Founding Grammars: How Early America's War Over Words Shaped Today's Language. Rosemarie Ostler. New York, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015. 309 pp. $27.99 hbk.In summer of 2014, Weird Al Yankovic released Word Crimes, a sarcastic blast at what song parodist saw as decline of proper grammar, word choice, and punctuation. Yankovic is a stickler on whom and literally, and he is an advocate of diagramming sentences. A link to song's video was widely shared on social media, and anyone who works as a writer or editor probably received an email from a friend or relative about it.Not everyone enjoyed song's mocking humor, however. On Language Log blog, linguist Ben Zimmer called it ultimate peever's guide. Mignon Fogarty of University of Nevada-Reno, perhaps better known as Grammar Girl, wrote on her website: don't believe in word crimes, and I don't believe in encouraging people to think about language that way.Such a battle between prescriptivists and descriptivists of language feels like a contemporary phenomenon. Certainly, Internet has led to plenty of chatter about they as a singular pronoun as well as debates about serial commas, split infinitives, and prepositions at end of sentences. But in Founding Grammars, author Rosemarie Ostler shows that this conversation about language has been taking place since founding of United States. It is not new, but it is fascinating.In eight chapters, Ostler takes reader through grammar's evolution in United States. She does so in a roughly chronological way, from Noah Webster through Geoffrey Pullum. In between, Ostler covers inside stories on The Elements of Style and Merriam-Webster Dictionary, as well as lesser-known works such as The Institutes of English Grammar by Goold Brown and Every-Day English by Richard Grant White.Founding Grammars begins with an origin story. Shortly after American Revolution, Webster sought to further declare new nation's independence via a distinctly American way of speaking and writing. He and others saw grammar knowledge as essential to country's success. Grammar books and dictionaries were, as Ostler describes them, the self-help manuals of their time. These grammarians, however, did not always agree on details, leading to type of debates over language that we still see today.Elsewhere, Ostler weaves issues of politics, ethnicity, and class into grammar's history. In presidential election of 1828, Andrew Jackson was criticized for his shaky spelling skills among other language-based shortcomings. …