LAST WEEK'S Red Pen column led with the tale of an email conversation writer Laura Moyer had with a linguist from Perth, Australia.

The linguist is Daniel Midgley, and he answered with this Red Pen guest column.

A LINGUIST RESPONDS By Daniel Midgley

Some people get nervous when they find out I'm a linguist. They think I'm silently monitoring their grammar, ready to strike down every "like" and every text abbreviation in an effort to maintain the purity of the language.

Eh, not a chance. We linguists are actually very relaxed about the way people use language. Say "nucular" instead of "nuclear," and you may drive some people crazy, but a linguist will probably grab a pen and start asking you questions about your hometown.

Our job is to describe how people use language, not to prescribe how they should use it.

And yet this advice leaves copy editors (like the effervescent Laura Moyer) out in the cold. What are they supposed to do? Correcting people on their usage is their job. And a needed job, too--not to prevent language decay (whatever that means), but to make sure their publication adheres to the style they want.

As Laura has pointed out in a recent column, though, some editors have some pretty strange rules. She mentions one editor who alleged that states don't have "borders," but "lines." And some insist that legal actions are "lawsuits" and not "suits."

These rules have nothing to do with how people really use language, and seem to originate from the editors themselves. Laura rightly calls these rules baloney.

So how can you tell a piece of baloney from good, solid writing practice?

Laura names some good resources (and I do like Grammar Girl). But we can do better than appealing to experts. We now have easy-to-use tech tools that allow us to look for real patterns in real publications.

A resource that you can use at your computer right now is Google's Ngram Viewer. (Don't let the name intimidate you; an n-gram is just a string of words. The phrase "box of chocolates" is a 3-gram.)

Google has digitized millions of books, and we can search through them with just a few keystrokes.