It may happen next month, it may happen in five years, but by ordering now you can rest easy in the knowledge that you’ve put a down-payment on a small and perfectly-formed segment of the celebrations.

1972
The ISEA wins a court ruling clarifying that pregnant teachers cannot be forced to resign, that they can use their accumulated sick leave for maternity purposes, and that they have the right to return to work following their maternity leave. After more than three years of litigation, that decision is upheld in the Iowa Supreme Court in 1975.

Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.

"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.

We are told that the active clause "I will always remember my first trip to Boston" sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It sure does. But that's because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows "by").

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane. (I'm the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. "The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor" sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

kynn

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers...

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel...

One young woman had a sign equating the Star of David with a swastika, followed by a question mark. I asked her about it, and she told me that she hoped to provoke thought. I did not press the issue with her, but I would ask her if the caricatures of the Messenger Muhammad ﷺ published in the Danish right-wing newspaper Jyllands-Posten “provoked thought.”

The desecration and abuse of these symbols is incompatible with the ethos of a humble believer. The Star of David, despite its appropriation by the state of Israel, remains a symbol of Judaism, which Muslims regard to be a revealed religion in its origin and a source of guidance. Regardless of whether the symbol has any real relationship to God’s Messenger David (Dawud in Arabic) ﷺ, anything tied with a messenger’s name should have some sanctity.