English

R()BIN F()X: THE HUMAN RIC;HT::-- CHARADE

HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ APRIL 2001

TENSE PRESENT Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage

By David Foster Wallace -----------+ -----------

STAR OF JUSTICE On the Job with America's Toughest Sheriff

By Barry Graham

OUT OF PRINT The Future of Publishing, Seen from the Inside

By Michael Korda

CURLY RED 04>~ Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates

~ •••

i Plus: Cristina Nehring and Robert Vivian f:t •••'"------+ -----------

F o L o

"Save up to 50%,-and More!" Betwe~n youand 1. On accident. Somewhat of a. Kustom Kar Kare Autowash. "The cause was due to numerous factors." "Orange Crush-A Taste That's All It's Own, ". ''Vigorex, Helping men conquer sexual issues." "Equal numbers of both men and women oppose the amend- ment." Feedback .. "As drinking water becomes more and more in short supply." "IMATION-Borne of 3M Innovation." Point in time. Time Frame. "At this. point il)-time: the individual in question was observed, and subsequently apprehended by author-ities." Here for you, there for you. Fail to compJy with for violate. Comprised of. From whence. Quote for quotation. Nauseous for nameated. Besides the point. To mentor, to parent. To partner. To critique. Indicated for !aid. Para- meters for limits and options for choices and viable optionHor optiOns and workable solution for solution. In point of fact. Prior to this time. As of this point in the time frame. Serves to. Tends'to be. Convince for persuade. Append for aHach, portion for pari. Commence, cease. Expedite. Request for ask. Ev,nfuate for happen. Subsequent to this time. Productive. Facilitate. Aid in. Utilize. Detrimental. Equates with. In rega~ds '1J~ ~ 4#td, '1 to. Tragic, tragedy. Grow as transitive. Keep for s1cry. "To demonstrate the power of Epson' s new Stylus Color Inkjet Print- . . . er with 1440 d.p.i., just listen," Could care less. Issues, core issues. Fellow colleagues. ' Goal-orientated. Resources. Unproductive. Feelings. Share for speak, Nurture, empower: recover. Valid for true. Authentic. lTodu~tive, unproductive. "1 choose to view my opponent's negative ;tta~ks as unproductive to the real issues fa<;ing the citizens of this campaign." Incumbent upon. Mandate. Plurality. Peranum. Conjunctive adverbs in general. Instantaneous. Qua1i!J' as adj. Proac-

tive. ProactiveMissio';'-Statement. Positive feedback. A positive role-model. Compensation. Validation. As for example. True facts are often impactful. "Callnow for your free gift!" I only wish. 'Not too good of a. Pay the consequences of. At this juncture. "Third- leading cause of death of both American men and women." To reference. To process. Process. The process of. The healing process. The grieving process. "Processing of feelings is a major component of the grieving process." Commensurant. "Till the stars fall from the sky/For-you and I." Workin;together. Efficacious, effectual. Lifestyle. This pheno~ena, these criter-ion, Irregardless. Iffor" whether.

- "Both sides are working together to achieve a workable consensus." Functional, dysfunctional. Family of origin. S.O. To nest. Rela- -, uonship. Merg~ together. KEEP IN IANE. Whomever wants it. "My wife and myself wish to express our gratitude and thanks to you for

being here 'to support us at this difficult time in our life." Eventuate. Diversity. Quality time. Values, family values. To conference. "French provincial twin bed with canape and box spring, $iSO." Take a wait-and-see attitude. Cum-N-Go Quik Mart. Travelodge. Self-

lADY'S ROOM confessed. Precise estimate. ' . . ' "Travel-times .on the ex-

pressways are reflective of its still being bad out there." Budgetel. EZPAY.RENT20WN. MENS' ROOM.'LADY'S ROOM. Individual for person. Whom for who, that for who. "The accident equated to a lot of damage." Ipse dixie. Falderol. "Waiting on' is a dialectical locution on the rise and splitting its meaning. "'Staunch the flow. A.M. in the morning. Forie as "forte." Advisement. Most especially. Sum total. Fi':'al totals. Complete d~arth. "You can donate your used car or truck in any con- dition." "DiBlasi's work shows how sex can bring people together and pull them apart. " "Come in and take advantage of our knowledgeable staff." 'We get the job done, not make excuses." "Chances of rain are prevalent." National Highway Traffic Safety Ad- ministration Rule and Regulation~endment Tas'Je Force. Furiher for fariher. "The Fred Pryor-Seminar has opened my eyes to better time management tech- niques. Also it has given real life situations and how to-deal with them effectively." Hands-on, can-do. "Each of the variants indicated in boldface type count as an entry." Visualjzation. "Insert and tighten metric calibrated hexscrews (K) into arc (C) comprised of intersecting vertical pieces W along transverse sec- tion of Structure. (see Diagram for #(3-4inv.)" Creative, creativity. To message, to send a message, to bring our message to. To read, out-to. Context. StraightJ:>ced.

'A factor, a decisive factor. Myriad"pf decisive factors: "It is a federal requirement to comply with all safety regulations on this "flight." In this context, of this context. On a --ly basis. From the standpoint of. Oontestualieation. Within the parameters of this context. Decontextualiaarion. Defamiliarize. Orientated. "The artist's employment of a radi~al,visual idiom serves to decontextualize both conventio~al modes of representation-and the patriarchal contexts on which such traditional hegemonic notions as representation, tradition, and even conventional contextualization have come to b~ seen as depending for their privi- leged status as aestheto-interpretive mechanism~." I don't feel well and hope I recoup. "As parents, the responsibilitY oftallcing to your kids about drugs is up to you." Who would of thought? Last and final call. As to. Achieve. Achievement. Competitive. Challenge, challenged, challenges. Excellence ..-Pursuit of a' standard of total excellence .. An astute observance. Misrepresent for lie. A longstanding tradition of achievement in the arena of excellence. "All copier stores are not the same." Visible to the eye. Which for thai, !.for me. That which. In regards to. Dctcas singular, media as singular, graffiti as Singular. Remain for s1llJ1. On-task. Escalate as.transitive. Closure. Community. "Iran must realize that it cannot flaunt with impunity the expressed will and law of the world community." Com-

munity support. Community-based. Broad appeal. Rally support. Outpourings of support. "Tried to lay the cause' at the feetNot too good of a of Congress. " Epidemic proportions. Proportionate response. Feasibility. "This anguishing national ordeal." Bipartisan, non- . . partisan. Widespread outbreaks. To appeal to. To impact. Author's Foreward. Hew and cry. From 'this aspect. Hayday. Appro-

