FROM 1992 until 1999 The Economist published a monthly column on the English language, under the by-line 'Johnson', as in Samuel Johnson, the famous man of letters and dictionary-maker. The columns, and a few later, longer articles, were all written by Stephen Hugh-Jones. He writes now:


“My aim was to entertain readers, not learnedly instruct them; quite shamelessly, I'm an enthusiast of language, not linguistics, a curio-collector, not a professor. We were once taken to task by an academic: why did we not cover language as seriously as other topics? I answered him that one can describe a car as riding smoothly, without dilating on the geometry of its hyperdihedral MacPherson struts. I suspect the real answer was simpler: we could have offered the coverage he wanted, but it for sure wouldn't have been me that wrote it. And, yes, to be wholly serious for once, that 'me' is indeed English, whether pedants like it or not.”



http://www.economist.com/research/johnson/