This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable “even for those with a deep-seated hatred for grammatical do-goodery.” The author describes her readers as “…intelligent people who probably never have diagrammed a sentence and never will” and who “don’t know a gerund from a gerbil and don’t care.” The first words that came to me when I read this were “At last!”
Patricia T. O’Conner, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, 3rd ed. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 17.