priate, inappropriate. Contingency. Contingent upon. Every possible contingency. Audible to the ear. As for since. Palpably. "The enormity of his accomplishment." Frigid temperatures. Loud volume. Surrounded on allsides; my workable options are at this time few in number. Chaise lounge, nucular, deep-seeded, beCl- roo~ suit, reek havoc. Her ten-year rein atop the competition. The reason is because she still continues to hue to the basic fundamentals. Ouster. Lucrative salaries, expensive prices. Forbear for forebear;forgo for forego. Breech of conduct. Award for meretricious service. Substantiate, unsubstantiated, substantial. Re- elected to another term. Fulsome praise. Service. Public service. "A traditiqn of servicing your needs." A commitment to accountability in a lifetime of pub- Iic service. As best as we can. WAVEALLINTERESTFOR 90 DAYS"But I also want to have-be the president that protects the ;ights of, of people to, to have arms. And that-so you don't go so far.that the legitimate ·rights on some legislation are, are"you know, impingedon." "Dr. Charles Frieses'." Conflict. Conflict-. resolution. The mut~al advantage of both sides in this widespread conflict. "Wewill make a deterrnirration in terms of an appropriate response." Future plans. Don't go therei'PLEASE WAITHERE UNTIL NEXT AVAILABLECLERK. I thought tomyself Fellow countrymen. "Your efforts to recover f~om the experience of growing up in an 'alcoholic family may be very difficult and threatening for your family to hear about and accept, especially if they are still in the midst of their own-survival." Misappropn"ate for,steal. Nortorious. I'll be there momentarily. At some later-point in time. I'm: not adverse to that. "Hello-o ?" Have a good one. Luv Ya. ,), " . \

TensePreserit pemocrary, English, and the

*zrs over Usage . l' .

BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Davw. Foster Wallace is a contributing editor to Harper's'Magazine'rmd the author of the novel Infinite Jest and other works. His most recent piece foithis magazine, "Brief Inte!vlews with Hideous Men," appeared in the October 1998 issue.

FOLIO·39

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Precise estimate

DiscUssed in this essay: A Dictiorlary of Modem American Usage, by Bryan A,

Garner, Oxford University Press, 1998. 723 pages. $35. .

A Dictionary of Modem English Usage, by H. W. Fowler. Oxford University Press, J 926. Rev, by Sir Ernest Gowers, 1965,725 pages.

The Lariguage 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-WebsterInc., 1989.978 pages.

Usage and Abusage: A Guide' to Good English, by Eric Partridge. Hamish Hamilton; 1957.392 pages.

1 .".

. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the Eng- . lish Laniuage, Philip Gave, ed. G. & C. Merriam Company, 1961. 2,662 pages.

Dilige et quod vis fac. -ST. AUGUSTINE

D ·id you know that probing the seamy,.

. underbeLly of U.S. lexicography . reveals ideological strife and centro- . , versy and intrigue and nastiness and

fervor on a nearly hanging-chad kale? For.' instance, did you knowthat some modem dic- tionaries are notoriously liberal and others noto-, riouslv conservative, and that certain conserva- tive dictionaries were actually conceived' and designed as corrective responses to the "corrup- . tion"and "permissiveness" of cer- tain .liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a spe- cial "Distinguished Usage Panel, . , of outstand- ing professional speakers' and writers" is an attempted, compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism!

Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a.seamy underbelly? .

T'he occasion fOT this arti~le is. . Oxford University Press's semi-recent release of Bryan A. Gamer's'A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. The fact of the matter is that Gamer'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.' 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 dis- tinctive 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 in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a ver- itable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics to public education to political ideology, and these con- troversies 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 estab- lish and define the highly colloquial term SNOOT .

. Fromoneperspective, a certain irony attends the publication of imy good' new book on

. American usage. It is-that thepeople 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 thatsmall 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

I Sunday. The sortsof people who feel that spe- cial blend of wincing despair and sneering supe- riority when they see EXPRESS LANE-lO 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

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~omprehenaiTe and good, bout ita emphasis is on British usage.)

"j

! With the 'advent of online data-

bases, Garner has access t~. far more examples of actual usage' than did Gilman, and he deJlloys them to great effect. (FYI, Ox- ford's 1996 N.,., Fowler'. Mod.rn EDKli.b U•• ,. is alao extremely

\I Sorry about this phrase; I hate' this phrase, too. ThishappenBto be one of those very rare times

. wben "historical context" is the p~rase to use and there.~8 no

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001 ./

equivalent phra.e that isn't even "orse. (I actually tried "Iesico- temporal backdrop" in one of the middle draft., which I think y~u'll'agree is not pref~rable.) ,

the fact that this rmewer almost always • ...,ers and! or winces "hen he sees "hi.to~ical context" de- ployed in a piece <ifwriting and thus hope. to head off any po- tential sneers/winces from the reader here, especially in an ae- tide'about felicitous usage.

INTERPOLATION

The above II i. moti .•.••ted by

of suppurate. There are l~ts of epithets for peo- ple like this-Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with isSNooT.3 The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms, A SNOOTcan be defined as

. somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it.

I submit that we SNOOTsare 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, car- buncular, 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 YGlUrscreen is both elitist and situa- tionally valid). But the 'SNOOT's purview is interhuinan 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' dan- 'gling, 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.t We com- bine 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.sup- posedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT'scheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOTI know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We5 are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else: '

THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE

Issuesof tradition vs. egalitarianism in';' U.S. English are at root political issuesand can be effectively addressed only inwhat this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., pas- sionate conviction plus sedulous' respect for

~-------"";""'"---------------------------------------- INTERPOLATION3 SNOOT(n) (lUglUy colloq) is this

reviewer's nuclear family's nick- name il deffor a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to· loole for mistalces in Safi~'s col- umn's prose itself. This review- er's family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT,which term itself derives frot!' an acronym, with the big historical family joice being that whether S.N.O.O,T. st.ooel for "Spr;dJge£iiJJl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance" or "Syntax Nudnih of Our Time" depend- ed on whether or not you weJ:e one.

•. This is true in my own case at any rate-plus also the "uncom- fortable" part. I teach college English part-time-mostly Lit, n';t Compo But I am also so patho- logically anal aboutO usage that every semester the same thing

, happens: The minute I have read my students' first set of papers, we immediately abandon the reg- ular Lit syllabus and hlIve a three- weele EmergenCY Remedial Usage Unit, duringwbich my demeanor,

is basically that of somebody teach-

ing HIV prevention to intra- ve:nous-drug. users. When it ell1erges (as it does, every time) that 93 percent of these intelli- gent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced on- ly can male a sentence c.onfus- ing, I all but pound lI1yhead on the blackbo"rd., I exhort them to sue their hometown school boards. The lcids end up scared, both of me and for me,

, -Editor's N_, Author insisuJ tlU.. phrase repl~ce tfobsessed witb" and tool umbrage al tlte sugges- tion ~1tlU.. c:ltangr dearly demon-

strated tlte "eryquality be wished to denigrate.

5 Please note that the strategi- cally 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 Femifies. In ADMAU's Preface, Bryan Gar- ner mentions both his father and

grandfather and actually uses the word genetic, and it' s p~obably true: 95 p~rcent of the SNOOTsI Icnowha~e at least oile 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 boob and is a SNOOTof the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part ' of the reason I am a SNOOTis that for yean Mom brainwashed us in all sorts of subtle ways. Here's an example. Family suppers often involved a game: If one ofus ehil- dre;n made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and .on un-. til the relevant child had identi- fied the relevant error and cor- rected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted, but still, loole- ing back, it seems a bit- excessive to pretend that your child is ac-

tually denying you oxyge:n by spealcing incorrectly. But the really chilling thing is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same ffgame" with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.

As something I'm all but sure Harper', will aci~, I'll also in- sert that we even had a lighthearted but retrospectively chilling little family .opgthat Mom and we lit- tle SNOOTlets would sing in the car on long trips while I>Ildsilent- ly rolled hi. eyes and drove (you have to rememher the title theme ot Uududo&,in order to follow the song):

w:Lenidjou in t1J.i. world appear And f.il to be cone. or clear

And .ole~isnM rend tile ear

The c'1 go•• up .otla far ond n •••r For Blunder Dol , Blunder D"I

Blunder Dol BlunduDo,

[etc.] °

°(Since this'll almost .....ely get cut, I'll admit that, yes, I, as a lcid,'wa 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. o' Wall.") ,

FOLIO 41

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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-e-you have to be willing to look hon- estly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less . , continually. , ' , This kind of stuff is advanced u.s. citizen- ship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all

. those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives work- ing on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irre-

. sistibly tempting to fall in with some estab- lished dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position hard:

, en within the camp and become inflexible and ..-. ;,," to believe that any other camp

~,.-: ",;' .•ft" , , GOdL-ol'ifmt«ted is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy

trying to shout over them.' . 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 sur- ,rounding' "correctness" in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they in:volve are ones whose answers have to be "worked out" instead of simply found.

A distinctive feature of ADMAU is that its au- thor is willing to acknowledge that a usage dic- tionary is not a bible or even a textbook but rather just the record of one smart person's attempts to work out answersto certain very difficultquestions. This willingness appears to me to be informed by a DemocraticSpirit. The big question is whether such a spirit compromises Garner's ability to pre- sent himself as a genuine "authority" on issues of usage. Assessing Garner's book, then, involves

, trying to trace out the very weird and complicat- ed relationship between Authority and Democracy in "hat we as a culture have decided is English. That relationship is, as many educated Ameri- cans would say, still in process ~t this time.

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A'"Dictionary' of Modem American Usagehas no Editorial Staff or Distinguished, Panel. It's conceived, researched, andwritten 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 Modem Legal Usage is already a minor classic; now, instead of practicing law anymore, he goes around con- ducting writing seminars for ].D.'sand doing prose-consulting for various judicial bodies . Gamer'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 periodi- cals. You get the idea. This Gamer is one seri- ous and very hard-core SNOOT. V

The lucid, engaging, and extremely sneaky Preface to ADMAU serves to confirm Gamer's snoortrude 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 hirnself-e-Gamer gives us an almost Waltonishly endearing sketch of' his own background:

I realized early-at the age of 157-that my pri- mary 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' ' New Mexico atthe age of 16, I discovered Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage. I was enthralled. Never had I,held a more 'exciting book .... Suffice it to ~ay that by the time I was 18, I had commit' ted to memory most of Fowler, Partridge, and their successors. '...

Although this reviewer regrets the bio- sketch's failure to mention the rather significant social costs of being an adolescent whose over- riding passion is English usage,8 the critical hat is off to yet another personable section of the Preface, one that' Garner entitles "F[fst Principles": "Before going .any further, I should

, explain my approach. That's an unusual thing for the author ofa usage dictionary to do- unprecedented, as far as lknow, But ~ guide to

subsequent classic in the fi~ld, from Eric Partridge's U..,e and Abwageto Theodore Bei-nJtein's Tile Careful Writer to Wilson Follett's Modern American ,UoagetoGilman'. '89 Webster's.

",

6 HSamueIJohnson is the Shab- apure ofE~lUh usagoo,think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dic-

,tionar, of Modern EnKlisil Uoageis th&grl\nddaddyof mod- ern usa~ guides, and ita dust- cbywitand bluahleas impmoua- nelS ha..., been modeu for every

taught that this rule applies j!Ut to Buainea Writing and that in aU other mode. you spell out one through nineteen' and.start uaiDg~at 20.· Degwtibu.s non eat rlisputllndum.>

•Editor'sNo~: The Harper's at,rle manWlI prucribes spelliJJKout an numbers up to 100.

7 (Garner preacri1>easpelling 0:" only n,umben under ten. I was

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001 , J-

.to'. ~

8 From per.onal experience, I can'lISIIUreyouthat anylid like this is goingto be at beatmarginalized and at worataavagelyand repeat- edlyWedgied.

Could care less

good writing is only as good as the principles Ion Kent State to Independent Counsels have pro- which it's based. And users should be naturally duced an influential contra-SNOOT school for interested in those principles. So, in the inter- whom normative standards of English grammar ests of full disclosure ... "9' and usage are functions of nothing butcustom and , The "~nprecedented"and "full disclosure" superstition and the ovine docility of a populace

here are actually good-natured digs at Gamer's that lets self-appointed language authorities boss Fowlerite predecessors, and a subtle nod to one them around. See for example MIT's Steven camp in the wars that have raged in both lexi- Pinker in.a famous New Republic article-e/'Once cography and education ever since thenotori- introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to ouslv liberal Webster's Third New International eradicate, no matterhow ridiculous. Inside the Dictionary came out in 1961 and included such Writing establishment, the rules survive by the terms as heighth and irregardless without r7. same dynamic that perpetuates ritual gen- any monitory labels on them. You CCin cLPaU 'ital rnutilations-c-or, at a somewhat low- think of Webster's Third as sort of the, ,1'1 ~ er pitch, Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue: Eng- Fort Sumter of the' contemporary Usage Wars. lish and How It Got That Way: These Wars are both the context and the target of a very subtle rhetorical strategy in A ~Dictio- nary of Modern Am~rican Usage, and without talking about them it's impossible to explain why Gamer's book is both so good and so sneaky.

We regular citizens tend to go to The Dic- tionary for authoritative guidance.'? Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who decides what gets in The Dictionary or what wordsor spellings or pronunciations get deemed "sub- standard'tor "incorrect." Whence the authori- , ty of dictionary-makers to decide what's OKIl and what isn't? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradi- tion won'twork, because what's considered cor- rect changes over time. In the 1600s, for in- stance, the second-singular pronoun took a singular conjugation-"Ydu is." Eadier 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 egre- gious slang. And riot 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. America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters oflanguage. In brief, the same sorts of po- litical upheavals thai: produced everything from

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Who sets down all those rules that we all know about from childhood-the idea that we must never end a seiJ.ten~ewith 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,surprisinglyoften, is that no one does,that when you look into the background of these "rules"there is often Iirtle basisfor them.

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" In ADMAU's Preface, Gamer himself

addresses the Authority Question with a Trumanesque simplicity and candor that simul- taneously disguise the author's cunning and' exemplify it:

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" '0·.As you might already suspect, I don't shy away frommakingjudgments.I can't imaginethat most readersw~uldwant me to. Linguistsdon't like it,

" of ,course, because judgment involves sub- jectivity.l? It isn't scientific. But rhetoric and usage, in the view of most professionalwriters, aren't scientificendeavors.Youdon't want dispas- sionate descriptions; you want sound guidance. And that requiresjudgment.

