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Both sides are understandably protective of their version of the language, so it was a pleasant surprise to find Ben Yagoda of Slate praising the "logical punctuation" that we are said to use in the UK. Specifically, he notes a "punctuation paradigm shift" away from the traditional US practice of placing commas and full points (periods) inside quotation marks.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.[2] It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct.[3]

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

'Tools Not Rules' says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the esteemed school for journalists and teachers of journalists. Clark believes that everyone can write well with the help of a handful of useful tools that he has developed over decades of writing and teaching. If you google 'Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools', you'll get an astonishing 1.25 million hits. That's because journalists everywhere rely on his tips to help them write well every day - in fact he fields emails from around the world from grateful writers. 'Writing Tools' covers everything from the basics (Tool 5: Watch those Adverbs) to the more complex (Tool 34: Turn your notebook into a camera) and uses more than 300 examples from literature and journalism to illustrate the concepts. For students, aspiring novelists and writers of memos, emails, PowerPoint presentations and love letters, here are 50 indispensible, memorable and usable tools.

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it’s one closed-up word—douchebag—but they are wrong. When you cite the dictionary as proof of the division, they will tell you that the entry refers to a product women use to clean themselves and not the guy who thinks it’s impressive to drop $300 on a bottle of vodka. You will calmly point out that, actually, the definition in Merriam-Webster is “an unattractive or offensive person” and not a reference to Summer’s Eve. They will then choose to ignore you and write it as one word anyway.

This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way.

"Colons, once on life support, are proliferating.

Why?

Because these aren’t Ms. Truss’s colons. The colons of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, are brittle, dusty, soporific. “Prepare yourself,” they yawn, “that I may shortly provide you a list.” To actually call these colons by name (syntactical-deductive, appositive, etc.) is to virtually lose consciousness. So bear with me for a moment as we first rechristen our colons."

"I used to be a normal psycholinguistics graduate student. I wanted to study how the mind parses improbable metaphors, unintelligible accents, and quirky syntax. Sexy things. Things that would play out well at parties. I imagined myself magnanimously explaining how sentences like “The bartender served the bourbon fell down the stairs” were truly grammatical. I imagined myself dropping newspaper headlines like “Iraqi Head Seeks Arms” into conversations with beautiful people. I would defend Internet chatroom slang on local radio. I would exchange holiday cards with Steven Pinker.

"But something has happened. I am in my third year of graduate school, and I have fallen in love. I have fallen for pronouns. It’s hard to shut me up about them."

"Polysyndeton is the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted (as in "he ran and jumped and laughed for joy"). It is a stylistic scheme used to achieve a variety of effects: it can increase the rhythm of prose, speed or slow its pace, convey solemnity or even ecstasy and childlike exuberance. In grammar, a polysyndetic coordination is a coordination in which all conjuncts are linked by coordinating conjunctions (usually and, but, or, nor in English)."

What do you call those peculiar headlines with noun/verb confusion? 'Crash Blossoms'.

"For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds."

Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, by David Foster Wallace.