Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles Book

Everyone who works with linguistics knows and admires Geoff Pullum, and the title piece, which you can read online here, is pure gold. You don't need to be a linguist yourself to find it very amusing. A few quotes to try and persuade you to check it out:
It is in the scholarly community that we ought to find a certain immunity, or at least resistance, to uncritical acceptance of myths, fables and misinformation. But sadly, the academic profession shows a strong tendency to create stable and self-sustaining but completely false legends of its own, and hang on to them grimly, transmitting them from article to article and from textbook to textbook like software viruses spreading between students' Macintoshes.... the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken from Siberia to Greenland) have ever said they do."A silly, infuriatingly unscholarly piece, designed to mislead" is what one irate but anonymous senior scholar called this chapter when it was first published in NLLT. But this is not correct; rather, what I have written here is a silly, misleadingly scholarly piece, designed to infuriate. There is a huge difference.