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masterful. rhetoric of this passage. Note for ex- .ample 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 Au- thority Crisis in modem usage; and his response to this crisis is-in the best Democratic'Spitit- rhetorical.' .

So ...

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......;....•...;,t-: '. . . '.9 What follow in the Preface are". , . the ten critical points that, af-

teryears of working on uoage prob- lems, I'~ settled on. " Tbese points are too involved to treat sepa- rately, but a couple of them are slippery in the extreme-e.g., . "roo Aetual Uoage. In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the" over-

arching criterion· fo~ correct- ness," of which both "educated" and "actual" would re'luire sev- eral pages of abstract darifica- tion and qualification to shore

. up, against Usage Wars-related attach, but which Garner rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in. his dictionary itself.

10 There's;'o better indication of The Dictionary's authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this day liv- ing down the outcome of a high- stakes bet on the correct spelling of meringue, a wager made on 14 September 1978,

II Editor's Note: The Harper's style manual pnacribe& okay. '

•... [2 This is a dever half-truth. Linguists !,ompose only one part of the anti-judgment camp, and their objections to usage judg- ments involve waymore than just "subjectivity, "

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COROLLARY TO THESIS STATI::MENT

FOR WHOLE ARTICLE

The most salient and timely feature ofGamer's book is that it's both lexi-. cographical and rhetoricaL Its mainstrategy 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 Ameri- can of rhetorical Appeals, because it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intel- lectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience's own hopes and fears.I3

These are not qualities one associates with the traditional SNOOT usage-authority, a ngure' who pretty much instantiates snobbishness

. and bow-tied anality; and one whose modem image is not improved by stuff like American Heritage Dictionary Distinguished Usage Panelist Morris Bishop's "The arrant sole- cisms of the ignoramus are here often omitted entirely; 'irregardless' of how he may feel about this ~eglect" or critic John Simon's "The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled their merchandise ... ," Compare those lines'. autho- rial personas with Garner's in, e.g., "English .usage is so challenging that even experienced

I ". .

writers need guidance now and then," The thrust here is 'going to be that A

Dictionary of Modern American Usage earns Gamer pretty much all the trust his Ethical Appeal asks us.for, The book's "feel-good'; spir- 'it (in the very best sense of "feel-good") marries rigor and humility in such a way as to allow Gamer to be exrremely prescriptive without any appearance, of evangelism or elitist put- down. This is an extraordinary accomplish- ment. Understanding why it's basically a rhetor- ical accomplishment, and why this is hoth his- torically significant and (in this reviewer's opin- ion) politically redemptive, requires a more detailed look at the Usage Wars .

Y ou'd sure know lexicography had

. an underbelly if you read the little . introductory essays in modern die-

tionaries-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 (act 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 Dic- tionary just to see how to spell (for instance) meringue. They're written for other lexicogra- - phers and critics, and in fact they're not real- ly introductory at all but polemical. They're salvos in the Usage .Wars that have been" under way evet since editor Philip Gave first sought to apply the value-neutral principles .of structural linguistics to lexicography in Webster's' Third. Gave's famous response to conservatives who howledt- when Webster's

Third endorsed OK and de- scribed ain't as "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers [sic}" was

this: "A dictionary should have no. traffic with ... 'artificial notion~ of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive." These terms stuck and turned

. epithetic, and linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.

The former are far better known, When you read the columns of William Safire 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 jour- nalists (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 Satire and Newman and the best of the Pre- scriptivists is often modeled after' the man- darin- Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same 'Twin Towers of scholarly

'. -c.

13 In thU last respect, recall for eumple W. J. Clinton's famous "I feel your pain," which was a blatant if not particuIarly lDlIIle1ful Ethical Appeal.

. 14 ReaDy, .howled: blistering...," viewsand outraged editorials from acroos the cll1Jl1try-from the Times and T.he New Yorker and good old Life, or q.v. this from the January '6~ Atlantic: "We have

'seen a novel ~ictionary formula improvise~t in great-part, out of snap judgments and the sort of theoretical improvement .that in' prac:ti£e impairs: and· wehave seen the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to mis-

·cellaneous confusions and cor- ruptions. In fine, the amdously awaited work that was to have crowned dsadantic linguistic scholarship with a particular glo-

ry turns out. to be a scandal and a disaster."

44 HARPER'S MAGAZI E I APRIL ZOOI

-,

Prescriptivism whom Gamer talks about rever- ing as akid.15

Descriptivists, on the oth~r hand, d~n'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 intellec- tual roots in the work of Auguste Comte and Ferdinand de Saussure and their ideological roots firmly in the U.S. sixties. The brief explicit men- tion Gamer's Preface gives this crew-

Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictio- naries got hijacked by the descriptive linguists,16who observe language scientifically. For the pure de- scriptivist, 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 use- ful 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, be- cause it vastly underplays the Descriptivists' in- fluence on U.S. culture. For one thing, Descrip- tivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively-via "freewriting," "brainstorming," "journaling," a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language. in which today's socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is inforined by the De- scriptivist belief that traditional English is con- ceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males'? and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic,' homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonies. Think of the involved contortions

, '

· .

people undergo to avoid he as a generic pronoun, or of the tense deliberate way white males now ad- just their vocabularies around non-w.m.s. Think of today's endless battles over just the names of things-"Affirmative Action" vs. "Reverse Dis- crimination," "Pro-Life" vs, "Pro-Choice," "Un- dercount" vs. "Vote Fraud," etc.

The Descriptivist revolution takes a little time to unpack, but it's worth it. The structural lin- guists' rejection of conventional usage rules de- pends on two main arguments. The first is acad- emic and methodological. In this age of technology, Descriptivists contend, it's the Sci-

I entific Method-s-clinically objective, value- neutral, based on direct observation and demon- strable hypothesis-that should determine both the content of dictionaries and the standards of "correct" English. Because language is constant- ly evolving, such standards will always be fluid. Gove's now classic introduction to Webster's Third outlines this type of Descriptivism's five basic edicts: "I-Language changes constantly; 2-Change is normal; 3-Spoken language is the language; 4-Correcmess rests upon usage; 5-All usage is relative."

. These principles look prima facie OK--com- monsensical 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.:

I-OK, but how much and how fast? '

2-Same thing. Is Heraclitean flux as normal or desirable as grad- ual 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 lan- guage has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent?

3- This is an old claim, at least as old as Pla- to's Phaedrus. And it's specious. If Derrida and the infamous Deconsttuctionists have done noth- ing else, they've debunked the idea that speech is language's primary instantiation.tf Plus consider

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16 Utter bush"a: As ADMAUs body makea clear, Garner kno"s eDctly "hen the Descriptiviats started influendng language guidea.

