"Unfriend" (and its dictionary-ignored but equally valid sibling "defriend") is a timely and crowd-pleasing choice. The last few years have been a bonanza of do-good, eco-bore terms from Oxford: 2008's "hypermiling,"  2007's equally crunchy, dull "locavore,"  and 2006's snoozy "carbon neutral." "Unfriend," in contrast, is snappy, active and a little mean. It sets a misanthropic tone that's followed through by its runners-up.

A perusal of this year's other Oxford contenders says much about where we are as a culture in this final year of the decade, and it's not a pretty picture, America: "sexting," "hashtag," "zombie bank," "birther," "death panel," "tramp stamp" and "teabagger." (Disappointingly, only one G-rated definition is provided.)  If this were the "$100,000 Pyramid," the category would be "Things that make me want to kill myself."

Oxford, by the way, isn't the only linguistic authority to elevate one word to rule them all. We still await a verdict from Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society, which both cruelly  turned a blind eye to "hypermiling" in 2008 and opted for the grim "bailout" instead. 

Strictly from an etymological point of view, "unfriend" is an interesting choice. Oxford's senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg notes on the Oxford University Press blog today that "Most 'un-' prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant) …. but 'unfriend' is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of 'friend' that is really not used."

But we all know unfriending when we see it in verby action -- when those Facebook numbers take a little dip after a few bad dates with Mr. Wrong or we broadcast our views on gay marriage and Jeff Dunham to the folks back home. Conversely, we all know what it's like to have someone write something idiotic on our wall and think, "Hiding your news feed just isn't enough." So for all you've done to streamline our online lives, we raise a tiny picture of a thumbs up and salute you, "unfriend." And if our affection for you ever wanes, don't worry, you'll figure it out soon enough.

Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that "proper" English is a recent and changeable institution. "The Lexicographer's Dilemma" recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive -- which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write -- and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former -- self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" -- know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing -- and, especially, the growth of general literacy -- led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as "the 18th-century grammarians" have, in some accounts of the language's history, been set up as "dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons," who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.

Lynch takes a more temperate view of these "bad guys," as he does of most matters discussed in "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." While he leans decidedly toward the descriptivist camp, he believes experts ought to acknowledge the public's need for guidance on how to speak and write standard English -- that is, the lingua franca of official, public and commercial life in the English-speaking world.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series "Star Trek": "To boldly go where no man has gone before." The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: "to go," "to eat," "to walk," etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English -- the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example -- is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

Lynch does think that English speakers should be taught to avoid splitting infinitives in certain situations, not because splitting them is incorrect, but because other people, people in a position to judge and exclude, have been taught it's incorrect. The ability to speak and write standard English gives students "access to power," he writes. It's a membership card required for participation in the culture's important conversations. But that doesn't mean that standard English is necessarily superior to, say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE or, to use a more notorious moniker, Ebonics), or that deviations from it constitute the downfall of civilization as we know it, as popular curmudgeons of Safire's ilk like to proclaim.

"Correct" English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically "the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago." And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater "elegance" and "politeness," not greater correctness. These manuals, born of an age of increased social mobility, were intended for "a newly self-conscious group of people who were no longer peasants but still were excluded from the traditional aristocracy." The suddenly rich children of merchants and manufacturers needed instructions on the elegant grammar (and manners) of the aristocracy in order to blend in with their social superiors. Tellingly, the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those "inferior" and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities and, of course, Americans.

To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Many of the most roundly deplored "debasements" of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible: I didn't confuse you by writing "Ain't it the truth?" in my opening paragraph, did I? The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today's usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.

Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun "impact" used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it's said, then a coup has been effected. The "verbing" of nouns (or the creation of "nerbs") has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.

Does it help to know that the foremost Victorian grammar cop regarded "donate" as "utterly abominable" and "inaugurate" as "high-flying nonsense"? It is in the nature of language to change, and while teaching people to use standard English may help get them into a boardroom or cabinet chamber, chances are they'll teach English itself a few new tricks by the time they get out, not necessarily for the worse. For every groaner like "mentee" (i.e., "protégé"), there are awesome coinages like "aerobicized," "blowback" and "crunk" -- all recently added to the "Concise Oxford English Dictionary." Also, I rejoice to learn that "whom" (the objective case of the pronoun "who") may soon vanish from written English just as it has nearly vanished from casual speech, and students will have one less tedious rule to memorize. But dangling participles? Those I'll fight 'til the bitter end.

The credit probably belongs to Trevor Butterworth, who in 2005 -- citing Truss as partial inspiration -- wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

Well. I asked our Broadsheet writers -- and our eminent book critics Laura Miller and Louis Bayard -- to chime in with their opinions. -- Sarah Hepola

Page Rockwell: I love the semicolon. But then, I also love the eyelash curler.

Catherine Price: I'd never really thought of punctuation as gendered, though I suppose the wink of the semicolon could be considered more girlish and coy than the straightforward, masculine em dash.

Tracy Clark-Flory: Clearly, men find the em dash a reassuring phallic symbol, while the semicolon reawakens their Freudian castration anxiety. What better way to cope with penis envy than to make frequent use of the semicolon?

