Associate professor of English Jeffrey F. Huntsman in a letter to the editor of the Herald Times of Bloomington, Indiana, March 2, 1997:

I have taught general linguistics, including grammar and usage, to prospective teachers of English for nearly thirty years. I was therefore deeply distressed to find your otherwise potentially useful article "Grammar 101" poisoned by such obsolete, prejudicial, and ultimately damaging terms as "proper/improper," "correct/incorrect," and "good/bad." These terms are at best counterproductive, because they belong respectively to systems of manners, logic, and ethics, not to the socially constrained system of language.

Instead, we should use less judgmental terms, like "standard," and "conventional," and, most useful, "appropriate." I do not mean to suggest that society does not have certain expectations with respect to language usage—quite the contrary. Those expectations, although often arbitrary and capricious, are very real. But such expectations can be recognized and described in ways that do not demean people by using diction that treats them as deficient, diseased, damaged, or depraved. People generally do not like to be attacked, especially about something as intimately identifying as their language....

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