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, descension of Fowler, here on some other people'. use of "ords , to mean things the )"orcia don't really mean:

.up.hotl ateDaioll ... ia es- pecially likely to occur when aome accident gives currency among the uneducated to words ofleamed origin, &:the more if they are isolated or have.f_ relatives in the vernacu- lar .... The original meaning

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15 Note for example the mordant pith (and royal ••••) of this random snippet from Partridge'. Uaage andAb~:

tlDZi••••• of. 'I am not hope- less of our future, But 1am profoundly anDOUSof it' , Bev-: erley NichoL., N •••••of Eng- land, 1938: "hieh made us profoundly anxious for (or about)-not ol=-Mr Nieh"Is'a literary future.

oUe~ible is simply doable (L faceredo); hutto the unlearned it is a mere token, of whieh he has to infer the value from the contexts in "hieh he heart it used, because such relatives

. as it has in EngIW.-feat, fea- ture, faction, &:c.-either fail· to sh_ the obvious family like- ness to "hich he is accustomed among families of indigenous "orda, or are (like malfea- sance) outside his range.

IS (Q:v. "The Pharmakon" in Derrida's La rlissiminatio.-but yo~' d probably be better off just trusting me.)

17 ("hich. in fact is true)

FOLIO 45

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the weird arrogance of Goves (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 rev'ersal. of the traditional entailment-relation between abstract rules and concrete usage:' Instead of usage ideally corre- spon-ding to a rigid set of regulations, the regu- lations ought to correspond to the way real peo- ple are actually using the language. Again, 'fine, but which people? Urban Latinos? Boston Brahmins? Rural Midwesterners? Appalachian I

" . • '. . Neogaelics? French provmClal . 5-Huh? If this means what

. twin bed with canape it see.~s to mea~, then it ends . • " up biting Gove s whole argu-

andbu spring, $150. ment 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 obvi- ous 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.s? 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 neu-

rologically predisposed CO 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 linguis- tic act by every native/naturalized speaker of English and. put the sum of all these acts between two coven and call it The Dic- tionary-involves an incredibly simplistic and outdated understanding of what scientific means. It requires a naive belief in scientific objectivi-

intended audience as "writers and editors.· And even ads for the dictionary in such organa as The New York Revie••.of Booh are built around ~e slogan"If you like to WRITE ... Refer to •. ".

tv, 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 isanalytically inseparable' from' it.

If you remember your old college English class- es, there's an analogy here that points up the trouble scholars get into when they confuse ob- servation with interpretation. Recall the New Ctitics.F! They believed that literary criticism was best conceived as a "scientific" endeavor: The critic was a neutral, careful, unbiased, high- ly trained observer whose job was to find and ob- jectively describe meanings that were right

.there-literally inside-pieces of literature. ,Whetheryou 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 has dimmed. The New Critics had

. the same basic problem as Gove's Methodologi- cal Descriptivists: They believed that' scientific meant the same thing as neutral or unbiased. And that linguistic meanings could exist "objective- ly," separate from any interpretive act.

'The point of the analogy is that claims to ob- jectivity in language study are now the stuff of. jokes and shudders. The epistemological assump- tions that underlie Methodological Descriptivism have been thoroughly debunked and displaced-- in Lit by the rise of post-structuralism, Reader-Re- sponse Criticism, and [aussian Reception Theo- ry; in linguistics by the rise of Pragrnatics-s-and it's now prettymuch universally accepted that (a)' meaning is inseparable from some act of inter- pretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed l>ythe 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 Descrip- tivists are wrong in thinking that the Scientific Method is appropriate to the study of language:

reporters and lIUl'Yf!illaneetecha; plua it'd be GNP-level espe...m.

be capitalized after a dependent clanle + e.1lipses-Quando'lue boous dormitat HomeZWl.)

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19 StandardWrittenEnglish(SWE) il also I.metim •• called Stan- dard Engliah (SE) or Edncated English, but the inditement-, einphaais is the same.

SEMI -INTERPOLA'nON

~O True,some Sort oflOOpercent compendious real-time Mega- dictionary might be pO_Die on- line, though it'd takea small army oflencal ••.ebma.stersanli a much larger army o( in situ ac:tual-uae

21 New Critici8lJl refers. to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards and F•.R. Leaviaand Cleanth Brooks and Wimsatt lit Beardaleyand the ••.hole "close readiDg" school that dominated literary critic:iamfrom WWIwell into the seventies. .

Plua note that Garner'a pref- ~ce e"Plicitly names ADMAUs

·(Yr. SNOOT rev. cannot help ob- serving, ••./r/t these ads, that the 0P,"Iling r in Ilder here should not

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001

Even if, as a thought experiment, we assume a kind of nineteenth-century scientific realism-in which; even though some scientists' interpreta- tions of natural phenomena might be biased,~~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 human and fundamentally normative. To understand this, you have only to accept the proposition that language is by its very nature public-s-i.e., that there can be no such thing as a Private Languagess-c-and then to ob- serve the way Methodological Descriptivists seem either ignorant of this fact or oblivious to its con- sequences.as in for example one Charles Fries's introduction to -an epigone of Webster's Third called The American College Dictionary:

A dictionarycan be an "authority"only in the sense in which a book of chemistry or of physics or of botanycan be an "authoriry"-by the accuracyand the completenessof its record of the observedfacts'

/ of the fieldexamined,in accordwith the latestprin- ciples and techniques of the particular science.

This is so stupid it practically drools. An "au- thoritative" physics text presents the results of physicists' observations and physicists' theories about those observations. If a physics textbook op- erated 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 lan- guage. Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not; finally, scientists but census-takers ~ho happen to misconstrue the importance of "ob- . served 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 "au-

.thoritative" 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 ances- tors were sitting around the veldt with nothing better to do. Language was invented to serve cer- tain specific purposes.wThat mushroom is poi- sonous"; "Knock these two rocks together and you can start afire"; "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 bet- ter with respect to the community's purposes. If we assume that one such purpose might be com- municating which kinds of food are safe to eat, then you can see how, for example, a misplaced modifier might violate an important norm:

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1111 ("EVIDENCE OF CANCER UNK

REFUTED BY TOBACCO INSTITUTE

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113 Thil proposition is in fad true. II is interpolamely demon- atrated below, and although the demonstration is euremelyper- lIWl8iveit is also, •• you can see from the lize of this FN, lencthr and invo1Yed and rather, umm, dense, 10 that again you'd prob- ably be better off simply vant- ing the truth of the propolition and 'forging on with the main fen.

INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF

'THE ·FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE'

It'l lometimes tempting to imapn~ that there can be such a thing II a PriwteLanpage: Many

of us are prone to lay-philoao- phizing about the we.ird privacy of our own mental &tates. for a- ample, and from the fad that when my knee hurts only I can leel it. it'l tempting to conclude

, that for me the word pain has a veJY

subjective internal meaning that only I can truIy underatand. This line of thinking is IOn of li1:e the adolescent pot-smQker'. terror that his ~ inner uperience il both private and unverifiable. a syndrome that is technically known

ao Cannabic Solip"i"m. Eating ChipIAhoy! aI!-d staring very in- tendy at ~e teleriaion'. network PGA event, for inatance, the ado- lescent pot-Imoker il otruc:lt by the gbaatIy poaaibilily 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 col- or e:q>eriencea at all: The fact that both he and scmeone elle call Pebble Beach'l fairways green and a atop1.ip.t·1 GO lignal green ap- pears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color uperience of fairways,and GO lights, not that the actual sub- jective qualily of those color a- periencel is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-Imoker a- periencel as green everyone else actually uperiencea II blue, and what we "mean" by the word blue U what he -means" by green, etc.,

etc., until the whole line olthinl<- ing gets lo'vaed and uhauating that the a.p. -I. ends up slumped crumb-atrewn and paralyzed in hil chair.

