"The Purity of the English Language"

[lethargic_man]

I was slightly surprised today to find the eminently respectable World Wide Words blog (a.k.a. worldwidewords) quoting the comment on the English language by james_nicoll that sciamanna used to quote in her .sig over on rec.arts.sf.* back in the day.

However, in the course of putting together this blog post, I discovered, even more to my surprise, that james_nicoll has his own Wikipedia page, with a section all about how this quote has gone viral on the Internet.

No doubt the reaction of readers of my blog is going to fall into the categories of either "We knew all about that years ago", or "Who is james_nicoll?"...