Parentheses are part of English. There's nothing wrong with them. True, many parentheticals can be set off by commas instead; the difference is in the degree of separation that commas and parentheses remove what they contain from the rest of the sentence.

Excessive use of parentheses is not wise. Use of parentheses in quoted dialogue is jarring and should be avoided. But suggesting that parentheses should never be used at all strikes me as one of those snooty elitist rules -- a general rule of thumb, perhaps, that somebody took to an extreme for no good reason. And if *I'm* calling something to do with language usage snooty or elitist, that's saying something.

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