Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the
Wars over Usage
By David Foster Wallace
Harper's Magazine, April, 2001
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1811_302/72732951/print.jhtml
Preface
(essay begins below)
"Save up to 50%--and More!" Between
you and I. On accident. Somewhat
of a. Kustom Kar Kare Autowash. "The
cause Was due to numerous factors." "
Discussed in this essay:
* A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan A.
Garner.
* A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler.
* The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by
Steven Pinker. William Morrow and Company, 1994. 494 pages.
* Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, E. W. Gilman, ed.
Merriam-Webster Inc., 1989. 978 pages.
* Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, by Eric
Partridge. Hamish Hamilton, 1957.392 pages.
* Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the
English Language, Philip Gore, ed. G. & C. Merriam Company, 1961. 2,662 pages.
Dilige et quod
vis fac. --
Essay
Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of
The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press's
semi-recent release of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary
of Modern American Usage. The fact of the matter is that Garner's
dictionary is extremely good, certainly the most comprehensive usage guide
since E. W. Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, now a decade out of
date.(1) Its format, like that of Gilman and the
handful of other great American usage guides of the last century, includes entries
on individual words and phrases and expostulative
small-cap MINI-ESSAYS. on any issue broad enough to
warrant more general discussion. But the really distinctive and ingenious
features of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage involve issues of rhetoric
and ideology and style, and it is impossible to describe why these issues are
important and why Garner's management of them borders
on genius without talking about the historical contexts(2) in which ADMAU
appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of
controversies involving everything from technical linguistics to public
education to political ideology, and these controversies take a certain amount
of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner's
usage guide so eminently worth your hard-earned
reference-book dollar can even be established; and in fact there's no way even
to begin the whole harrowing polymeric discussion without taking a moment to
establish and define the highly colloquial term SNOOT.
From one perspective, a certain irony attends the
publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who
are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least
going to need it, i.e., that offering counsel on the finer points of U.S.
English is Preaching to the Choir. The relevant Choir here comprises that small
percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of
double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched Story of
English on PBS (twice) and read W. Safire's column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that
special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS
LANE--10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the
founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the
meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this--Grammar
Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police.
The term I was raised with is SNOOT.(3) The word might
be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A
SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't
mind letting you know it.
I submit that we SNOOTs are just
about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd. There are, granted, plenty
of nerd-species in today's America, and some of these are elitist within their
own nerdy purview (e.g., the skinny, carbuncular, semi-autistic Computer Nerd
moves instantly up on the totem pole of status when your screen freezes and now
you need his help, and the bland condescension with which he performs the two
occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid). But the SNOOT's
purview is interhuman social life itself. You don't,
after all (despite withering cultural pressure), have to use a computer, but
you can't escape language: Language is everything and everywhere; it's what
lets us have anything to do with one another; it's what separates us from the
animals; Genesis 11:7-10 and so on. And we SNOOTS know when and how to
hyphenate phrasal adjectives and to keep participles from dangling, and we know
that we know, and we know how very few other Americans know this stuff or even
care, and we judge them accordingly.
In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble
religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture:(4) We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural
faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely
manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around
us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and
bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's
cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that
listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a
Stradivarius to pound nails. We(5) are the Few, the
Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.
THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE
Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are
at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this
article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is
one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous
respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very
difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to
issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100
percent intellectual integrity--you have to be willing to look honestly at
yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or
less continually.
This kind of stuff is advanced
I submit, then, that it is indisputably easier to be
dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and
highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding
"correctness" in contemporary American usage are both vexed and
highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose
answers have to be "worked out" instead of simply found.
A distinctive feature of ADMAU is that its author is
willing to acknowledge that a usage dictionary is not a bible or even a
textbook but rather just the record of one smart person's attempts to work out
answers to certain very difficult questions. This willingness appears to me to
be informed by a Democratic Spirit. The big question is whether such a spirit
compromises Garner's ability to present himself as a genuine "authority" on issues of
usage. Assessing Garner's book, then, involves trying
to trace out the very weird and complicated relationship between Authority and
Democracy in what we as a culture have decided is English. That relationship
is, as many educated Americans would say, still in process at this time.
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage has no Editorial
Staff or Distinguished Panel. It's conceived, researched, and written ab ovo usque
ad mala by Bryan Garner. This is an interesting guy.
He's both a lawyer and a lexicographer (which seems a bit like being both a
narcotics dealer and a DEA agent). His 1987 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage
is already a minor classic; now, instead of practicing law anymore, he goes
around conducting writing seminars for J.D.'s and doing prose-consulting for
various judicial bodies. Garner's also the founder of
something called the H. W. Fowler Society,(6) a worldwide group of usage-Trekkies who like to send one another linguistic boners
clipped from different periodicals. You get the idea. This Garner is one
serious and very hard-core SNOOT.
The lucid, engaging, and extremely sneaky Preface to ADMAU
serves to confirm Garner's SNOOTitude
in fact while undercutting it in tone. For one thing, whereas the traditional
usage pundit cultivates a sort of remote and imperial persona--the kind who
uses one or we to refer to himself--Garner gives us an
almost Waltonishly endearing sketch of his own
background:
"I realized early at the age of 15(7)--that my primary
intellectual interest was the use of the English language.... It became an
all-consuming' passion.... I read everything I could find on the subject. Then,
on a wintry evening while visiting
Although this reviewer regrets the biosketch's
failure to mention the rather significant social costs of being an adolescent
whose overriding passion is English usage,(8) the critical hat is off to yet
another personable section of the Preface, one that Garner entitles "First
Principles": "Before going any further, I should explain my approach.
That's an unusual thing for the author of a usage dictionary to
do--unprecedented, as far as I know. But a guide to good writing is only as
good as the principles on which it's based. And users should be naturally
interested in those principles. So, in the interests of full disclosure ..."(9)
The "unprecedented" and "full
disclosure" here are actually good-natured digs
at Garner's Fowlerite
predecessors, and a subtle nod to one camp in the wars that have raged in both
lexicography and education ever since the notoriously liberal Webster's Third
New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included such terms as heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on
them. You can think of Webster's Third as sort of the
We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for
authoritative guidance.(10) Rarely, however, do we ask
ourselves who decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or
pronunciations get deemed "substandard" or "incorrect."
Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what's OK(11)
and what isn't? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to
precedent or tradition won't work, because what's considered correct changes
over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular pronoun took a
singular conjugation--"You is." Earlier
still, the standard 2-S pronoun wasn't you but thou. Huge numbers of now
acceptable words like clever, fun, banter, and prestigious entered English as
what usage authorities considered errors or egregious slang. And not just usage
conventions but English itself changes over time; if it didn't, we'd all still
be talking like Chaucer. Who's to say which changes are natural and which are
corruptions? And when Bryan Garner or E. Ward Gilman do
in fact presume to say, why should we believe them?
These sorts of questions are not new, but they do now have a certain urgency.
"Who sets down all those rules that we all know about
from childhood the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or
begin one with a conjunction, that we must use each other for two things and
one another for more than two ...? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no
one does, that when you look into the background of these "rules" there
is often little basis for them."
In ADMAU's Preface, Garner
himself addresses the Authority Question with a Trumanesque
simplicity and candor that simultaneously disguise the author's cunning and
exemplify it:
"As you might already suspect, I don't shy away from
making judgments. I can't imagine that most readers would want me to. Linguists
don't like it, of course, because judgment involves subjectivity.(12) It isn't scientific. But rhetoric and usage, in the
view of most professional writers, aren't scientific endeavors. You don't want
dispassionate descriptions; you want sound guidance. And that requires
judgment."
