In his 1980 book Language: The Loaded Weapon, Dwight Bolinger decries the number of ‘shamans,’ as he calls them, who comment without authority (and usually without recourse to evidence) on the use of language. The problem, he says, is that ‘they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble, and someone must answer the cry for help’ (Bolinger 1980: 1). Stephen Pinker makes a similar point in The Language Instinct (1994), grumbling about ‘the language mavens,’ self-appointed experts on usage whose views are uninformed by the insights of linguistic theory and description. Bolinger and Pinker are essentially complaining about prescriptivists – and it is true that there are lots of them about. Almost everyone has the ability to speak, write or sign, and so it is no surprise that almost everyone has an opinion about language and language use, regardless of whether this is supported by evidence. Every academic linguist will have had the dispiriting experience of arguing about language with a prescriptivist, and there is a temptation to sup-pose that linguistics as a discipline is particularly hard done to in this regard. Oliver Kamm, a journalist who writes informatively on language, has said ‘I know of no discipline where the gap between popular commentary and science is so vast’ (Kamm 2015), although there are enough climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers out there to suggest that linguistics is not the only subject on which nonexperts feel qualified to comment. Nonetheless, the fact that almost everyone has a language capability at least begins to explain why so many people without a formal background in linguistics feel confident in discussing issues of language.