Are 'grammar Nazis' ruining the English language?

English is the most important language on the planet, he says – not because it’s better but because, by historical accident, it happens to have spread around the globe. “It’s not that English has won out because of its virtue,” he says. “In some ways, English is highly unsuited to its role; it has 200 irregular verbs, where Swahili, for example, has none. It would have been wonderful to have Swahili as a global language, but it didn’t happen.”

... the reduction in the use of “whom”: “It’s marginal now,” says Pullum, “but still firmly ensconced wherever a preposition precedes a human-gender relative pronoun, as in ‘the employee to whom it was assigned’; it’s the clause-initial uses – ‘Whom do you mean?’ – that are now rare and unbearably pompous.”

The battle between the English-is-decaying brigade and the scientific linguists who want to record the real rules of the language has been going on for decades.