En 2015, l’Oreille tendue publiait un petit livre intitulé Le niveau baisse ! (et autres idées reçues sur la langue). Depuis quelque temps, il n’était plus disponible. Ce n’est plus le cas, grâce à une réimpression qui vient de paraître.
«After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning like into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be» (p. 124).