Whole monographs could be written just on the masterful
rhetoric of this passage. Note for example the ingenious equivocation of
judgment in "I don't shy away from making judgments" vs. "And
that requires judgment." Suffice it to say that Garner is at all times
keenly aware of the Authority Crisis in modern usage; and his response to this
crisis is in the best Democratic Spirit rhetorical.
So ...
COROLLARY TO THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE
The most salient and timely feature of Garner's
book is that it's both lexicographical and rhetorical. Its main strategy
involves what is known in classical rhetoric as the Ethical Appeal. Here the
adjective, derived from the Greek ethos, doesn't mean quite what we usually
mean by ethical. But there are affinities. What the Ethical Appeal amounts to
is a complex and sophisticated "Trust me." It's the boldest, most
ambitious, and also most distinctively American of rhetorical Appeals, because
it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his
intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and
fairness and sensitivity to the audience's own hopes and fears.(13)
These are not qualities one associates with the traditional
SNOOT usage-authority, a figure who pretty much instantiates snobbishness and
bow-tied anality, and one whose modern image is not
improved by stuff like American Heritage Dictionary Distinguished Usage
Panelist Morris Bishop's "The arrant solecisms of the ignoramus are here
often omitted entirely, `irregardless' of how he may feel about this
neglect" or critic John Simon's "The English language is being
treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled their merchandise...."
Compare those lines' authorial personas with Garner's
in, e.g., "English usage is so challenging that even experienced writers need guidance now and then."
The thrust here is going to be that A Dictionary of Modern
American Usage earns Garner pretty much all the trust his Ethical Appeal asks
us for. The book's "feel-good" spirit (in the very best sense of
"feel-good") marries rigor and humility in such a way as to allow
Garner to be extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist
putdown. This is an extraordinary accomplishment. Understanding why it's
basically a rhetorical accomplishment, and why this is both historically
significant and (in this reviewer's opinion) politically redemptive, requires a
more detailed look at the Usage Wars.
You'd sure know lexicography had an underbelly if you read
the little introductory essays in modern dictionaries--pieces like Webster's DEU's "A Brief History of English Usage" or
Webster's Third's "Linguistic Advances and Lexicography" or AHD-3's
"Usage in the American Heritage Dictionary: The Place of Criticism."
But almost nobody ever bothers with these little intros, and it's not just
their six-point type or the fact that dictionaries tend to be hard on the lap.
It's that these intros aren't actually written for you or me or the average
citizen who goes to The Dictionary just to see how to spell (for instance)
meringue. They're written for other lexicographers and critics, and in fact
they're not really introductory at all but polemical. They're salvos in the
Usage Wars that have been under way ever since editor
Philip Gove first sought to apply the value-neutral principles of structural
linguistics to lexicography in Webster's Third. Gove's
famous response to conservatives who howled(14) when
Webster's Third endorsed OK and described ain't as
"used orally in most parts of the
The former are far better known. When you read the columns
of William Satire or Morton Freeman or books like Edwin Newman's Strictly
Speaking or John Simon's Paradigms Lost, you're actually reading Popular
Prescriptivism, a genre sideline of certain journalists (mostly older ones, the
vast majority of whom actually do wear bow ties) whose bemused irony often
masks a Colonel Blimp's rage at the way the beloved English of their youth is
being trashed in the decadent present. The plutocratic tone and styptic wit of
Safire and Newman and the best of the Prescriptivists
is often modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W.
Fowler, the same
Descriptivists, on the other hand, don't have weekly columns in the
Times. These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of
structural (or "descriptive") linguistics, they are doctrinaire
positivists who have their intellectual roots in the work of Auguste Comte and Ferdinand de Saussure
and their ideological roots firmly in the
"Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries
got hijacked by the descriptive linguists.(16) who
observe language scientifically. For the pure descriptivist, it's impermissible
to say that one form of language is any better than another: as long as a
native speaker says it, it's OK--and anyone who takes a contrary stand is a
dunderhead.... Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems. Descriptivists want to record language as it's actually
used, and they perform a useful function--though their audience is generally
limited to those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research."
--is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the
"approaching different problems" part, because it vastly underplays
the Descriptivists' influence on
The Descriptivist revolution takes a little time to unpack,
but it's worth it. The structural linguists' rejection of conventional usage
rules depends on two main arguments. The first is academic and methodological.
In this age of technology, Descriptivists contend,
it's the Scientific Method--clinically objective, value-neutral, based on
direct observation and demonstrable hypothesis--that should determine both the
content of dictionaries and the standards Of
"correct" English. Because language is constantly evolving, such
standards will always be fluid. Gore's now classic introduction to Webster's
Third outlines this type of Descriptivism's five
basic edicts: "1--Language changes constantly; 2--Change is normal;
3--Spoken language is the language; 4--Correctness rests upon usage; 5--All
usage is relative."
These principles look prima facie OK--commonsensical and
couched in the bland simple s.-v.-o, prose of dispassionate Science--but in
fact they're vague and muddled and it takes about three seconds to think of
reasonable replies to each one of them, viz.:
1--OK, but how much and how fast?
2--Same thing. Is Heraclitean
flux as normal or desirable as gradual change ? Do
some changes actually serve the language's overall pizzazz better than others?
And how many people have to deviate from how many conventions before we say the
language has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent?
3--This is an old claim, at least as old as Plato's Phaedrus. And it's specious. If Derrida and the infamous
Deconstructionists have done nothing else, they've debunked the idea that
speech is language's primary instantiation.(18) Plus
consider the weird arrogance of Gove's #3 w/r/t
correctness. Only the most mullahlike Prescriptivists care very much about spoken English; most
Prescriptive usage guides concern Standard Written English.(19)
4--Fine, but whose usage? Gove's
#4 begs the whole question. What he wants to imply here, I think, is a reversal
of the traditional entailment-relation between abstract rules and concrete
usage: Instead of usage ideally corresponding to a rigid set of regulations,
the regulations ought to correspond to the way real people are actually using the
language. Again, fine, but which people? Urban Latinos?
5--Huh? If this means what it seems to mean, then it ends up
biting Gove's whole argument in the ass.
#5 appears to imply that the correct answer to the above
"which people?" is: "All of them!" And it's easy to show
why this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle. The most obvious
problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not?
Because you can't observe every last bit of every last native speaker's
"language behavior," and even if you could, the resultant dictionary
would weigh 4 million pounds and have to be updated hourly.(20)
The fact is that any lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what
gets in and what doesn't. And these choices are based on ... what? And now
we're right back where we started.
It is true that, as a SNOOT, I am probably neurologically
predisposed to look for flaws in Gove et al.'s methodological argument. But
these flaws seem awfully easy to find. Probably the biggest one is that the Descriptivists' "scientific lexicography"--under
which, keep in mind, the ideal English dictionary is basically
number-crunching; you somehow observe every linguistic act by every native/naturalized
speaker of English and put the sum of all these acts between two covers and
call it The Dictionary--involves an incredibly simplistic and outdated
understanding of what scientific means. It requires a naive belief in
scientific objectivity, for one thing. Even in the physical sciences,
everything from quantum mechanics to Information Theory has shown that an act
of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically
inseparable from it.
If you remember your old college English classes, there's
an analogy here that points up the trouble scholars get into when they confuse
observation with interpretation. Recall the New Critics.(21)
They believed that literary criticism was best conceived as a
"scientific" endeavor: The critic was a neutral, careful, unbiased,
highly trained observer whose job was to find and objectively describe meanings
that were right there--literally inside--pieces of literature. Whether you know
what happened to the New Criticism's reputation depends on whether you took
college English after c. 1975; suffice it to say that its star bas dimmed. The
New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove's
Methodological Descriptivists: They believed that
scientific meant the same thing as neutral or unbiased. And
that linguistic meanings could exist "objectively," separate from any
interpretive act.
