Some linguists would argue that there’s no point fighting against slips like that—that language is forever unfixed and deviations should simply be observed and even appreciated—or that it’s silliness to tell people to follow rules that are as arbitrary as the meaning assigned to a certain jumble of letters. But Garner is not one of them.

usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style

In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader