It is easy to say that English is an ageless language ever renewed by fresh words and concepts. But lately it has been polluted by creeping neologisms and solecisms, many of them spawned by military jargon, television clichés and youthcult dialects. Should lexicographers rubber-stamp the linguistic junk or rear back and proclaim standards?
The American Heritage Publishing Co. has steered a canny middle course. To preserve an elegance of sorts, it established a new kind of court: a panel of 104 reasonably literate Americans including writers, scholars, editors and a U.S. Senatorwho...
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