The point of the analogy is that claims to objectivity in
language study are now the stuff of jokes and shudders. The epistemological
assumptions that underlie Methodological Descriptivism have been thoroughly
debunked and displaced--in Lit by the rise of post-structuralism,
Reader-Response Criticism, and Jaussian Reception
Theory; in linguistics by the rise of Pragmatics--and it's now pretty much
universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of
interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased,
i.e., informed by the interpreter's particular ideology. And the consequence of
(a) and (b) is that there's no way around it--decisions about what to put in
The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer's
ideology. And every lexicographer's got one. To presume that dictionary-making
can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular
ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.
There's an even more important way Descriptivists
are wrong in thinking that the Scientific Method is appropriate to the study of
language:
Even if, as a thought experiment, we assume a kind of
nineteenth-century scientific realism-in which, even though some scientists'
interpretations of natural phenomena might be biased(22)
the natural phenomena themselves can be supposed to exist wholly independent of
either observation or interpretation--no such realist supposition can be made
about "language behavior," because this behavior is both hum, an and
fundamentally normative. To understand this, you have only to accept the
proposition that language is by its very nature public--i.e., that there can be
no such thing as a Private Language(23) and then to
observe the way Methodological Descriptivists seem
either ignorant of this fact or oblivious to its consequences, as in for
example one Charles Fries's introduction to an
epigone of Webster's Third called The American College Dictionary:
A dictionary can be an "authority" only in the
sense in which a book of chemistry or of physics or of botany can be an
"authority" by the accuracy and the completeness of its record of the
observed facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest principles and
techniques of the particular science."
This is so stupid it practically drools. An
"authoritative" physics text presents the results of physicists'
observations and physicists' theories about those observations. If a physics
textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans
believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that
power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the
Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a "valid"
theory in the textbook--just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for
imply, the use becomes an ipso facto "valid" part of the language.
Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not, finally, scientists but
census-takers who happen to misconstrue the importance of "observed
facts." It isn't scientific phenomena they're tabulating but rather a set
of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are--to be blunt--moronic.
Try, for instance, to imagine an "authoritative" ethics textbook
whose principles were based on what most people actually do.
Norm-wise, let's keep in mind that language didn't come
into being because our hairy ancestors were sitting around the veldt with
nothing better to do. Language was invented to serve certain specific purposes:(24) "That mushroom is poisonous";
"Knock these two rocks together and you can start a fire"; "This
shelter is mine!" And so on. Clearly, as linguistic communities evolve
over time, they discover that some ways of using language are
"better" than others--meaning better with respect to the community's
purposes. If we assume that one such purpose might be communicating which kinds
of food are safe to eat, then you can see how, for example, a misplaced
modifier might violate an important norm:
People who eat that kind of mushroom often get sick"
confuses the recipient about whether he'll get sick only if he eats the
mushroom frequently or whether he stands a good chance of getting sick the very
first time he eats it. In other words, the community has a vested practical
interest in excluding this kind of misplaced modifier from acceptable usage;
and even if a certain percentage of tribesmen screw up and use them, this still
doesn't make m.m.'s a good idea.
Maybe now the analogy between usage and ethics is clearer.
Just because people sometimes lie, cheat on their
taxes, or scream at their kids, this doesn't mean that they think those things
are "good." The whole point of norms is to help us evaluate our
actions (including utterances) according to what we as a community have decided
our real interests and purposes are. Granted, this analysis is oversimplified;
in practice it's incredibly hard to arrive at norms and to keep them at least
minimally fair or sometimes even to agree on what they are (q.v. today's
Culture Wars). But the Descriptivists' assumption
that all usage norms are arbitrary and dispensable leads to--well, have a
mushroom.
The connotations of arbitrary here are tricky, though, and
this sort of segues into the second argument Descriptivists
make. There is a sense in which specific linguistic conventions are arbitrary.
For instance, there's no particular metaphysical reason why our word for a
four-legged mammal that gives milk and goes Moo is cow and not, say, prtlmpf. The uptown phrase for this is "the
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign," and it's used, along with certain
principles of cognitive science and generative grammar, in a more
philosophically sophisticated version of Descriptivism that holds the
conventions of SWE to be more like the niceties of fashion than like actual
norms. This "Philosophical Descriptivism" doesn't care much about
dictionaries or method; its target is the standard SNOOT claim supra--that
prescriptive rules have their ultimate justification in the community's need to
make its language meaningful.
The argument goes like this. An English sentence's being
meaningful is not the same as its being grammatical. That is, such clearly
ill-formed constructions as "Did you seen the car
keys of me?" or "The show was looked by many people" are
nevertheless comprehensible; the sentences do, more or less, communicate the
information they're trying to get across. Add to this the fact that nobody who isn't
damaged in some profound Oliver Sacksish way actually
ever makes these sorts of very deep syntactic errors(25) and you get the basic
proposition of Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics,
which is that there exists a Universal Grammar beneath and common to all
languages, plus that there is probably an actual part of the human brain that's
imprinted with this Universal Grammar the same way birds' brains are imprinted
with Fly South and dogs' with Sniff Genitals. There's all kinds of compelling
evidence and support for these ideas, not least of which are the advances that
linguists and cognitive scientists and A.I. researchers have been able to make
with them, and the theories have a lot of credibility, and they are adduced by
the Philosophical Descriptivists to show that since
the really important rules of language are at birth already hardwired into
people's neocortex; SWE prescriptions against
dangling participles or mixed metaphors are basical ly the linguistic equivalent of whalebone corsets and short
forks for salad. As Descriptivist Steven Pinker puts it, "When a scientist
considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to order words into
everyday sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential
decorations."
This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that
Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to some objections.
The first one is easy. Even if it's true that we're all wired with a Universal
Grammar, it simply doesn't follow that all prescriptive rules are superfluous.
Some of these rules really do seem to serve clarity, and precision. The
injunction against twoway adverbs ("People who
eat this often get sick") is an obvious example, as are rules about other
kinds of misplaced modifiers ("There are many reasons why lawyers lie,
some better than others") and about relative pronouns' proximity to the
nouns they modify ("She's the mother of an infant daughter who works
twelve hours a day").
Granted, the Philosophical Descriptivist can question just
how absolutely necessary these rules are it's quite likely that a recipient of
clauses like the above could figure out what the sentences mean from the
sentences on either side or from the "overall context" or whatever. A
listener can usually figure out what I really mean when I misuse infer for
imply or say indicate for say, too. But many of these solecisms require at
least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort, a kind of rapid
sift-and-discard process, before the recipient gets it. Extra
work. It's debatable just how much extra work, but it seems indisputable
that we put some extra neural burden on the recipient when we fail to follow
certain conventions. W/r/t confusing clauses like the above, it simply seems
more "considerate" to follow the rules of correct SWE ... just as it's more "considerate" to de-slob your home
before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date. Not
just more considerate but more respectful somehow--both of your listener and of
what you're trying to get across. As we sometimes also say about elements of
fashion and etiquette, the way you use English "Makes a Statement" or
"Sends a Message"--even though these Statements/Messages often have
nothing to do with the actual information you're trying to transmit.
We've now sort of bled into a more serious rejoinder to
Philosophical Descriptivism: From the fact that linguistic communication is not
strictly dependent on usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the
traditional rules of usage and grammar are nothing but "inconsequential
decorations." Another way to state the objection is that just because
something is "decorative" does not necessarily make it
"inconsequential." Rhetorically, Pinker's
flip dismissal is bad tactics, for it invites the very question it begs:
inconsequential to whom?
Take, for example, the Descriptivism claim that so-called
correct English usages such as brought rather than brung
and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and
restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular
verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass.
Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable.
