Opening my Washington Post to the op-ed page one day early in the new year, my eye fell on the opening sentence of David Ignatius’s column: “Sailing smoothly into this first week of the 21st century, it’s hard to see storm clouds on the horizon.” Did my eye open the paper as well as “fall”? Did the impersonal “it” do the smooth sailing for Mr. Ignatius? No in both cases. Is there any danger of your misunderstanding either my meaning or his as a result of what American high school pupils were once taught to call a “dangling participle”? Also no. So then, does this alleged mistake really matter? Nowadays, either of the two possible answers to that question is likely to follow “Of course …”

Talk about your culture wars! I belong to the “Of-course-it-does” faction, and so to the “Of-course-it-doesn’t”s I am a troglodyte and a reactionary, someone who would have us all speaking Latin and lording it over our social inferiors who are, in the words of a once-common newspaper advertisement, “shamed by mistakes in grammar.” Newspapers themselves have been for the last twenty or thirty years theoretical “Doesn’t”s and practical “Does”es. If they have managed not to be shamed by mistakes in grammar very often up until now, it is largely because there has been an ample supply of copy editors who went to school back in the days when “English” class routinely included tuition in grammar. As these people retire, we are likely