Today, a little book is celebrating a big birthday -- complete with a commemorative edition and a panel discussion at the Museum of the City of New York.

Not everyone is popping champagne corks, though.

"The Elements of Style" by William J. Strunk and E.B. White was published 50 years ago, dispensing indispensable tips on English usage, grammar and style. It commands would-be writers in Chapter 5, for instance, to avoid fancy words (rule 14) or a breezy manner (rule 9), and use nouns and verbs rather than adjectives and adverbs, since "the adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place" (rule 4).

But just in time for the party, a literary scuffle has broken out in the blogosphere, with a devastating online review in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week by a British grammarian, who calls the book's late authors "grammatical incompetents" and the book "a toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity ... not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar."

In "The Elements of Bile," Geoffrey Pullum, author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and a University of Edinburgh linguistics professor, unloads on Mr. White, the late, beloved author of "Charlotte's Web" and other books and essays, and his mentor and Cornell professor Mr. Strunk, who first privately published "The Elements of Style" in 1919. Mr. White revised and expanded it in 1959.

The style advice in the book isn't the problem, Mr. Pullum says, comparing it to "the way 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' describes Earth: mostly harmless." But the book's prescriptions on grammar -- in particular its admonition against the passive voice and inconsistent, incorrect citations of grammar rules -- are mostly "atrocious."

Take the "that/which" controversy: Mr. Pullum notes Mr. Strunk "knew nothing about any rule against 'which' in restrictive relative clauses ('the thing which') yet White added a rule banning this, and then expunged Strunk's occasional violations of the fake rule."

Moreover, the book's admonition against the passive voice uses an "inept" example: "My first visit to Boston will long be remembered by me," an example so lame it's "like it saying because you crashed your uncle's Porsche there's something wrong with Porsches."

Mr. Pullum isn't the only one unhappy with Strunk and White's grip on American writing students. Jan Freeman, who writes on grammar and usage for the Boston Globe (her column is published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), says the writing advice is mostly fine, "for writers who already know what they're doing."

But Mr. Strunk's command to "'omit needless words,' for instance, requires that you know how to judge 'needless.' I've seen copy editors use the slogan as an excuse to remove every extra syllable in a story, regardless of idiom or rhythm," Ms. Freeman said.

"Teaching writing from a handbook, any handbook, is just a flawed idea; it's like teaching dance or carpentry from a book," she said. "Writing is a craft; you learn it by reading and writing, not by learning rules."

Mr. Strunk was a creature of his time -- the 19th century, which was full of rulemakers making distinctions about everything, she added.

Not much seems to have changed, but "The Elements of Style" seems likely to withstand the assault on it. Indeed, it seems to have transcended its original purpose as a handy how-to guide to good writing -- an opera has been written about it and an illustrated version is available. And today at the Museum of the City of New York, author Roy Blount Jr. will join essayist Roger Rosenblatt and others to talk about its significance.

Its defenders are legion.

David Bartholomae, chair of the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, thinks much of Mr. Pullum's "heated and heavy breathing" in the Chronicle piece "has little to do with the text at hand and much to do with strutting and self-display. The book is not stupid."

Mr. White was not a linguist by training or temperament, Mr. Bartholomae acknowledges, but he never pretended to be. "He doesn't present himself as a scientist or expert but as a reader and editor. There is no systematic presentation of rules to govern the English sentence. There are nuggets of advice, expressions of wit, taste and lore."

William Zinsser, author of another classic bestseller for would-be scribes, "On Writing Well," believes that today's indignation about a 50-year-old book seems misplaced.

"Let's remember what impact this book had in 1959," said Mr. Zinsser, who wrote a column for Life Magazine and is the author of 17 books on American culture.

"At the time it was a fresh book -- nobody had written a book that was that simple, that warm. White was a man who had been an elegant stylist himself. And here we are, 50 years later, with all these envious academics in England saying it's out of date -- well, of course it's out of date, it's 50 years old.

"We need to stop picking at the pedestal [Mr. White] is on and admire what he did 50 years ago."

Mr. Zinsser, 86, who teaches writing to foreign students at Columbia Journalism School, said that most of the young people he teaches today "gather a million facts, notes from every direction, from prop-ups they look at in the palm of their hand, and have no idea what a narrative story is."

"The Elements of Style," though, still matters, because of its main message -- that clarity in writing matters, above all else.

"That is the only game," Mr. Zinsser said.

"If the writing isn't clear, you might as well stay in bed."