The point here is that the idea ofa Private Language, like Pri - ' vate Colors and moat of the oth- er solipsistic conceitawith which this partiCular reYiewer has atftr- ious times lieen afflicted. is both deluded and demonstrablyfalae. ,

In tl!-e case of Private Lan- guage, the delusion il ulually baaed 'In the belief q,at a word

, such as pain baa the meaning it does because it is som~oW' "con - \ nected" to a feeling in my knee. Butas Mr. L. Wittgenatein'l PfJilo- aoplllcal Inreatigationaproved in the 195°0. words actually have the meanings they do because of cer- tain rUles and ve,.;f;cation teats that aie impoled on us from qut- lide our own aubjectivitiea, ro., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenatein'l argument. which io admittedly very comple" and gnomic and opaque, basically centers on the

fact that a word like pain means .what it does lor me because of the way the community I'm part of baa ~citly agreed to use pain.

Ifyou're thiDIring thatall this seems not only abstract butalao pm-

tyirrelnantto the Usage Wars or to anything you have any real in- tereat in at all, you are very much mistaken. Hworda' meanings de- 'pend on tranaperaonal rules and these rules on community con- sensus,language is not only con- ceptuaIly non- Private but also u:- reducibly pub'lic, political. and ideological. This means that 'ques- tiOtu a'bout our national conaen- lUI on grammar and UlIlI&" m.ac-

, tually bound up with every last iocial i.Muethat millennia! Amer- ica's .hout-cLua, race, 'rnder, morality, tolerance. pluralism, coheaion, equalily, fairness, mon- ey: You name it. ,

114 Norms, after all. are just prac- tices people have agreed on II op- timal ways of doingthinga for cer- tain purposel. They're not I••••• but they're not laissez-faire. ei- ther.

!DUO 47

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"People who eat that kind of inushroom ofte~ get sick" confuses the recipient about, whether he'll get sick only if he eats the mushioom fre- quently or whether he stands a good chance of getting sick the very first time he eats it. In oth- er words, the community has a vested practical in- ' terest in excluding this kind of misplaced modi- 'fier 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 (includmg utter- ances) according towhat we as a com- munity have decided our real interests and purposes are. Granted, this analysis is oversimplified; in practice it's incred-: MENS'ROOM ibly 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 ar- gument Descriptivists make: There is a sense in which specific linguistic conventions are arbi- trary.For instance, there's no particular meta- physical reason why our word for a four-legged mammal that gives milk and goes Moo is cow and not, say,prclmpf. The uptown phrase for this is "the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign," and it's used, along with certain principles of cognitive science and gen;:rative grammar, in a more I?hilosophically sophisticated version of Descriptivism that holds the eon vent ions of SWE to be more like the niceties' of fashion than like actual no~s. 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. com- munity's need to make its language meaningful.

The argument goes like this. An English sen~- tence's being meaningful is not the same as its be- ing 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 th!s the fact that

nobody who isn't damaged in some profound Oliv- er Sacksish way actually ever makes these sorts of very deep syntactic errors25 and you get the basic proposition of Noam Chomsky's generative lin- guistics, which is that there exists a Universal Grammar beneath and common to a~ languages, plus that there is probably an actual pari:of the hu- man brain that's imprinted with this Universal Grammar the Sameway birds' brains are imprint- ed with Fly South and dogs' with Sniff Genitals. There's all kinds of compelling evidence and sup-

port forthese ideas, not least of which are . the advances that linguists and cogni- tive 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 De- scriptivists to show that since the really important rules of language are at birth al-

- ready hardwired into people's neoccirtex, SWE prescriptions against dangling par- ticiples 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 mentalmachinerv 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 fol- low that all prescriptive rules are superfluous. Some of these rules really do seem to serve clar- ity. and precision. The injunction against two- way 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 in- fant daughter who works twelve hours a day").

Granted, the Philosophical Descriptivist can question just how absolutely necessary these rules are-s-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 mis- use 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 recipi- .

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(J99+), Steven Pinker puts it this way: ttNo one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to 8ay

Apple. the eat boy or The child seems sleeping or Who did you meet]olua and? or the vast, vast

maj ority, of the millions of tril- lions of mathematically possible combinations of words."

2'5 In his The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001

ent 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.t'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 ele- ments of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English "Makes a Statement" or "Sends a Mes- sage"-even though these Statements/Messages

, often have nothing to do with the actual infor- mation you're trying to transmit.

We've now sort of bled into a more serious re- joinder to Philosophical Descriptivism: From the fact that linguistic communication is not strict- ly dependent on usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the traditional rules of usage and grammar are nothing but "incense- quential decorations." Another way to state the objection is that just because something is "dec- orative" does not necessarily make it "incense- quential." Rhetorically, Pinker's flip dismissal is bad tactics, for it invites the very question it begs: inconsequential to whom?

Take, for example, the Descriptivist claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are ar- bitrary and restrictive and unfair and are sup- ported 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. 1suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants in- stead 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 cross- bar), 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-denud- ed legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant-as a thought ex- periment if nothing else-that these are all rea- sonable 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 America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescrip-

,tions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and un- squished and motile as we want.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad' cul- rural mainstream of millennial America, men do . not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally un- squishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situa- tions you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More, to the point, if you are a U .S. male and also have a U:S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/in- tention to wear'a skirt rather than pants to school the next clay, I am l.Otl-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-

, tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself-you're goingto stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbi- ' trary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequen- tially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, be- cause inmodern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say,a modest all-' season midi) is going to get stated at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and accep- tance are important to him. ~6 In our culture, in other words, aboy who wears a skirt is Makinga Statement that is going to have all kinds of grue- some social and emotional consequences.

Yousee 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 some- thing devoted to unpacking this point. The weird thing is that I've seen neither Descriptivists nor SNoC)Ts deploy it in the Wars.~7

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JII'~\; ••" " •..• ,J,;.-'~.i 26Inthe<aseofSteveP~erJr .•those people are the boy's peers and teachers and ero~ guards, etc, In the ease of adult <ross- dressers and drag queens who have

jobs in the Straight World and

wear }tants to those jobs, it's co- workers and dienta and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a <oat and a tie to work, it's mostly his boss, who himsell doesn't want his employee's doth •• to send

to improve people's voeabulary. These ads are extremely ominous and intimidating and always' start out with "DID YOU KNOW PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY THE WORDS

YOU USE?"

, dients "the wrong message." But' of ceurse it's all basieally the 'aame thing.

