So whence the popular anxiety? This is where a less than benign explanation comes in. Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about "correct English" for the rest of us. Who? There is no English Language Academy. The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists and pundits.Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to carrying out standards that maximize the language's clarity, logic, consistency, precision, stability and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the New York Times Magazine, calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.
https://newrepublic.com/article/77732/grammar-puss-steven-pinker-language-william-safire