It’s unusual these days to encounter a freshly researched, serious book about English usage. Although several wordbooks appear every year, they’re often superficial and breezy. Not Anne Curzan’s Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words (Crown), issued in March. The title immediately raises the question, Kinder and funner than what? You might think of the well-known usage guides by Fowler (1926), Partridge (1940), Bernstein (1965), and Follett (1966). But the latter two writers are nowhere mentioned by Curzan, and Partridge comes up only once. Fowler is mentioned ten times — each time about the things he wrote in the 1920s and before. That is, there are no mentions of the second (1965), third (1996), and fourth (2015) editions of Fowler.

So what is Curzan talking about?

Page one suggests that the answer is Garner’s Modern English Usage, an Oxford University Press book now in its fifth edition (2022). Although she calls that book both “influential” and “authoritative,” Curzan takes issue with it on various points, such as using impact as a verb. On the first page of her book, she quotes yours truly as saying: “Impact was traditionally only a noun. In the mid-20th century, it underwent a semantic shift that allows it to act as a transitive or intransitive verb [as in This will impact our decision]. . . . Traditionalists still reserve impact for noun uses and impacted for wisdom teeth.”

Here’s what Curzan says: “This use of impact as a verb is clearly jarring to many ‘traditionalists,’ but it is clearly not jarring to the many writers who use it, including the ones Garner quotes.” She adds some useful context: “Historically the verb, which appears in written English by the early 17th century, had the more concrete meaning of ‘to press closely into something’; to this day, your impacted teeth are pressed closely into your gum tissue. By the 1930s, the verb impact had come to be used figuratively for things that exuded a force on other things or had an effect of some kind, first primarily in literary works and then in a much wider range of genres.”

Curzan distinguishes between humorless traditionalists, whom she calls grammandos, and all other language enthusiasts, whom (maybe I should say who) she calls wordies. It’s a cute dichotomy. A grammando is “one who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes.” A wordie is “someone who delights in language’s shifting landscape,” a “skilled bird-watcher of language, taking pleasure in observing how different speakers creatively deploy the language and how it is changing.” She notes that most of us have both characters rattling around in our minds.

Curzan cites ten potential differences between the two of us, impact being the first. Let’s examine the nine others:

I describe impactful as “originating in jargon” and call it “a word to be scorned.” Curzan concedes that she “doesn’t especially like the word,” but says “that is neither here nor there.” She says that the word “is now in general use in a range of formal, edited genres of written English.”

I call fun, as an adjective (as in a fun time), a “casualism.” I call funner and funnest “blemishes in both writing and speech.” Curzan says that funner and funnest are “both words to be cautious with right now, given the visceral reaction some folks have to hearing or reading them, . . . but this change in acceptability could happen relatively quickly.” No big dispute there.

I call reason is because “loose because reason implies because and vice versa.” Curzan suggests that this phrasing involves “mirroring” and is therefore “aesthetically pleasing.”

I call amongst a pretentious archaism in American English — primarily a Briticism. Curzan says you should “keep your eye on this resurrected word” because “it may have reenergized legs.”

I say that only is “perhaps the most frequently misplaced of all English words.” Curzan asks: “If this word is ‘misplaced’ so frequently, is it really misplaced?” She adds: “If there is the possibility of genuine ambiguity, then it can be helpful to ensure your only is placed as unambiguously as possible.”

I used to call the past-participial use of proven “ill-advised,” but Curzan notes that I have “recently removed the description.” The old advice was to use proven only as an adjective (proven facts) and to keep proved as the past participle (facts that have been proved). I still think proven is “best used only as an adjective.” Curzan says that “many of us use proven as a past participle, and editors regularly let it pass.”

Curzan and I agree that none can unimpeachably be either singular (none is) or plural (none are).

I urge that the relative pronoun that be used restrictively and which nonrestrictively. Curzan says that my position “makes a whole lot of educated people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing as writers.” She says that “editors may prefer a restrictive which to avoid two instances of that appearing too close together,” citing this sentence: “We want to assign only that material which/that will be most helpful.” I would rewrite it this way: “We want to assign only the material that will be most helpful.”

I say that where it is at has always “to one degree or another . . . been stigmatized as nonstandard,” adding in the past tense: “The usage was long regarded as illiterate.” (Curzan wrongly says that I call the wording “uneducated.”) Curzan points out that it has to do with the contraction we’re: We can say where we are but not where we’re, so at tends to be added when the contraction is used. She declares, “It’s not uneducated,” adding: “I’m not recommending scattering this phrase throughout your formal writing, but I am saying that it sometimes appears in more formal places and we may not notice.” (Count me out of that we.)

You might expect me to pan this book. Not at all. I think it’s delightful, informative, and entertaining. Curzan is a little ahead of the curve, I think, but her views are a good signal of where the language might soon be heading (as opposed to where it is now — or, in her view, where it’s at now). And given that there are about 300 exceedingly common points of debatable usage, it’s hardly bad to have ten points of moderate disagreement.

And I really don’t mind that she names me on page one. I’ve had worse. In 2006, the first seven words of June Casagrande’s book Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies were these: “I’d like to thank Bryan Garner.”