Even Safire's substitutes fire blanks

When I saw that it was a column by a sub this morning, I dared to glance at "On Language" in the NYT Magazine. It was a particularly elitist slam at people who aren't 'careful' enough about their language: Jaimie Epstein rants about how she can't find a man because her "literacy" (!?!?) is "dangerous to [her] dating health." After a breakup, she goes looking for male company …

I didn’t realize, however, what a huge boulder I would be rolling uphill — what with my being a “literary person,” a sometime editor of this column, someone whose ear is as tuned to the pitch of language as a cellist’s is to music — until the misplaced modifiers, dyslexic spellings and grievous abuses of syntax started pouring in.

Oh, a grammar harpy, there's a big turn-on. Or maybe there's some kind of S&M inside thing that I'm not getting. (Please, baby, 'e' before 'i'. Oh yeah.)

Besides, even if the commas are in the right places, the column looks like weak writing to me — leaving aside her bragging about the tuning of her own ear. I was going to ignore the column, but the ads-l has had a pretty good string under the subject line 'Safire'. Or see key points here.

But maybe there's a business possibility in here, especially now that it's in the news that men talk as much as women:

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