Then let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest
to you that having the "correct" subthoracic
clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other
cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear
pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with
certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes
don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical
(skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants
can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode
irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded
legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant--as a thought experiment if nothing else--that
these are all reasortable and compelling objections
to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in
our minds and hearts say yes--shout yes--to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the
sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our
spare time work toward an
And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural
mainstream of millennial
You see where this is going. I'm going to describe the
intended point of the pants analogy in terms I'm sure are simplistic--doubtless
there are whole books in Pragmatics or psycholinguistics or something devoted
to unpacking this point. The weird thing is that I've seen neither Descriptivists nor SNOTs deploy
it in the Wars.(27)
When I say or write something, there are actually a whole
lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (the
actual information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part
is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of
the fact that there are uncountably many well-formed
ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a
bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine
juggernaut bethought to sup upon my person!" and so on. And different
levels of diction and formality are only the simplest kinds of distinction;
things get way more complicated in the sorts of interpersonal communication
where social relations and feelings and moods come into play. Here's a familiar
sort of example. Suppose that you and I are acquaintances and we're in my
apartment having a conversation and that at some point I want to terminate the
conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore. Very
delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to
handle it: "Wow, look at the time"; "Could we finish this up
later?"; "Could you please leave now?"; "Go";
"Get out"; "Get the hell out of here"; "Didn't you say
you had to be someplace?"; "Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my
friend"; "Off you go then, love"; or that sly old
telephone-conversation ender: "Well, I'm going to let you go now";
etc.(n) And then think of all the different factors and implications of each
option.
The point here is obvious. It concerns a phenomenon that
SNOOTS blindly reinforce and that Descriptivists
badly underestimate and that scary vocab-tape ads try
to exploit. People really do "judge" one another according to their
use of language. Constantly. Of course, people judge
one another on the basis of all kinds of things--weight, scent, physiognomy,
occupation, make of vehicle(28)--and, again, doubtless
it's all terribly complicated and occupies whole battalions of sociolinguists.
But it's clear that at least one component of all this interpersonal semantic
judging involves acceptance, meaning not some touchy-feely emotional
affirmation but actual acceptance or rejection of somebody's bid to be regarded
as a peer, a member of somebody else's collective or community or Group.
Another way to come at this is to acknowledge something that in the Usage Wars
gets mentioned only in very abstract terms: "Correct" English usage
is, as a practical matter, a function of whom you're
talking to and how you want that person to respond--not just to your utterance
but also to you. In other words, a large part of the agenda of any
communication is rhetorical and depends on what some rhet-scholars
call "Audience" or "Discourse Community."(29) And the
INTERPOLATION: EXAMPLE OF GRAMMATICAL ADVANTAGES OF A
NON-STANDARD DIALECT THAT THIS REVIEWER ACTUALLY KNOWS ABOUT FIRSTHAND
This rev. happens to have two native English dialects--the
SWE of my hypereducated parents and the hard-earned
Rural Midwestern of most of my peers. When I'm talking to R.M.'s,
I usually use, for example, the construction "Where's it at?" instead
of "Where is it?" Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not
get rejected as an egghead or fag (see sub). But another part is that I, SNOOT
or no, believe that this and other R.M.isms are in
certain ways superior to their Standard equivalents.
For a dogmatic Prescriptivist,
"Where's it at?" is double-damned as a sentence that not only ends
with a preposition but whose final preposition forms a redundancy with where
that's similar to the redundancy in "the reason is because" (which
latter usage I'll admit makes me dig my nails into my palms). Rejoinder: First
off, the avoid-terminal-prepositions rule is the invention of one Fr. R. Lowth, an eighteenth-century British preacher and indurate
pedant who did things like spend scores of pages arguing for hath over the
trendy and degenerate has. The a.-t.-p. rule is antiquated and stupid and only the most ayatolloid SNOOT takes it seriously. Garner himself calls
the rule "stuffy" and lists all kinds of useful constructions like
"the man you were listening to" that we'd have to discard or distort
if we really enforced it.
Plus the apparent redundancy of
"Where's it at?"(31) is offset by its metrical logic. What the
at really does is license the contraction of is after the interrogative
adverb. You can't say "Where's it?" So the choice is between
"Where is it?" and "Where's it at?", and the latter, a
strong anapest, is prettier and trips off the tongue better than "Where is
it?", whose meter is either a clunky
monosyllabic-foot + trochee or it's nothing at all.
This is probably the place for your SNOOT reviewer openly
to concede that a certain number of traditional prescriptive rules really are
stupid and that people who insist on them (like the legendary assistant to EM.
Margaret Thatcher who refused to read any memo with a split infinitive in it, or
the jr.-high teacher I had who automatically graded you down if you started a
sentence with Hopefully) are that very most pathetic and dangerous sort of
SNOOT, the SNOOT WhO Is Wrong. The injunction against
split infinitives, for instance, is a consequence of the weird fact that
English grammar is modeled on Latin even though Latin is a synthetic language
and English is an analytic language.(32) Latin
infinitives consist of one word and are impossible to as it were split, and the
earliest English Prescriptivists--so enthralled with
Latin that their English usage guides were actually written in
Latin(33)--decided that English infinitives shouldn't be split either. Garner
himself takes out after the s.i. rule in both SPLIT
INFINITIVES and SUPERSTITIONS.(34) And Hopefully at the beginning of a
sentence, as a certain cheeky eighth-grader once pointed out to his everlasting
social cost, actually functions not as a misplaced modal auxiliary or as a
manner adverb like quickly or angrily but as a "sentence adverb" that
indicates the speaker's attitude about the state of affairs described by the
sentence (examples of perfectly OK sentence adverbs are Clearly, Basically,
Luckily), and only SNOOTs educated in the
high-pedantic years up to 1960 blindly proscribe it or grade it down.
The cases of split infinitives and Hopefully are in fact
often trotted out by dogmatic Descriptivists as
evidence that all SWE usage rules are arbitrary and stupid (which is a bit like
pointing. to Pat Buchanan as evidence that all Republicans are maniacs). Garner
rejects HopefuIly's knee-jerk proscription, too,
albeit grudgingly, including the adverb in his miniessay
on SKUNKED TERMS, which is his phrase for a usage that is "hotly
disputed.., any use of it is likely to distract some readers." (Garner
also points out something I'd never quite realized, which is that hopefully, if
misplaced/mispunctuated in the body of a sentence,
can create some of the same two-way ambiguities as other adverbs, as in the
clause "I will borrow your book and hopefully read it soon.")
Whether we're conscious of it or or,
most of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in a large
number of subdialects and are probably at least
passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of
course, on whom you're addressing. More to the point, I submit that the dialect
you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and
whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group. An
obvious example is that traditional upper-class English has certain dialectal
differences from lower-class English and that schools used to have courses in
Elocution whose whole point was to teach people how to speak in an upper-class
way. But usage-as-inclusion is about much more than class. Here's another
thought experiment: A bunch of U.S. teenagers in clothes that look far too
large for them are sitting together in the local mall's Food Court, and a
53-year-old man with a combover and clothes that fit
comes over to them and says that he was scoping them and thinks they're totally
rad and/or phat and is it
cool if he just kicks it and does the hang here with them. The kids' reaction
is going to be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy--most likely a mix of
both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two hard-core urban black guys are standing there
talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and greet
them with "Yo" and call them
"Brothers" and ask "s'up, s'goin on," pronouncing on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young
Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going to be
offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other
reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?
Why: A dialect of English is learned and used either
because it's your native vernacular or because it's the dialect of a Group by
which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted. And although
it is the major and arguably the most important one, SWE is only one dialect.
And it is never, or at least hardly ever, anybody's only dialect. This is
because there are--as you and I both know and yet no one in the Usage Wars ever
seems to mention--situations in which faultlessly correct SWE is clearly not
the appropriate dialect.
Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason
why SNOOTlets tend to have a very hard social time of
it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who's
wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet,
so I know you've seen them--these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who
use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out
"How incalculably dreadful!" etc. The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of
academic Geekoid and is duly. despised
by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the
incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is
receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates
and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which
children are capable.
But the other children's punishment of the SNOOTIet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things
at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and
-exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the
use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion.(35) They're learning about Discourse Communities. Kids
learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at
lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet
monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on
him, there's serious learning going on ... for everyone except the little
SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn. What
neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet
is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his
vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or
vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer
rapport," which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by
the most important Group in the little kid's life.
This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some,
umm, personal stuff getting dredged up and worked out here;(36)
but the stuff is relevant. The point is that the little A+ SNOOTlet
is actually in the same dialectal position as the class's "slow" kid
who can't learn to stop using ain't or bringed. One is punished in class, the other on the
playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill--viz., the
ability to move between various dialects and levels of "correctness,"
the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and
another with family and another with Little League coaches and so on. Most of
these dialectal adjustments are made below the level of conscious awareness,
and our ability to make them seems part psychological and part something
else--perhaps something hardwired into the same motherboard as Universal
Grammar--and in truth this ability is a far better indicator of a kid's
"Verbal I.Q." than test scores or grades, since U.S. English classes
do far more to retard dialectal talent than to cultivate it.
Well-known fact: In neither K-12 or college English are
systematic WE grammar ar),d
usage much aught anymore. It s been this way for more than 20 years. The
phenomenon drives Prescriptivists nuts, and it's one
of the big things they cite as evidence of
By way here I'm referring not so much to actual method as
to spirit or attitude. Most traditional teachers of English grammar have, of
course, been dogmatic SNOOTs, and like most
dogmatists they've been incredibly stupid about the rhetoric they used and the
Audience they were addressing.(37) I refer
specifically to their assumption that SWE is the sole appropriate English
dialect and that the only reasons anyone could fail to see this are ignorance
or amentia or grave deficiencies in character. As rhetoric, this sort of
attitude works only in sermons to the Choir, and as pedagogy it's just
disastrous. The reality is that an average
I'm not suggesting here that an effective SWE pedagogy
would require teachers to wear sunglasses and call students "Dude."
What I am suggesting is that the rhetorical situation of an English class--a
class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in
defiance of Adult-Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities
whose primary dialects are different from SWE--requires the teacher to come up
with overt, honest, compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth
learning.
These arguments are hard to make--not intellectually but
emotionally, politically. Because they are baldly elitist.(38)
The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite.
That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is
perpetuated as "Standard" by same. That it is the shibboleth of the
Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and
racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say
rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the
service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a
Privileged WASP Male and the TeaCher and thus pretty
much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment. This reviewer's opinion,
though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes
his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an
advocate of SWE's utility rather than as a prophet of
its innate superiority.
Because this argument is both most delicate and (I believe)
most important with respect to students of color, here is one version of a
spiel I've given in private conference(39) with certain black students who were
(a) bright and inquisitive and (b) deficient in what U.S. higher education
considers written English facility:
"I don't know whether anybody's told you this or not,
but when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign
dialect. This dialect is called 'Standard Written English. [Brief
overview of major
I should note here that a couple of the students I've said
this stuff to were offended--one lodged an Official Complaint--and that I have
had more than one colleague profess to find my spiel "racially
insensitive." Perhaps you do, too. My own humble opinion is that some of
the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially
insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around
these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic
to the project of ever actually changing them. Such pussyfooting has of course
now achieved the status of a dialect--one powerful enough to have turned the
normal politics of the Usage Wars sort of inside out.
I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under
whose conventions failing students become "high-potential" students
and poor people "economically disadvantaged" and people in
wheelchairs "differently abled" and a
sentence like "White English and Black English are different and.you better learn White English if you don't want to
flunk" is not blunt but "insensitive." Although it's common to
make jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as "aesthetically
challenged" and so on), be advised that Politically Correct English's
various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and
corporations and government agencies, whose own institutional dialects now
evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.
From one perspective, the history of PCE evinces a kind of
Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same
ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist
revolution--namely, the sixties-era rejections of traditional authority and
traditional inequality --have now actually produced a far more inflexible
Prescriptivism, one unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the
threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to
conform. This is sort of funny in a dark way, maybe, and most criticism of PCE
seems to consist in making fun of its trendiness or
vapidity. This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just
silly but confused and dangerous.
Usage is always political, of course, but it's complexly
political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions
can function in two ways: On the one hand they can be a reflection of political
change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. These
two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them--in
particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's
political symbolism--By Barry Graham--enables the bizarre conviction that
America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using
certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness.
This is PCE's central fallacy--that a society's mode
of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those
attitudes--and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically
conservative SNOOT'S delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting
change in standard usage.(40)
Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations,
though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that
PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its
Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality
itself--of vastly more help to conservatives and the
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who
has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less
ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as "economically
disadvantaged" rather than "poor." Were I he, in fact, I'd
probably find the PCE term insulting--not just because it's patronizing but
because it's hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage,(41)
PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the
speaker--scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people,
sophistication about the political implications of language--and so serves the
selfish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or
groups renamed.
INTERPOLATION ON A RELATED ISSUE IN THE FACE OF WHOSE
GHASTLY MALIGNANCY THIS REVIEWER'S DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT JUST GIVES OUT ALTOGETHER,
ADMITTEDLY
This issue is Academic English, a cancer that has
metastasized now to afflict both scholarly writing--
"If such a sublime cyborg
would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject,
his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the "now
all-but-unreadable DNA" of the fast industrializing Detroit, just as his
Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and
street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration
through violence upon the racially heteroglassic
wilds and others of the inner city."(42)
--and prose as mainstream as The Village Voice's:
"At first encounter, the poems' distanced cerebral
surfaces can be daunting, evading physical location or straightforward
emotional arc. But this seeming remoteness quickly reveals a very real passion,
centered in the speaker's struggle to define his evolving
self-construction."
Maybe it's a combination of my SNOOTitude
and the fact that I end up having to read a lot of it for my job, but I'm
afraid I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but as a
grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherences of Presidential English ("This is the
best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reengineering
weapons of mass destruction") or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak ("Our Mission: to proactively search and
provide the optimum networking skills and resources to meet the needs of your
growing business"); and in support of this utter contempt and intolerance
I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE pegged
as a "mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence" in which "it
is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in
meaning."(43)
It probably isn't the whole explanation, but, as with the
voguish hypocrisy of PCE, the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can
be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance
between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the
writer's own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar's vanity/insecurity
leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an
Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction
(whose function is to signal the writer's erudition) and by opaque abstraction
(whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite
assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter
characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible
to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles
political and corporate doublespeak ("revenue enhancement,"
"downsizing," pre-owned," "proactive resource-allocation
restructuring") that it's tempting to think AE's real purpose is
concealment and its real motivation fear.
The insecurity that drives AE, PCE, and vocab-tape
ads is far from groundless, though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it
on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodern relativism
or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity, of
advertising and P.R. or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will--we
live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation.
In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal,
Logical Appeal (= an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal
(= an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed--or rather
the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in
ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on
"reason" alone.
A vividly concrete illustration here concerns the Official
Complaint a black under-graduate filed against this rev. after one of my little
in camera spiels described on pages 53-54. The complainant was (I opine) wrong,
but she was not crazy or stupid; and I was able later to see that I did bear
some responsibility for the whole nasty administrative swivet.
