Literal Meaning: The Very Idea Book

Mark Halpern took an introduction to linguistics class and a class on Old English as a college student many years before; he doesn't mention in this book, whether or not he knows any languages other than English. Yet he feels competent enough to write a whole book attacking academic linguistics for disdaining linguistic prescriptivism, and thus contributing to the degradation of the English language. He attributes this disdain to the linguists' left-wing and progressive bias. I was reminded of the claim on a Russian left-wing site that Russia's transition to capitalism in the early 1990s has been stripping the Russian language of noun and verb morphology.