Burling, Robbins. 2006. Patterns of Language: Structure, Variation, Change. San Diego: Academic Press
(This book is written from a functionalist perspective.)

Finegan, Edward. 2004. Language, Its Structure and Use. Boston: Wadsworth
(Written from a more formalist/generative perspective.)

http://grammar.qdnow.com/

It has a wonderful set of bite-size chunks of grammar neepery, all done as podcasts and blog post transcriptions. All free, though she’s also currently plugging a one-hour for-sale grammar guide as well.

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As I happen to know, they did find the way to the theatre: I met them in the lobby between Acts II and III of the play, when they told me they were all too nauseated to stay for Act III — though not all of them for one and the same reason.
One said it was the protagonist’s “wimpy, George-Bush-like voice” that had sickened her and everyone else in the house.
Another, who praised the protagonist’s “well projected ‘manly bass’ voice,” blamed everyone’s nausea on the bad ventilation of the theatre.
Yet another insisted that the Butler’s obscene attempt to simulate Australian speech was the cause of all misery.
Embarrassed to feel as well as I did, I said, “It’s clear that all of you are sickened by what you’ve endured; but only one of you can really be right on the cause of that.”
One of them agreed: “True,” she said, “two or even all three of us may be wrong about the specific cause of our nausea; but trust me:
we’re all right
on whether anyone should need to endure the performance of the play we paid too many dollars to see.”

SW as I understand was written in the fifties from notes put together in the twenties–and in the twenties,

The first edition was. It’s been revised a number of times since. As for the Fowler quote, now you know why I consider him the epitome of stodginess.

Berna, thanks for the additional information.

My Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (C.T. Onions, ed.) indicates that whether *shaped* like an eye or a kielbasa, English *island* has been eyeless from its beginnings.
Old English *ea* or *eg* like
Old Frisian *a* or *e*, like
Old High German *aha*, like
Old Norse *a* , like
Gothic and Old Saxon*ahwa*
were cognate forms, all related to Latin *aqua* and all denoting “sea, stream, water”.
Of the cognate base forms in the contemporaneous languages named above, such obviously synonymous prefixes as *ig-* & *ieg-* & *ei-* & *ey-* & *auwa-* [et al.] were combined with base-forms *land* or *lant*, yielding such words as *egland*, *iegland*, *iland*, *eiland*, *eilant*, & *eyland* — all denoting “land surrounded by water.”
The insertion of the *s* of *island* reflects sixteenth-century assimilation to Middle English *isle* — cognate of Portuguese and Spanish *isla* and of Italian *isola* — all derived from Latin *insula*).

Virtually all of this pedantic entry was mere copy work. If anyone finds inaccuracies, I will be grateful for being corrected. The only font available here in DeepGenre does not enable one to copy any of the great many superscripts used in contemporary orthography to indicate the stress and pronunciation imputed to antique languages by today’s readers of them.

I agree with you on S&W being a good intro. The trouble is, I’ve run into a good number of people over the years who view S&W as the be all and end all of English grammar, probably because they don’t want to argue a point or crack any more books.

As for “alright” looking Arabic, then what about “already” and “altogether” not to mention “almost”?

I’m of the opinion that if a rule is correct for several common words, you might as well extend the rule for all similar words, if simply because it looks neater on the page and is easily understandable. For example, if wildfire is one word, then you might as well follow Judy Collins and spell wildflowers as one word as well.

And anyway, in the case of “alright,” I just took a peep at the entry on Dictionary.com and found this mention, among others:

alright
frequent spelling of all right, attested from 1893.

“There are no such forms as all-right, or allright, or alright, though even the last, if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen … in MS.” [Fowler]

If a spelling has been around since 1893, at this point we might as well let it into the language. S&W as I understand was written in the fifties from notes put together in the twenties–and in the twenties, I can see the argument against for it being a new and trendy error–but at this point, the alternate spelling of “alright” predates every living grammarian, so we might as well use it.