My culpability lay in gross rhetorical naivete. I'd
seen my speech's primary Appeal as Logical: The aim was to make a conspicuously
blunt, honest argument for SWE's utility. It wasn't
pretty, maybe, but it was true, plus so manifestly bullshit-free that I think I
anticipated not just acquiescence but gratitude for my candor.(44) The problem
I failed to see, of course, lay not with the argument per se but with the
person making it--namely me, a Privileged WASP Male in a position of power,
thus someone whose statements about the primacy and utility of the Privileged
WASP Male dialect appeared not candid/hortatory/ authoritative/true but
elitist/high-handed/ authoritarian/racist. Rhetoric-wise what happened was that
I allowed the substance and style of my Logical Appeal to completely torpedo my
Ethical Appeal: What the student heard was just another PWM rationalizing why
his Group and his English were to dog and ought "logically" to stay
that way (plus, worse, trying to use his academic power over her to coerce her
assent (45)).
If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this
particular student's perceptions and reaction,(46) I would ask that you bracket
your feelings long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor's very modern
rhetorical dilemma in that office was really no different from the dilemma
faced by a male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or an atheist who argues against
Creation Science, or a Caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or an African
American who decries Racial Profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to
make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has
nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or
even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far--any opponent with
sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the arguments and
pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a single, terribly familiar
rejoinder: "Of course you'd say that"; "Easy for you to
say"; "What right do you have ...?"
Now (still bracketing) consider the situation of any
reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOT who sits down to prepare a
prescriptive usage guide. It's the millennium, post-Everything: Whence the authority
to make any sort of credible Appeal for SWE at all?
ARTICLE'S CRUX: WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS, THOUGH OF
A RATHER PARTICULAR KIND
It isn't that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is
perfect It doesn't seem to cover conversant in vs. conversant with, for
example, or abstruse vs. obtuse, or to have anything on hereby and herewith
(which I tend to use interchangeably but always have the uneasy feeling I'm
screwing up). Garner's got a good discussion of used
to but nothing on supposed to. Nor does he give any examples to help explain
irregular participles and transitivity ("The light shone" vs. "I
shined the light," etc.), and these would seem to be more important than,
say, the correct spelling of huzzah or the plural of animalculum,
both of which get discussed. Plus there's the VOGUE WORDS snafu and the absence
of a pronunciation entry on trough.(47) In other
words, a SNOOT is going to be able to find stuff to quibble about in any usage
dictionary, and ADMAU is no exception.
But it's still really, really good--and not just
lexicographically but rhetorically, politically (if it even makes sense to
distinguish these any more). As a collection of judgments, ADMAU is in no way
Descriptivist, but Garner structures his judgments very carefully to avoid the
elitism and anality of traditional SNOGTitude. He does not deploy irony or scorn or caustic
wit, nor tropes or colloquialisms or contractions ... or really any sort of
verbal style at all. In fact, even though Garner talks openly about himself and
uses the 1-S pronoun throughout the whole dictionary, his personality is oddly
effaced, neutralized. It's like he's so bland he's barely there. E.g., as this
reviewer was finishing the book's final entry,(48) it
struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan Garner was black or white, gay or
straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more
striking was that I hadn't once wondered about any of this up to now; something
about Garner's lexical persona kept me ever from
asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies
were informing what he had admitted right up front were "value
judgments."
Bryan Garner is a genius because A Dictionary of Modern
American Usage pretty much resolves the Usage Wars' Crisis of Authority. Garner
manages to control the compresence of rhetorical
Appeals so cleverly that he appears able to transcend both Usage Wars camps and
simply tell the truth, and in a way that does not torpedo his own credibility
but actually enhances it. His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and
totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn't seem like
there's even an argument going on at all.
Garner recognizes something that neither of the dogmatic
camps appears to get: Given 40 years of the Usage Wars, "authority"
is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio. In fact, a
large part of the project of any contemporary usage dictionary will consist in
establishing this authority. If that seems rather obvious, be apprised that
nobody before Garner seems to have figured it out--that the lexicographer's
challenge now is to be not just accurate and comprehensive but credible. That
in the absence of unquestioned Authority in language, the reader must now be
moved or persuaded to grant a dictionary its authority, freely and for what
appear to be good reasons.
Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection
of information and a piece of Democratic rhetoric.(49) Its goal is to recast
the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents
himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense.
And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of
Authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism
that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism.
Of course, Garner really is a technocrat. He's a lawyer,
recall, and in ADMAU he consciously projects a sort of wise juridical persona:
knowledgeable, dispassionate, fair, with an almost Enlightenment-grade passion
for reason. His judgments about usage tend to be rendered like legal
opinions--exhaustive citation of precedent (other dictionaries' judgments,
published examples of actual usage) combined with clear, logical reasoning
that's always informed by the larger consensual purposes SWE is meant to serve.
Also thoroughgoingly technocratic
is Garner's approach to the issue of whether
anybody's even going to be interested in his 700 pages of fine-pointed counsel.
Like any specialist, he simply presumes that there are practical reasons why
some people choose to concern themselves with SWE usage; and his attitude about
the fact that most Americans "could care less" isn't scorn or
disapproval but the phlegmatic resignation of a doctor or lawyer who realizes
that he can give good advice but can't make you take it:
"The reality I care about most is that some people
still want to use the language well.(50) They want to
write effectively; they want to speak effectively. They want their language to
be graceful at times and powerful at times. They want to understand how to use
words well, how to manipulate sentences, and how to move about in the language
without seeming to flail. They want good grammar, 'but they want more: they
want rhetoric(51) in the traditional sense. That is,
they want to use the language deftly so that it's fit for their purposes."
It's now possible to see that all the autobiographical
stuff in ADMAU's Preface does more than just humanize
Mr. Bryan A. Garner. It also serves to detail the early and enduring passion
that helps make someone a credible technocrat--we tend to like and trust
experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of
just a desire to be expert at something. In fact, it turns out that ADMAU's Preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with
every single qualification of modern technocratic Authority: passionate
devotion, reason, and accountability (recall "in the interests of full
disclosure, here are the ten critical points ..."), experience
("that, after years of working on usage problems, I've settled on"),
exhaustive and tech-savvy research ("For contemporary usage, the files of
our greatest dictionary makers pale in comparison with the fulltext
search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WESTLAW"), an even and
judicious temperament (see e.g. this from HYPERCORRECTION: "Sometimes
people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave
inappropriately"(52)), and the sort of humble integrity (for instance,
including in one of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that
not only renders Garner likable but transmits the same kind of reverence for
English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more
important than any one person.
Probably the most attractive thing about ADMAU's Ethical Appeal, though, is Garner's
scrupulous consideration of the reader's concern about his (or her) own
linguistic authority and rhetorical persona and ability to convince an Audience
that he cares. Again and again, Garner frames his prescriptions in rhetorical
terms, e.g.: "To the writer or speaker for whom credibility is important,
it's a good idea to avoid distracting any readers or listeners."
Dictionary of Modern American Usage's real thesis, in other words, is that the
purposes of the expert authority and the purposes of the lay reader are
identical, and identically rhetorical--which I submit is about as Democratic these
days as you're going to get.
Notes:
(1) With the advent of online databases, Garner has access
to far more examples of actual usage than did Gilman, and he deploys them to
great effect. (FYI, Oxford's 1996 New Fowler's Modern English
Usage is also extremely comprehensive and good, but its emphasis is on British
usage.)
(2) Sorry about this phrase: I hate this phrase, too. This
happens to be one of those very rare times when "historical context"
is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn't even worse.
(I actually tried "lexico-temporal
backdrop" in one of the middle drafts, which I think you'll agree is not
preferable.) INTERPOLATION: The above
[paragraph] is motivated by the fact that this reviewer almost always sneers
and/or winces when he sees "historical context" deployed in a piece
of writing and thus hopes to head off any potential sneers/winces from the
reader here, especially in an article about felicitous usage.
