firecat

Some editor friends were passing around a John McWhorter article about pronoun use in English ("You and Me Need to Talk", which is behind a paywall). McWhorter argues that the rules about whether to use "I" or "me" in such phrases were made up by the same "Let's make English more like Latin" people who made up the rule about not splitting an infinitive and not ending a sentence with a preposition.

The article included a reference to this book:
The vulgarities of speech corrected: with elegant expressions for provincial and vulgar English, Scots, and Irish; for the use of those who are unacquainted with grammar (London: Printed for F. C. Westley, 1829)

I searched for the book and opened several of the search results. One of them included this quote:

In particular, the noun churchyard has been used attributively in the phrase churchyard cough, denoting a bad cough indicative of impending death.

For example, in The vulgarities of speech corrected: with elegant expressions for provincial and vulgar English, Scots, and Irish; for the use of those who are unacquainted with grammar (London: Printed for F. C. Westley, 1829), “a church-yard cough” was corrected as “a deadly cough”.

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silveradept

That sounds like the prescriptivists who are very interested in things sounding more like what they think of as sophisticated than what the actual language is doing.