Judy Berman: The em dash actually has feminine connotations for me. It could have something to do with Emily Dickinson, or my former boss (a woman), whose em-dash habit I eventually picked up. Either way, semicolons do tend to result in longer sentences, and I think those have long been seen as the "feminine" answer to short, abrupt "masculine" sentences. Generally, though, the attempt to declare any type of punctuation masculine or feminine seems pretty reductive to me.

Kate Harding: Seems to me they're arguing that complex thoughts and nuanced self-expression are chick things, and I'm not touching that one.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Confidential to the Boston Globe: The semicolon is so not "girly." It's obviously transgender. It's neither a colon nor a period, with its own unique significance. Have these people never heard of "America's Next Top Model"?

Laura Miller: I love semicolons. They represent a certain development of thought, however, and a degree of emotional nuance that I would not associate with the writers [in the above block quote], especially with the superficially stoic but actually sentimental Hemingway (and, to a lesser degree, Chandler). To the degree that a writer is crude and relatively simplistic in the representation of psychological states and emotions, I can see why he would eschew the semicolon. None of these guys are especially precise in that department.

Nicholson Baker, on the other hand, wrote a whole essay on the colon-dash and semicolon-dash, two now obsolete forms of punctuation that he thought should be revived.

Louis Bayard: Not only do I use semicolons, but when I see someone else use them (correctly) I elevate that person to a private pantheon. As Laura says, it's a very nuanced thing -- a test of ear and eye -- but delightful when done right. I haven't read it in 20 years, but in "The World According to Garp," I believe Garp warms to another character when she uses a semicolon in her letters.

Lynn Harris: Wait. And the period is manly?

It's a formula. As former New York Times editors Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman note, there's no need with E-rater "to sweat over creativity, individuality and style -- the things a real reader looks for in writing." Alas, the advice they dispense in "You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online" can only result in prose equally dull and mechanical.

Perhaps that's inevitable, given the authors' oft-stated premise. Like many people who grew up in another era, O'Conner and Kellerman see e-mail simply as the latest trend in letter-writing, a technological advance which, like the invention of the fountain pen, has made life a little easier and people a little lazier than they were in the age of the quill. They write that "e-mail has single-handedly revived the epistolary tradition," yet that "much of what passes for writing in cyberspace is dreadful. The spelling in e-mail is rotten, the grammar is atrocious, the punctuation -- don't ask."

But rather than examining why online writing is so undisciplined and attempting to appreciate the virtue of such impertinence, O'Conner and Kellerman are determined to impose on electronic communication all the limitations of the forms to which they're already accustomed. "Right now online writing is pretty much in its Wild West stage," they write, "with everybody shooting from the hip and no sheriff in sight. The outlaws claim that rules are so 'analog,' so 'print,' so 'old media.' But law and order will gradually replace frontier justice, and now is our chance to have a say in what the laws will be."

What rules would they instate? Some of their ideas are simply quaint remnants of an earlier time, as harmless as our vestigial tails: include "a friendly greeting, a polite closing, and a name at the end." Extraneous as all that may be, what with the "To" and "From" fields that head every e-mail, it's the sort of gesture that inevitably will go the way of the dinosaur.

Occasionally, O'Conner and Kellerman even give a good suggestion. One anecdote they relate, of a professor who deleted any e-mail that came to him from a Hotmail address -- he believed it to be from a porn site -- indicates the degree to which a screen name makes an impression. But such attention to online communication as a medium in its own right is, in this book, inexplicably uncommon.

The majority of the advice in "You Send Me" is either so banal that it insults the intelligence of the reader or so inappropriate that it calls into question the competence of the writers. Into the former category we can place the suggestion to "Say it once. You might come up with three terrific ways to say something, but an e-mail or other online message isn't the place for all three." These words of wisdom, lest they be forgotten, are rephrased 39 pages later: "Did you get right to the point?" -- which is almost verbatim a reprise of the advice 44 pages earlier to "Get to the point."

One might think this an attempt at subtle satire, were the authors not so ham-handed with their humor elsewhere. Almost invariably, the chapter subheads are puns ("Mail Bonding," "Clone Rangers," "Call Me Modem"), offering a superficial levity sometimes extended into the text ("Simply follow these steps and develop the comma touch"). While hardly witty, such trite wordplay would simply be forgettable were there something useful being said. Instead, when the authors take the space to be substantive, they merely offer a round-about repackaging of Strunk & White.

It should be said that William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's "Elements of Style" could easily be extended to many times its current 105 pages. Ideally, an annotated edition would explain why we have the rules of grammar that we do and how the exceptions originally came into being. A history of English grammar would help us to use rules with greater precision, or more originality, as happens when we know the etymology of our words. O'Conner and Kellerman don't give grammar that chance. While their advice is sometimes easier to apply than that found on a high school composition class mimeograph, they allow the deeper reasons for most rules to remain as opaque as ever. "If a sentence ends with an aside in parentheses, the period goes outside. ... But if the entire sentence is in parentheses, the period goes inside." Why? They don't say, although it would be easy enough to explain that a period indicates the end of a sentence as a whole; when a clause enclosed in parentheses is only part of a larger sentence, the period goes outside. But if the parenthetical is a full sentence, unless you want your period to serve as a clause in its own right, it goes inside.