(3) SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer's nuclear
family's nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person
whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire's column's prose
itself. This reviewer's family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself
derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether
S.N.O.O.T. stood for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates
Our Ongoing Tendance" or "Syntax Nudniks of
Our Time" depended on whether or not you were one.
(4) This is true in my own case at any rate--plus also the
"uncomfortable" part. I teach college English part-time--mostly Lit,
not Comp. But I am also so pathologically anal about(*) usage that every
semester the same thing happens: The minute I have read my students' first set
of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a
three-week Emergency Remedial Usage Unit, during which my demeanor is basically
that of somebody, teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it
emerges (as it does, every time) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale
college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a
misplaced only can make a sentence confusing, I all but pound my head on the
blackboard; I exhort them to sue their hometown school boards. The kids end up
scared, both of me and for me.
(*)
Editor's Note: Author insisted this phrase replace "obsessed with"
and took umbrage at the suggestion that this change clearly demonstrated the
very quality he wished to denigrate.
(5) Please note that the strategically repeated 1-P pronoun
is meant to iterate and emphasize that this reviewer is very much one too, a
SNOOT, plus to connote the nuclear family mentioned supra. SNOOTitude
runs in families. In ADMAU's Preface, Bryan Garner
mentions both his father and grandfather and actually uses the word genetic,
and it's probably true: 95 percent of the SNOOTs I
know have at least one parent who is, by profession or temperament or both, a
SNOOT. In my own case, my mom is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage
books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part of
the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years Mom brainwashed us in all sorts of
subtle ways. Here's an example. Family suppers often involved a game: If one of
us children made a usage error. Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that
would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error
and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still,
looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your child is actually
denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. But the really chilling thing is
that I now sometimes find myself playing this same "game" with my own
students, complete with pretend pertussion.
INTERPOLATION: As something I'm all but sure Harper's will
excise, I'll also insert that we even had a lighthearted but retrospectively
chilling little family song that Mom and we little SNOOTlets
would sing in the car on long trips while Dad silently rolled his eyes and
drove (you have to remember the title theme of Underdog in order to follow the
song):
When idiots in this world appear
And fail to be concise or clear
And solecisms rend the ear
The cry goes up both far and near
For Blunder Dog
Blunder Dog
Blunder Dog
Blunder Dog
[etc.](*)
(*) (Since
this'll almost surely get cut, I'll admit that, yes, I, as a kid, was the
actual author of this song, But by this time I'd been thoroughly brainwashed.
And just about the whole car sang along. It was sort of our family's version of
"100 Bottles ... Wall.")
(6) If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage,
think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of
Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry
wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic
in the field, from Erie Partridge's Usage and Abusage to Theodore Bernstein's
The Careful Writer to Wilson Follett's Modern American Usage to Gilman's '89
Webster's.
(7) (Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten.
I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all
other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at
20.(*) De gustibus non est disputandum.)
(*)
Editor's Note: The Harper's style manual prescribes spelling out all numbers up
to [nineteen] too.
(8) From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid
like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and
repeatedly Wedgied.
(9) What follow in the Preface are "... the ten
critical points that, after years of working on usage problems, I've settled
on." These points are too involved to treat separately, but a couple of
them are slippery in the extreme--e.g., "10. Actual Usage.
In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the over
arching criterion for correctness," of which both "educated" and
"actual" would require several pages of abstract clarification and
qualification to shore up against Usage Wars-related attacks, but which Garner
rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in his
dictionary itself.
(10) There's no better indication of The Dictionary's
authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this
day living down the outcome of a high-stakes bet on the correct spelling of
meringue, a wager made on
(11) Editor's Note: The Harper's style manual prescribes
okay.
(12) This is a clever half-truth. Linguists compose only
one part of the anti-judgment camp, and their objections to usage judgments
involve way more than just "subjectivity."
(13) In this last respect, recall for example W. J.
Clinton's famous "I feel your pain," which was a blatant if not
particularly masterful Ethical Appeal.
(14) Really, howled, blistering reviews and outraged
editorials from across the country--from the Times and The New Yorker and good
old Life, or q.v. this from the January '62 Atlantic: "We have seen a
novel dictionary formula improvised, in great part, out of snap judgments and
the sort of theoretical improvement that in practice impairs; and we have seen
the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to miscellaneous confusions
and corruptions. In fine, the anxiously awaited work that was to have crowned cisatlantic linguistic scholarship with a particular glory
turns out to be a scandal and a disaster."
(15) Note for example the mordant pith (and royal we) of
this random snippet from Partridge's Usage and Abusage:
"anxious of. 'I am not
hopeless of our future. But I am profoundly anxious of it', Beverley Nichols,
News of England, 1938: which made us profoundly anxious For
(or about)--not of--Mr Nichols's literary future."
Or see the near-Himalayan condescension of Fowler, here on
some other people's use of words to mean things the words don't really mean:
"slipshod extension ... is
especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the
uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or
have few relatives in the vernacular.... The original meaning of feasible is
simply doable (L facere do); but to the unlearned it
is a mere token, of which he has to infer the value from the contexts in which
he hears it used, because such relatives as it has in English--Feat, feature,
faction, &c.--either fail to show the obvious family likeness to which he
is accustomed among families of indigenous words, or are (like malfeasance)
outside his range."
(16) Utter bushwa: As ADMAU's body makes clear, Garner
knows exactly when the Descriptivists started
influencing language guides.
(17) (which in fact is true)
(18) (Q.v. "The Pharmakon"
in Derrida's La dissemination--but you'd probably be better off just trusting
me.)
(19) Standard Written English (SWE) is also sometimes
called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the inditement-emphasis
is the same.
SEMI-INTERPOLATION: Plus note that Garner's
Preface explicitly names ADMAU's intended audience as
"writers and editors." And even ads for the dictionary in such organs
as The New York Review of Books are built around the slogan "If you like
to WRITE ... Rear to us."(*)
(*) (Yr.
SNOOT rev. cannot help observing, w/r/t these ads, that the opening r in Refer
here should not be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipses--Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.)
(20) True, some sort of 100 percent compendious real-time
Mega-dictionary might be possible online, though it'd take a small army of
lexical webmasters and a much larger army of in situ actual-use reporters and
surveillance techs; plus it'd be GNP=level expensive.
(21) New Criticism refers to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards
and F. R. Leavis and
(22) ("EVIDENCE OF CANCER LINK REFUTED BY TOBACCO
INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS")
(23) This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated below, and although the
demonstration is extremely persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size
of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that again you'd
probably be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging
on with the main text.
INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO
SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE
It's sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a things as Private Language. Many of us are prone to
lay-philosophising about the weird privacy of our own
mental states, for example, and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I
can feel it, it's tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very
subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of
thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker's terror that his own inner
experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is techinically known as Cannabalic
Solipsism. Eating ChipsAhoy! and staring very
intently at the television's network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent potsmoker is struck by ghastly possibility that, e.g., what
he sees as the color green and what other people call "the color
green" may in fact not be the same color experiences at all. The fact that
both he and someone else call Pebble Beach's fairways green and a stoplight's
GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency
in their color experience of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual
subjective quality of those color experiences is the same; it could be that
what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences
as blue, and what we "mean" by the Word blue is what he
"means" by green, etc., etc., until the Whole line of thinking gets
so vexed and exhausting that the a.p.-s, ends up
slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.
The point here is that the idea of a Private Language, like
Private Colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this
particular reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and
demonstrably false.
In the case of Private Language, the delusion is usually
based on the belief that a word such as pain has the meaning it does because it
is somehow "connected" to a feeling in my knee. But as Mr. L.
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually
have the meanings they do because of certain males and verification tests that
are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community
in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein's
argument, which is admittedly very complex and gnomic and opaque, basically
centers on the fact that a word like pain means what it does for me because of
the way the community I'm part of has tacitly agreed to use pain.