27 In fact, the only time one ever hears the issue made e:q>lidt is in radio ads for tapes that promiae

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When r say or write something, there are ac- tually a whole lot of different things I am com- municating. The propositional content (the ac- tual information I'm trying to convey) is only' one part ofit, 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 distinc- tion; things get way more com- plicated in the sorts of interper- sonal communication where social relations and feelings and moods come into play. Here's a familiar sort of ex- ample. Suppose that you and I are acquaintances and we're in my apartment having a conversation and that atsome point I want to terminate th~

, conversation and not have you be in my apart- , ment anymore. Very delicate' social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to han- dle 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 .sayyou had to be someplace?"; "TIme for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend"; "Off you go then, love"; or that sly old telephone-con- versation ender: "Well, I'm going to let you go ' now'jetc," And then think of all the different fac- tors and implications of each option.' ,

The point here is obvious. It concerns a' phe- nomenon that SNOOTsblindly 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 , vehicle28-and, again, doubtless it's all terribly

complicated and occupies wholebattalions of sociolinguists. But it's clear that at least one component of all this interpersonalsemantic judging involves acceptance, meaning not some touchy-feely emotional affirmation but actual acceptance or rejection of sornebodv's bidto 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-re- spend-s-not just to your utterance but also to ,

. you. In other words, a large part of the agenda of, I any communication is, rhetorical and depends ' on what some rhet-scholars call "Audience" or "Discourse Community."29 And the United States obviously has a huge number of such Dis-

, -course Communities, many of 'them regional and/or cultural di- alects of English: Black English, Latino English, Rural Southern,

Urban Southern, Standard Upper-Midwest, MaineYankee, East-Texas Bayou, Boston Blue- Collar, on and on. Everybody knows this. What not everyone knows-c-especially not certain Pre- scriptivists-is that many of these non-SWE, dialects have their own highly developed and internally consistent grammars, and that some of these dialects' usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense,than do their Standard counterparts (see INTERPOLATION).PIus,of course, there are innumerable sub- and subsubdialects based on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with locale or ethnicity-e-Medical-School English.Teoriaris- Who- Follow- Pro- Wrestling- Closely English, Twelve-Year-Old-Males-Whose- Worldview- Is-Deeply- Informed- By-South- Park English-and that are nearly incomprehensible, to anyone who isn't inside their very tight and specific Discourse Community (which ofcourse is part of their functionev).

INTERPOLATION: '

EXAMPLE OF GRAMMATICAL ADVANTAGES OF A

NON-STANDARD DIALEC'I' THAT THIS REVIEWER

ACTUALI,Y KNOWS ABOUT FIRSTHAND

This rev. happens to have two native, English dialects-the SWE of myhypereducated parents and the hard-earned Rural Midwestern of most of my peers. When I'm talking to R.M.'s, I usually

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captures something at once very compla and very specific that no other, English term 'luite can.-

-(The above is an obvious attempt to preempt readerly sneers/winces at the term'. con" . tinued deployment in this article.)'

30 (Plus it's true that whether something gets called a ~subdi- alect" or "jargon h 'seems to de- pend on how much it annoys peo- ple outside its Discourse Community. Garne" himaelfhu

miniesaa;s on AlRUNESE, COM- PUTERESE, LEGALESE, and BU- REAUCRATESE,and he more or less

calls aU of them jargon. There ie no ADMAU miniessay on 01- ALEafS, but there ie one onJAR- ,GON, in wh,ich such ie Garner's' self- restraint that you can almost' hear his tendons straining, u in "(Jargon! ari.seafrom the urge to save time and space-and eeea- sionally to co""eal meaning from the uninitiated. "),

28 (.,.notto mention color, gen- der, creed-you ean see how fraught,

and charged all this is going t~ get)

29 Discourse Community ie' an aample of that rare kind of aca- demic jargon that's aetua1ly a valu-

able addition to SWE because it

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001

I

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••• '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, SNOOTor 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 preposi- tion forms a redundancy with where that's simi- lar 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 inven- tion bf one Fr. R. Lowth, an eighteenth-centu- ry 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 SNOOTtakes it seriously. Gamer him- self calls the rule "stuffy" and lists all kinds of useful constructions like "the man you' were lis- tening to" that we'd have to discard or distort if we really enforced it.

Plus the apparent redundancy of "Where's it at?"3! 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'~ 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 num- ber of traditional prescriptive rules really are stu- pid and that people who insist on them (like th~ legendary assistant to P.M. 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 still-ted a sentence with Hopefully) are that very most pathetic 'and dangerous sort of SNOOT, the SNOOTWho 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 lan- guage and English is an analytic language.s" 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 t2 written in Latin33--decided ren own that English infinitives shouldn't be split either. Gamer himself takes out after the' s.i. rule in both SPLITINFINITIVES and SUPERSTITIONS.34And Hopefully 'at the beginning of a sentence; as a certain cheeky eighth-grader once pointed out to his 'everlast- ing social cost, actually functions not as a mis- placed 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 (exam- ples of perfectly OK sentence adverbs are Clearly, Basically, Luckily), and only SNOOTsedu- cated in the high-pedantic years up to 1960 blindly proscribe it or grade it down.

The cases of split infinitivesand Hopejully are in fact often trotted out by dogmatic Descrip- tivists as evidence that all SWE usage rules are arbitrary and stupid (which is a bit like pointing to Pat Buchanan as evidence that all Repub- licans are maniacs). Gamer rejects Hopefully's knee-jerk 'proscription, too, albeit grudgingly, intluding the adverb in his miniessay on SKUNKEDTERMS,which is his phrase for a usage that is "hotly disputed ... any use of it is likely to distract smile readers." (Gamer 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 die same two-way ambiguities as other adverbs', as in the clause "I will borrow your book and hope- fully read it soon.")

Wether we're conscious of it or, not, most of us are fluent inmore, than one major English dialect. and in a farge number of subdi- alects and are probably at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to

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33 (Q..v. for oample Sir Thomas Smitll'. corta-witllering De Rec- ta et Emendata Linguae ALwli- eae Sc:riptione Diologw ofIS68.)

:ti But note that he's •• ne about it. Some split infinitive. reJllly are clunky and hard to parse,

32 A,syntlletic language uses in- flecti~DI to dictate syntax. where- u an analytic 1anguar uses word order. latin, German, and Ru.u-

especiallywhen tlIere are a whole bunch of words b~tween to and the verb- "Wewill attempt to swift- ly and to the best of our ability respond to these chl\Ts" _hi~ Garner eaUs "widJ splits" and, aensibly disco"rago. Hia m:e"all verdict on s.I, 's_hich is tlIat some are "perfectly proper" and some iffy and some juat totally bad newa, and that no one wide

ticly dogmatic ukase can handle all s.I. c:aaes,and thus that "know- 'ingwhen to split an infinitive re- quires a good ear and a keen eye"- is a goodeumple of the wayGarner distinguiahes sound and helpful Descriptivist objections from •••do or dogmatic objeetioDi and then incorporates tlIe sound ob- jections into a smarter and mo~ flexible Prescriptivism.

