Or is it time to focus again on al-Qaeda?

With great respect to the CIA, the FBI and Don Rumsfeld, these are comparatively minor concerns. I have discovered a more urgent threat to democracy and civilized values, lurking in our very midst. His name is Andy Lamey, and he writes for the National Post.

Mr. Lamey is the Post's resident philosopher and novelist, and a fitting advertisement for the dangers of a liberal education. Of late he has been hiding in a cave somewhere pounding out a a novel, but surfaces periodically, bin Laden-like, to taunt us with his theories of society and language.

I have had occasion in the past to deal sharply with young Mr. Lamey, in the matter of group rights and aboriginal sovereignty. At the time, he had fallen under the spell of Will Kymlicka, the Queen's University professor who wants to reconstitute Canada as a "multi-national federation." However, I had assumed that a timely administering of six of the best, intellectually speaking, would have cleared his head. One day he'd thank me.

Well now he's back, ungrateful as ever, and quoting the maverick language theorist Steven Pinker. The subject this time: linguistic prescriptivism, or as Lamey Minor calls it, "language bullying." Indeed, he confesses to having once been a language bully himself, one who delighted in instructing others on the misuse of "hopefully" and other violations of the laws of grammar.

We can all agree there are few things worse than a usage bore. But if there is anything worse than pedantry, it is inverted pedantry: the dogmatic insistence that there is no such thing as "proper" usage, and that any attempt to uphold it is pointless at best, snobbish at worst.

There is but one rule, says our Guevara of the grammar: however most people happen to say it at the time. Not proper usage, but common usage.

Perhaps seized with the zeal of the converted, Mr. Lamey lays waste to a procession of supposed linguistic sacred cows. Some of these -- never start a sentence with a conjunction, never end one with a preposition -- I would agree with him ... on. But "irregardless"? Mr. Lamey justifies this monstrosity, because it "resembles" a number of actual words that are similar in meaning to what the user intends, such as "irrelevant" and "irrespective." (Perhaps it irresembles them, too.) Besides, it has "made it into dictionaries"!

But if I say Mr. Lamey is being inconsistent, citing the authority of the dictionary in arch-prescriptivist fashion, he would no doubt say the same of me. In a subsequent column, he insists that prescriptivists (we prefer "scolds") are not allowed to pick and choose which rules they enforce. "A genuine defence of prescriptivism," he writes, "means coming out against ending sentences with a preposition, starting sentences with conjunctions, using quote as a noun and the rest." Again with the rules. Can't we all just get along, Andy? Because if you're going to insist on common usage as the only rule, you've got a problem. Maybe lots of people say "irregardless." But lots of other people, most in fact, say "regardless." The issue isn't so much who's right as how these two groups of people are going to make themselves understood to one another. Maybe dictionaries should follow common usage. But common usage needs dictionaries -- rules -- if it is indeed to be common.

Our guide in framing these rules, I suggest, should be neither the peculiar aristocratic conventions of language snobs nor the chaos of the streets. Rather, we should look to logic, elegance, clarity: principles that are neither hostage to outdated custom nor to passing fad, but go to the root of why we use language in the first place, which is to get our point across.

We should ask of any new or unusual expression, not just whether it is used, but is it useful? Does it tend to improve the language, or does it just lead to confusion? No one claims common usage should decide whether two plus two equals four. Why, then, should we accept the Pinker/Lamey conjecture with regard to double negatives -- that "I didn't buy no lottery tickets" is on a par with "I didn't buy any lottery tickets"?

In each case, they reason, the sentence could simply have been written "I didn't buy lottery tickets": the "no" and "any" are extraneous, put there only to agree with the negated verb. "The slim difference," writes Prof. Pinker, "is that non-standard English co-opted the word 'no' as the agreement element whereas standard English co-opted the word 'any.' " Nonsense. If I say I didn't buy any lottery tickets, it is because I want to impress upon you the absoluteness of my abstention. You think maybe I bought one or two? No: I did not buy so much as one. I did not buy any. Number of tickets bought: zero.

If I say, on the other hand, I didn't buy no lottery tickets, the meaning is the exact opposite. Or at any rate, it is one plausible meaning. If I did not buy no tickets, it means I bought some. That's not snobbery, it's simple logic.

But perhaps you think this is all just a debate about semantics. It isn't.

It's a debate about the meaning of words.