Books like The Elements of Style

This book is good for the following things: 1. Propping up a short table leg2. Lining a bird cage3. Building a fire4. Using as a coaster for cold drinksI devoted some of my grammar thesis to criticizing this book, and it was time well spent. Geoff Nunberg may have said it best: "The weird thing is to see rules like these passed down as traditional linguistic wisdom. Take that edict that you ought to say "10 persons" rather than "10 people." You can still find it in the recent editions of Strunk and White's revered Elements of Style, along with antique admonitions against saying "contact us" or calling something "worthwhile." The linguist Arnold Zwicky calls these zombie rules. Somebody should have run them through a wood chipper long ago, but here we are in 2010 assigning students a style guide that tells them that correct English requires them to write, "There were 5,000 screaming persons at the Lady Gaga concert." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...