Another one of our usage guide writer’s birthdays! Paul Brians is the author of Common Errors in English Usage, published in 2003, one of the usage guides in our HUGE database. Paul also has a website, a blog, a daily calendar (for his birthday today, he chose if not: read more about it here). He turned 73 today: happy birthday, Paul, and many happy returns of the day!
(What irony, Paul, when we joked yesterday during your interview of me about Friday 13th, that for me, at 5 pm, the day was almost over, and for you, at 8 am, it was still to begin. We grieve with the French and worry about Europe’s future …)
Bridging the Unbridgeable 
Thank you for the birthday wishes, Ingrid. The day did indeed turn out grim.
One point I didn’t get to make in our conversation: linguists seem to be mainly interested in grammatical questions (makes sense), whereas much of what the rest of us talk about are misspellings, malapropisms, mispronunciations, offensive language, lack of clarity, and other usage problems most of which are not on the list of usage shibboleths most often criticized by linguists.
I see you have a list of relevant blogs, but not mine. I hope you’ll read at least these two entries:
http://wmjasco.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-much-clemency-for-word-crimes.html
http://wmjasco.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-dating-sites-good-writing-matters.html
Paul, don’t you think you are a linguist too, when you write about language?