That said, I’m a big fan of alternate spellings and house style, and I consider the differences between British and American spelling and grammar to be house style for the continents. (And yes, I’m horribly lumping Canada in with America here, but since we’re talking publishing here, it’s already been done.)

Berna,

In the case of Chaucer, the poor guy died before he could edit his manuscripts. “The Shipman’s Tale” has the shipman calling himself “a daughter of eve” because that was originally “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and got swapped over when Chaucer thought of a better one. And not having heard the words between Shakespeare and his printer, we can only imagine the Bard’s displeasure at some of the things the typesetters did.

The ideal with grammar is and always should be clarity and consistency. Pick a spelling and stick with it. Likewise with a grammatical rule. Anything else causes unnecessary headaches for the reader and is a mark of laziness and disrespect from the writer.

Seriously, though, anyone who cares about language will be able to quibble about one or three details in any book about grammar. If you want real Stodginess, consider Fowler’s ENGLISH USAGE.

I still think S and W is the best intro for those people who have asked for a recco here on deepgenre.com.

My lamented teacher thought vaguely of correct spelling and punctuation and good penmanship as “components” of “good grammar”; and she told us to spell and punctuate “as great writers do.”
In honor of my teacher’s vision, and with Katherine’s “Strunk-White apostrophe quiz” in mind, one *could* look to the exemplary spelling and punctuation of such great English writers as, say, Chaucer and Shakespeare. However, from line to line and page to page in the manuscripts of Chaucer’s great poetry and Shakespeare’s too, words (including the poets’ own names) are spelled and sentences are punctuated variously.
From hundreds of years before Chaucer until more than a hundred years after Shakespeare, thousands of writers had no *rules* at all for spelling and punctuating their good, bad, and mediocre English writing. That spelling and punctuation were not even conceivably “correct” or “wrong” didn’t make any author’s English muddy or unintelligible.
Like the millions of creative spellers and punctuators who exchange billions of intelligible emailed messages in our time with blithe UNconcern for correct spelling or punctuation, Chaucer addressed Katherine’s “Strunk-White apostrophe challenge” head on — with no apostrophes at all. For him and then Shakespeare after him, apostrophes and commas and semicolons and colons and exclamation points — along with the very idea of uniquely correct spellings — had not yet been invented.
Example: The title of the prologue of the tale told by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is “The Prologe of the Wyves Tale of Bathe [The Prologue of the Wife's Tale of Bath]“; and where the Wife’s prologue ends, one reads that “Heere endeth the Wyf of Bathe hir Prologe [Here ends the Wife of Bath Her Prologue].” Even this half a millenium after Chaucer, you and I are not even fleetingly confused by his variety of spellings or by his variously improvised syntax.
I wonder: As they “corrected” the writing of Chaucer or Shakespeare, all without rules for the kinds of correctness that figured in my own teacher’s quaint conception of “good grammar,” whatever did their 14th- and 17th-century English teachers attack as “wrong” in their students’ writing?

Ah, I see. You’re talking about Miss Thistlebottom, the arbitrary cranky Victorian grammar instructress that Theodore M. Bernstein talks about in Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins, a grammar book I heartily recommend, in particular because it points out where various ossified grammar rules are in fact wrong.

Kit,

Actually, though I did read Patrick NH railing about Strunk & White, the “mid-20th century business correspondence” was I believe a criticism of my own. Yes, I have read the book, but there are certain items which are preserved in the amber of the 1950s. One of the main ones of which is the entry on the virtues and rectitude of “all right” and the degenerate wickedness and depravity of “alright.” Or something like that.

To make the argument for “alright,” first off, not only are other similar words already altogether accepted, but using “alright” as a synonym for “okay” provides clarity in certain instances. For example, check the meaning of:

They were alright on the way to the play.

versus:

They were all right on the way to the play.

The first means unequivocally that they were “in an acceptable state of health and well being.” The second? Well, either that or that they were “collectively directly” on the way to the play.

There’s also a difference in pronunciation. When someone says “Alright already” they are not saying the same thing as “All right all ready.”