The State of the Language: New Observations, Objections, Angers, Bemusements, Hilarities, Perplexities, Revelations, Prognostications, and Warnings for the 1990s.

"Sprawling, uncoordinated, uneven, noisy, and appealing," wrote one reviewer of the first edition of this book, published on 1 January 1980. "The language is in rude health," wrote another.

Exactly a decade later, here is the book anew, with the same editors but with fifty fresh contributors writing essays and poems that engage our language today.

Imaginative attention is bestowed on the changes of recent years, changes not only in the language but in how language is understood. In the fore...