Here at Cornell, as at any other college campus or location where academics convene, we have sprinkled among our populace grammar snobs.

You probably know the type. The guy who never ends sentences with prepositions; who cringes when people use the word “disconnect”; who distinguishes between “who” and “whom” in speech, even though it makes him sound pompous and weeny.

This guy takes classes in Goldwin Smith. He carries around a tattered moleskine notebook and writes in it at random, seemingly uninspiring moments. He attends lectures by visiting theorists and asks questions complete with preambles and perorations. Spend more than an hour with him and he’ll mention Dostoyevsky. Twice.

Point is, people despise this type, and with good reason. This type taints the reputation of the many earnest, self-effacing students interested in language for scholarly fulfillment, not for ostentatious display.

Frankly, however, this type has a point: Our language sucks.

I don’t fully identify with the grammar snob, but I still find myself bewildered by the linguistic and grammatical imprecision permeating our vernacular.

Take irony, which no one knows how to define or identify anymore, and now seems to pass for anything interesting, unusual and, especially, coincidental.

I hear people mistake coincidence for irony all the time. Take, for instance, the girl I passed on Stewart Bridge who, after breaking her shoe, dubbed the moment “ironic” because she had broken another pair of shoes earlier that week. (My condolences about the shoes, really, but there’s nothing ironic about breaking something twice in a week.)

Or maybe you’ve noticed how we conflate the word “literally” with “figuratively,” using “literally” to describe situations and events that are anything but literal. I’m guilty of this one myself. (E.g., I once told a friend that a coffee shop in town was “literally giving shit away” — before backtracking to explain that, alas, no one was actually distributing feces.)

I could continue cataloguing solecisms, malapropisms, grammatical errors, etc., but doing so wouldn’t amount to anything interesting. Indeed, to anyone remotely familiar with linguistics, these instances are already well-known, in no need of further documentation and, presented individually, neglect the weightier question lurking behind them: Does it even matter if we use words and figures of speech in contexts divergent from their original meanings?

For centuries, linguists and grammarians have been ensnared in this debate, with participants falling primarily into one of two camps (though occasionally both): prescriptivists, who believe language should adhere to a fixed set of rules, and descriptivists, who believe language should be defined according to the way it evolves.

I’m not interested here in giving a didactic lecture on prescriptivism and descriptivism, as I know little about linguistics and, given that scholars have devoted their lives to this subject, probably can’t contribute anything revelatory to the discussion, anyway.

But after reading an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “Defending Against Language Pedants,” an implicit critique of prescriptivism, I want to speak up briefly for my fellow pedants and grammarians — or at least help them defend against people defending against them.

In the article, the author, Ammon Shea, instructs readers to combat language freaks “through the use of historical precedent.” Shea presents a few of grammarians’ favorite pet peeves, and in each instance provides an example of a famous author using (or misusing, depending on your perspective) the formulation in question.

For example, Ezra Pound wrote “stupider” instead of “more stupid,” Jane Austen and Charles Dickens used “literally” in a figurative sense and Shakespeare littered his work with double negatives.

The main problem with this argument, however, is that Shea never explains how these historical precedents implicate the prescriptivist approach. Are we to infer that because famous people have broken the rules of language, it’s okay for us to do the same?

That would be fair, I guess, if it weren’t for the golden rule of writing, the one enshrined in nearly every style guide, which Shea neglects to mention at all: “Know the rules, break the rules.” Of course all writers alternate between correct and incorrect usage; the difference is, the good ones know what they’re doing. Which is why the approach Shea endorses in his essay — something along the lines of “don’t bother with the rules; just break them and blame Shakespeare” — seems so frivolous.

What complicates this line of thinking is that Shea, who is writing a book on reading the Oxford English Dictionary, is no dilettante when it comes to language. Clearly, the guy has some serious, sophisticated thoughts on words.

So why’s he holding back?

My guess is that he’s not interested in getting into an epistemological argument about language — and, really, neither am I. Maybe he’s just looking to root out the faux-grammar snobs, to “outpedant the pedants,” and, in that case, all the power to him. If not, we grammarians will be needing a word with him.

Literally (or maybe not).