Not long ago, Newsweek ran a guest column by an Alabama college professor who was complaining about his students' sloppy writing -- one of those familiar language diatribes that seem to come with the system disk. Whenever a student hands in a paper with the words "It goes without saying," he says, he scribbles in the margin, "Then why say it?'"

Nobody gets through life without having an English teacher like that, though if you're lucky you'll get yours out of the way well before you reach college. Mine was Mrs. Bosch in the eighth grade. Let someone hand in a paper with the sentence, "Having been thrown in the air, the dog caught the stick," and Mrs. Bosch would dispatch it before the entire class with pointed sarcasm: "Why the poor animal!" And we would crack up, partly out of sadistic pleasure at the humiliation visited on our hapless classmate and partly because it pleased us to be let in on the joke. 

Mrs. Bosch's sarcasm was a crucial part of our education as writers, such as it was -- her sharp voice was an inward presence as we scanned our words, trying to make sure their meanings at least vaguely coincided with what we were trying to say.  

And of course she had our eighth-grade number. That's the age when kids are all going a little crazy with the discovery of sarcasm, as they realize the power of echoing someone else's words or thoughts in a way that makes them sound deluded or foolish. In the schoolyard sarcasm replaces brute insult, as kids move from "you butthead retard" to "smooth move, guy." And it's their first line of defense against parental authority, as they learn to voice their grudging compliance in a tone that makes their disaffection clear: "Yeah, right, dad."

Adolescent sarcasm can be irritating -- that's what it's supposed to be -- but  we can look on it a little indulgently; after all, what else have thirteen-year-olds got going for them? But when grown people engage in it, it can come off as a disconcertingly juvenile bit of nastiness.

Yet when the subject of language comes up, a lot of people revert to a tone of keening mockery that hasn't much deepened since they were in middle school. Earlier this year, for example, Dick Cavett wrote a piece about the decline of English for the web-based New York Times Select. Cavett began by warning that we're losing our grip on our glorious English language, and proceeded to roll off a series of familiar japes about mispronunciations of heinous and nuclear, not to mention that chestnut about literally that my Mrs. Bosch performed for three generations of middle-schoolers: "'The senator literally exploded with laughter.' And who cleaned up the mess?"

When a flight attendant announces, “We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,” Cavett says, he enjoys replying, “Will there be time to get off?” Actually, I have trouble imagining how that conversation could have taken place. I mean, Cavett makes his little witticism, and the flight attendant gives him this look that says "excuse me?," and then he has to explain, "Oh,  I was merely venturing a joking reference to the prescriptive grammarians' insistence that the adverb momentarily should be used only to signify 'for a moment' rather than 'in a moment.'" I don't think so -- my guess is that if Cavett actually replied to that announcement, it was sotto voce to an imaginary companion. But the gag tells better this way. As Mrs. Bosch understood full well, the point of sarcasm isn't just to humiliate the clueless -- it's also for the benefit of an audience who are in on the joke. That's who teenagers are appealing to with their eye-rolls, as if they were glancing over to an invisible homey in the other corner of the room.

You could sense the same yearning for solidarity among the 800 or so readers who posted online comments to Cavett's piece, the majority of them with a sarcastic take on some usage that sears their ears or has them screaming at their TV set: "What do you mean 'broad daylight'? Could it happen in 'narrow daylight'?" "As for those who 'feel badly,' I believe they refer to an impaired tactile sense."

It's easy to dismiss this sort of thing as sophomoric -- and even that might involve skipping a grade or two. But it answers to a simple desire for communion with others who know better. And in its own way it leaves you with a reassuring sense of complacency about the state of English. These complaints may always be bracketed by apocalyptic warnings about the imminent collapse of the language, but if the greatest linguistic threats we're facing are things like the confusion of prone and supine and a shaky grasp on the lie/lay distinction, then we'll probably muddle through. It's like hearing someone warn of grave domestic security threats and then learning that he's chiefly concerned about Canadian sturgeon-poaching on the US side of Lake Huron.

In fact the inconsequentiality of those issues belies the charges of elitism that critics are always leveling at the wordinistas. Think of the way Lynne Truss has ridden this shtick to the top of the bestseller lists: with operatic indignation, she draws millions of readers into a sense of confraternity with everybody else who got the possessive rule down cold in middle school. What could be more democratic than that? Language may be infinitely deep and mysterious, but when it comes to mastery of the apostrophe, you and I can walk hand-in-hand with Henry James.