Now that the war on terror is cooling down, the war on grammar is hotting up.
Last week, a 185-page style guide written by the CIA to help its agents write a respectable sentence was circulated online, proving that the agency takes the protection of the Oxford comma almost as seriously as protection of the US. If you want to write like a spy you must never split an infinitive unless you have a jolly good excuse, must know the difference between “oral” and “verbal”, and must only use “hopefully” to mean “with hope”.
This news will make pedants the world over feel very safe indeed. In an age in which people no longer fear reds under beds and mainly don’t expect to be blown up in the course of a normal day, one of the few things that still terrifies them is misuse of grammar.