The r-link business—a reply

Abstract

I have to confess to being to a degree pained at having it seems touched a nerve of my good friend Julian Pring's in my comments on linking /r/. He suggests that my article on the subject in its zeal to counter long-current false notions of the facts of usage has not escaped some degree of tendentiousness. I should be less than candid if I failed to grant that he has something of a point to make but equally if I let my high regard for him make me withhold the counter-comment that his criticisms strike me as by no means more successful than I was in avoiding tendentiousness in that article. I am at least glad to see that it is only on the sociological status of the so-called ‘intrusive’ /r/ that we are in disagreement.