Responding to my post, "A senseless waste of human life," about the pointlessness of correcting the comprised of usages on Wikipedia, a gentleman commented:
"Someone has to fight to preserve usage. At some point, we must accept that denotation has changed, but not soon."
Without ascribing attitudes to the gentleman, I'm going to take those two sentences as illustrative of the attitudes of sticklers generally, to explain why they are misguided.
Someone does have to fight to preserve usage. I am at the desk for ten hours a day, five days a week, preserving standards of accuracy and usage. Yesterday a reporter at The Sun got the name of a public figure wrong and used a technically incorrect term for a procedure; I corrected both errors. I'm the editor who changes whom to who when the pronoun is the subject of a clause that is itself the object of a verb or infinitive; the writers get that wrong at least half the time. I am still holding the line on lie and lay, though I increasingly see little point in it. I'm changing free reign to free rein for people who fail to hear dead metaphors.
Spare me, then, any suggestion that I have abandoned the good fight.
The second sentence also echoes a common attitude: a grudging admission that language changes while refusing to look at it doing so.
Even Bryan Garner, while stoutly maintaining that is comprised of is an error in usage, notes in his Language-Change Index that the usage has arrived at Stage 4: "Ubiquitous but …" It is characteristic of the hard-shell sticklers to ignore the evidence, to refuse to do any corpus research or heed the conclusions of those who have done so. What the stickler was once taught must remain perpetually true, lest the pillars of the temple crash around him.
When the Associated Press Stylebook abandoned the idiotic and unfounded over/more than, distinction a couple of years ago, the air was rent with cries of despair (admittedly, often mock despair) from copy editors vowing to clutch the distinction to their bosoms to the grave. Fine with me. The sooner, the better.
This is the project on which I have been engaged at this blog, in my work as an editor, in my teaching, and in my own writing: To determine, on the basis of evidence rather than whim, which usages are valid and to differentiate them from superstitions, shibboleths, and crotchets; to decide, in the inevitable triage of editing, what distinctions of meaning are worth the time and trouble of maintaining; and to encourage my colleagues to get beyond dog-whistle editing, the insistence on shades of meaning or grammatical niceties that even educated readers do not hear.