If you're thinking that all this foetus
not only abstract but also pretty irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything
you have any real interest in at all, you are very much mistaken. If words'
meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus,
language is not only conceptually non-Private but also irreducibly public,
political, and ideological. This means that questions about our national
consensus on grammar and usage arc actually bound up with every last social
issue that millennial America's about--class, race, gender, morality,
tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: You name it.
(24) Norms, after all, are just practices people have
agreed on as optimal ways of doing things for certain purposes. They're not
laws, but they're not laissez-faire, either.
(25) In his Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates
Language (1994), Steven Pinker puts it this way: "No one, not even a
valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples the eat boy or The
child seems sleeping or Who did you meet John and? or
the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible
combinations of words."
(26) In the Case of Steve Pinker Jr., those people are the
boy's peer and teachers and crossing guards etc. In the case of adult
cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the Straight World and wear
pants to those jobs, it's coworkers and clients and people on the subway. For
the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and a tie to work, it's mostly
his boss, who himself doesn't want his employee's clothes to send clients
"the wrong message." But of course it's all basically the same thing.
(27) In fact, the only time one ever hears the issue made
explicit is in radio ads for tapes that promise to improve people's vocabulary.
These ads are extremely ominous and intimidating and always start out with
"DID YOU KNOW PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY THE WORDS YOU USE?"
(28) (... not to mention color, gender, creed-you can see
how fraught and charged all this is going to get)
(29) Discourse Community is an example of that rare kind of
academic jargon that's actually a valuable addition to SWE because it captures
something at once very complex and very specific that no other English term
quite can.(*)
(*) (The
above is an obvious attempt to preempt readerly
sneers/winces at the term's continued deployment in this article.)
(30) (Plus it's true that whether something gets called a
"subdialect" or "jargon" seems to
depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community. Garner
himself has miniessays on AIRLINESE, COMPUTERESE,
LEGALESE, and BUREAUCRATESE, and he more or less calls all of them jargon.
There is no ADMAU miniessay on DIALECTS, but there is
one On JARGON, in which such is Garner's
self-restraint that you can almost hear his tendons straining, as in "
[Jargon] arises from the urge to save time and space-and occasionally to
conceal meaning from the uninitiated.")
(31) (a redundancy that's a bit arbitrary, since
"Where's it from?" isn't redundant [mainly because whence has
vanished into semi-archaism])
(32) A synthetic language uses inflections to dictate
syntax, whereas an analytic language uses word order. Latin, German, and
Russian are synthetic; English and Chinese, analytic.
(33) (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smith's cortex-withering
De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus of 1568.)
(34) But note that he's sane about it. Some split
infinitives really are clunky and hard to parse, especially when there are a
whole bunch of words between to and the verb--"We will attempt to swiftly
and to the best of our ability respond to these charges"--which Garner
calls "wide splits" and sensibly discourages. His overall verdict on s.i.'s--which is that some are "perfectly proper"
and some iffy and some just totally bad news, and that no one wide tidy
dogmatic ukase can handle all s.i. cases, and thus
that "knowing when to split an infinitive requires a good ear and a keen
eye"--is is a good example of the way Garner
distinguishes sound and helpful Descriptivist objections from wacko or dogmatic
objections and then incorporates the sound objections into a smarter and more
flexible Prescriptivism.
(35) The SNOOTlet is, as it
happens, an indispensable part of other kids' playground education. The kids
are learning that a Group's identity depends as much
on exclusion as inclusion. They are, in other words, starting to learn about Us and Them, and about how an Us always needs a Them because
being not-Them is essential to being Us. Because they're kids and it's school, the obvious Them is the teachers and all the
values and appurtenances of the teacher world. This teacher-Them helps the kids
see how to start to be an Us, but the SNOOTlet
completes the puzzle by providing the as it were missing link: He is the
Traitor, the Us who is in fact not Us but Them.
In sum, the SNOOTier is teaching
his peers that the criteria for membership in Us are not just age, station, inability
to stay up past 9:00, etc.--that in fact Us is primarily a state of mind and a
set of sensibilities. An ideology.
(36) (The skirt-in-school scenario was not personal stuff,
FYI.)
(37) There are still Some of these
teachers around, at least here in the
(38) (Or require us openly to acknowledge and talk about
elitism, whereas a dogmatic SNOOT's pedagogy is merely
elitism in action.)
(39) (I'm not a total idiot.)
(40) E.g., this is the reasoning behind many Pop Prescriptivists' complaint that shoddy usage signifies the
Decline of Western Civilization.
(41) A Dictionary of Modern American Usage includes a miniessay on VOGUE WORDS, but it's a disappointing one in
that Garner does little more than list VW's that bug
him and say that "vogue words have such a grip on the popular mind that
they come to be used in contexts in which they serve little purpose." This
is one of the rare places in ADMAU where Garner is simply wrong, The real problem is that every sentence blends and balances
at least two different communicative functions--one the transmission of raw
info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker--and Vogue
Usage throws this balance off. Garher's "serve
little purpose" is exactly incorrect; vogue words serve too much the
purpose of presenting the speaker in a certain light (even if this is merely as
with-it or hip), and people's subliminal B.S.-antennae pick this imbalance up,
and that's why even nonSNOOTs often find Vogue Usage
irritating and creepy.
(42) FYI, this passage, which appears in ADMAU's entry on OBSCURITY, is quoted from a 1997
Sacramento Bee article entitled "No Contest: English Professors Are Worst
Writers on Campus."
(43) This was in his 1946 "Politics and the English
Language," an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic
redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese.
Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous "I saw under the sun that
the race is not to the swift" in Ecclesiastes as "Objective
considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or
failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with
innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must
invariably be taken into account" should be tattooed on the left wrist of
every grad student in the anglophone world.
(44) Please just don't even say it.
(45) (She professed to have been especially traumatized by
the climactic "I am going to make you," which in retrospect was
indeed a mammoth rhetorical boner.)
(46) (The Dept. head end Dean did not, as it happens, share
her reaction ... though it would be disingenuous not to tell you that they
happened also to be PWM's, which fact did not go unremarked by the complainant, such that the whole
proceeding got pretty darn tense, indeed, before it was all over.)
(47) To be honest, I noticed this omission only because
midway through working on this article I happened to use the word trough in
front of the same SNOOT friend who Likes to compare public English to
violin-hammering, and he fell sideways out of his chair, and it emerged that I
have somehow all my life misheard trough as ending with a th
instead of an fend thus have publicly mispronounced it God knows how many
scores of times, and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether
perhaps the error was so common and human and understandable that Garner
himself had a good-natured entry on it, but no such luck which in fairness I
don't suppose I can really blame Garner for.
(48) (on zwieback vs. zweiback)
(49) (meaning literally Democratictic--it
Wants Your Vote)
(50) The last two words of this sentence, of course, are
what the Usage Wars are about--whose "language" and whose
"well"? The most remarkable thing about this sentence is that coming
from Garner it doesn't sound naive or obnoxious but just ... reasonable.
(51) Did you think I was kidding?
(52) (Here this reviewer's indwelling and ever-vigilant
SNOOT can't help but question why Garner uses a comma before the conjunction in
this sentence, since what follows the conjunction is neither an independent
clause nor any kind of plausible complement for strive to. But respectful
disagreement between people of goodwill is of course Democratically
natural and healthy and, when you come right down to it, kind of fun.)
David Foster Wallace is a contributing editor to Harper's
Magazine and the author of the novel Infinite Jest and other works. His most
recent piece for this magazine, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,"
appeared in the October 1998 issue.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 2001 Harper's Magazine Foundation
in
association with The Gale Group and LookSmart.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------