Mindlessly memorizing rules, you find yourself at the service of language rather than the other way around. If that happens to enough people, language is immobilized, effectively dead. The Internet, so long as it remains in what O'Conner and Kellerman call its "Wild West stage," offers an opportunity for the unwashed masses to rethink the accepted rules of grammar, to reclaim them and to reinvent them to suit new meanings.

"We think the computer may be the best thing that's happened to writing since the printing press," the authors of "You Send Me" claim, presumably referring to its ability to facilitate mass communication. What they ignore, though, in their lists of words with 'e' before 'i' that "you'll just have to memorize" is the remarkable plurality of approaches to spelling and grammatical strategies to be found in incunabula, from the Bible to Shakespeare. (Consider the effect of the technical misuse of "whom" for "who" in the King James Bible: "But whom say ye that I am?" Christ asks Peter in Matthew 16:15, adding a glint of majesty to his question, an implied answer, that would be lacking in, e.g., "But who say ye that I am?") In the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a looseness to language that gradually was driven out by schoolteachers and proofreaders until modernism had to break each rule intentionally, a sort of reverse-engineered ignorance, deliberately building an alternate history of literature on self-conscious idiosyncrasies.

It was an exercise that, at its most profound, brought us Gertrude Stein's "3 Lives," and, at its most silly, an entire novel written exclusively with words lacking the letter 'e'. Language opened up in certain circles courtesy of the experimental novel, but that expansion was always artificial.

Through the Internet, language can be revivified in a way that is universal and natural. O'Conner and Kellerman want us to "resist the temptation to show off typographically with bizarre lettering or graphics or spelling or punctuation," when those are precisely the things with which we ought to be experimenting. Addressing the perils of punctuation, they write that, "It hasn't helped that those cutesy emoticons people use online are tiny pictures made of punctuation marks. After a while, folks start thinking of hyphens as noses, parentheses as smiles or frowns, colons as eyes (and semicolons as winks)."

Point well taken, but is this honestly a bad thing? The authors claim earlier that, "Asking an e-mail to carry your message is sometimes asking a lot ... In a face-to-face meeting, body language, tone of voice, and facial expression help people to communicate." Certainly ;-) doesn't match the nod-and-a-wink of a professional comedian, nor does 0:-) evoke angelic innocence as well as a Raphael painting does, but such symbols do suggest that, if people need to gesture in a textual environment, they can innovate.

We can do this by ignoring old rules and inventing at our keyboard without the worry that we're committing a cardinal sin. Emoticons are as insipid as air kisses and should be avoided by anybody whose name isn't Tammi or Brandi. But we can only address our need to punctuate what we write online with an indication of how we feel about it -- to create a language of emotional subtext -- if we recognize that need in the first place. And we will recognize it only if we learn from what we see online rather than trying to teach the Internet to behave like an older technology.

Already we've seen the PC held back by the desktop metaphor -- the persistence of folders and trash bins -- that has made us wary of any organizational scheme designed to take advantage of the differences between a digital and an analog world. Having rejected DOS, we're paranoid about anything that isn't "user-friendly," that requires some adjustment on our part and a commitment to meet the technology halfway. It's as if Henry Ford rigged a bridle and set of leather reins to his Model T instead of a steering wheel and clutch, and to this day we were still driving our cars the way a 19th century groomsman would handle a horse and buggy. The automobile works better because we allowed the technology to take on a form of its own and adjusted our habits to make the most of it. Except perhaps among early enthusiasts of the Altair, that never happened with computers.

This paranoia about innovation now extends into online communication. "Software is out there that can track your every move," O'Conner and Kellerman write, "from the Web sites you visit to the books you buy to the songs you download to the e-mail you answer. Yes, there are programs that can foil casual snoopers. ... But it's safer to operate on the assumption that virtually anyone can find out virtually anything you do in the virtual world."

In other words, because the technology allows the possibility that you'll be monitored, you should respond by never saying anything substantive -- let alone, God forbid, something ungrammatical. And as for expressing yourself with even a whiff of whimsy: "Assume that someone with absolutely no sense of humor is hunched over a desktop computer in an office down the hall."

Assume that no one will understand you, everyone will forward what you write to those you want least to read it and that the whole Internet is a virtual fishbowl. Don't put a semicolon inside your quotation marks, don't write "a lot" as a single word and never ever send another e-mail that's not about correct grammar, and you may live your life unnoticed by all. If that's your idea of a worthy existence, then this is your book.

Already, generations have suffered under the strictures of "good grammar." We've been running scared for too long. It can be seen in the way that people use "I" instead of "me" at every possible opportunity: The constant correction of "Pat and Stewart and me went to the library" has resulted in a fear of ever being caught saying "me" -- a source of trauma for Pat and Stewart and I -- or, rather, for Pat and Stewart and me.

More proper than we are, our grammar has caused us to second-guess everything we say. The Internet is the Wild West. Let's not treat it like Westminster Abbey.