage, "9 grammatical mistakes you need to stop making before I throw live scorpions at you." It left me inclined to fling a few things myself.
The post is the depressing sort of counterfeit expertise you get all the time: a mixture of points about actual lapses in usage (affect/effect), trivia (it's/its), and downright error. One representative example should give you the flavor of the whole:
Myriad. "We have a myriad of options for venues for next year's gala." Myriad is more like an adjective, kind of like "countless," but it's started to be treated more like a noun. You don't say, "We have countless of options." So, you can win major sexy grammar points by dropping the "of," like this: "The myriad services we provide are a testament to our awesomeness."
Apparently one does not win sexy grammar points by looking at a dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary, for one, indicates that myriad started being treated like a noun in English circa 1550. The adjectival sense emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Merriam-Webster, the Concise Oxford, American Heritage, and Webster's New World all list it as both noun and adjective, and Merriam-Webster and American Heritage append usage notes saying that restricting the word to the adjectival sense is mistaken. Both senses are standard English.
Here's the grimly familiar pattern. Someone , a teacher or editor, claiming authority pronounces on English usage, either from an idiosyncratic preference or a mistaken belief. The pronunciamento is taken up uncritically and repeated. Over time it becomes a shibboleth by which the supposedly unenlightened and subliterate are identified and shamed.
Some people should keep their scorpions to themselves.