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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 Qf. that Group. An obvious example is that tradi- tional 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 howto speak in an upper-class way. But usage-as-inclu- sian 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 wasscoping them and thinks they're totally rad and/or phat and is it cool if he just kicks it and do~s 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 blacItguys are stand- ing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in .al] 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 60-0 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 andI both know and yet no one in the Usage Wars ever seems to rnention-e- '

, situations -in which faultlessly correct SWIi is clearly not the appropriate dialect.

Childhood is'full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTletstend to have a very hard so-

Cum-N-Go Q~ikMart

cial time of it in school. Asnoorlec is a little kid who's wildly,precociously fluent in SWE (he is of- ten, 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 incal- culably dreadful!" etc. 'The elementary-school SNOOTletis one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and isduly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of pun- ishment the snoorler is receiving from his class- mates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and ar- bitrary cruelty of which children are capable.

But the other children's punishment of the, SNOOTlet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclu- sion 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 play-

, ground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are' giving the snoorler rnpnstrpus 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 snoorler 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 s'tuff is relevant. The point is that the little A + SNOOTletis actually in the same dialectal posi- tion 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-s-viz.,

membershlp in, U. are not just age, station, inability toiatByup plist 9:00, etc.-thatin fact U. i. pri- marily a state of mind and a .et of .ensibilitie •. An ideology.

about Us and Them, and about how an Us alwa,.. needs a Them be- cause being not-Them. is essen> tial to being Ua. Because they're lcids and it' •• chool, the obvious Them Is the'teachers and all the value. and appurtenance. of the teacher_rid. This teacher-Them

help. the lcids see how to .tart to, be an U., but the SNOOTlet com- plete. the pUDle by providing the a. it •••ere miaaing link: He is the Traitor, the U.1l'hb is in fact not U.but Them.

In sum, the SNOOTletis teach- ing hi. peers that the criteria for

35 The SNOOTletis, as it happens, . an indiapensable part of other lcids' playground education. The lcids are learning that a Group'. identity depends as much on ex- clusion as induaion. They are, in other words, starting to Iearn

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2001

, . 36 (The slcirt-in-achool scenario 1l'll8not personal.tuft', FYI,)

Wll-knOWn fact: In neither K-12. nor college English are systematicSWE grammar and usage much.taught 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 America's gradual mur- der of English. Descriptivists and English-Ed specialists counter that grammar and usage have been abandoned because scientific research proved that studying SWE grammar and usage simply doesn't help make kids better writers. Each side in the debate tends to regard the other as mentally ill or/and blinded by political ideol- ogy. Neither camp appears everto have consid- ered whether maybe the way prescriptive SWE was traditionally taught had something to do with its inutility.

.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.s? 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 ig- norance or amentia or grave deficiencies in char- acter. As rhetoric, this sort of attitude works on- ly in sermons to the.Choir, and as pedagogy it's just disastrous. The reality is that an average U.S. stu- dent is going to go to the trouble of mastering .the difficult conventions of SWE'only if he sees SWE's relevant Group or Discourse Community as one he'd like to be part of.And in the absence I don't know whether anybody'stold you this or of any sort of argument for why the correct-SWE not, but when you're in a college English class Group is a 'good or desirabie one (an argument you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This ..•.•.. ~ ,

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the ability to move between various dialects and levels of "correctness," the ability to' com- . municate 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 psycho- logical and part. something else-perhaps something hardwired into the same mother- board as Universal Grammar-s-and in truth this ability is a far better indicator of a kid's "Verbal I.Q." than testscores or grades, since U.S. English classes do far more to retard dialectal talent than to cultivate it.

lipless, tweedy, cancrine-Old Maids of both genders. Hyouhiod one (as I did, 1976-'77), you sure- ly remember him.

37 There are still some' of these teachers around, at least here in the Midwest. You Imow the type,

'Ptuue 'U'aa ~eu ~.' '1ted~~

. that, recall, the traditional teacher hasn't given, because he's such a dogmatic SNOOThe sees no need to), the student isgoing to be reduced to eval- uating the desirability of the SWE Group based on the one obvious mem- ber of the Group he's encountered, namely the SNOOTy teacher himself .:

I'm not suggesting here that an effective SWE pedagogy would require teachers to wear sun- glasses and call students "Dude." What, I am sug- gesting is that the rhetorical situation of an Eng- lish class-s-a class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult-Establishment values; plus also com- posed partly of minorities whose primary dialects are different from SWE-requires the teacher to come up with overt, honest, compelling argu- ments 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 del- isate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argu- ment, 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 bet- ter served' if the teacher makes his premises explicit and his argument overt, presenting. himself as an advocate of SWE's utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority.

Becausethis argument is both most delicate and (I believe) most important with respect to .stu- dents of color, here is one version of a spiel I've given in private conference39 with certain black students who were (a) bright and inquisitive and (b) deficient in what U.S. higher education con-

/ siders written English facility:

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dogmatic SNOOT'. pedagogy i. merely elitiam in aetion.)

38 (Or rather the arguments re- quire UI openly to aclmowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a

39 (I'm not a total idiot.) .

FOLIO 53

'.

. . ..• • 4 •

•••• II... .;. dialect is called Standard Written English. [Brief overview of major U.S. dialects a la p. 50.] From talking with you and reading your essays, I've con- cluded that your own primary dialect is [one of three variants of SBE common to our region]. Now, let me spell something out in my official Teacher- voice: The' SBE you're fluent in is different from SWE in all kinds of important ways. Some of these differences are gramrnatical-c-for example, double negatives are OK in Standard Black English but not in SWE, and SBE and SWE conjugate certain verbs in totally different ways. Other diff~rences have more to do with style-for instance, Standard Written English tends to use a lot more subordi- nate clauses in the early parts of sentences, and it sets off most of these early subordinates with com- mas, and, under SWE rules, writing that doesn't do this is "choppy" There are tons of differences like that. How much of this stuff do you already know? [STANDARD RESPONSE: some variation on "I know from the grades and comments on my papers that English profs don't think I'm a good writer."] Well, I've got good news and bad news. There are some

otherwise smart English profs who aren't very. aware that there' are real dialects of' English other than SWE, so' when

they're reading your papers they'll put, like, "Incorrect conjugation" or "Comma needed" instead of "SWE conjugates this verb differently" or "SWE calls for a comma here." That's the good news-it's not that you're a bad writer, it's that you haven't learned the special. rules of the dialect they want you to write in. Maybe that's not such good news; that they were grading you down for mis- takes in a foreign language you didn't even know was a foreign language. That they won't let you write in SBE. Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you're not going to like this news: I'm not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you.have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your own dialect and its rules and history and.how it's different from SWE, fine-s-there are some great books by scholars. of Black English, and I'll help, you find some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In class-s-in my English class-you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which. we might just as well call'''Standard White English," because it was developed by white people and is used, by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES by this point vaiy too widely to stan- dardize.] I'm respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of educa- tion and intelligence' and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to'be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can 'be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it's racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking miri.ute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seri- ously, you're going to have to communicate them '

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in SWE,.,bec~use SWE is the dialect our country . uses to talk to itself. African' Americans who've' become successful and important in U.S. culture know this; that's why King's and X's and Jackson's' speeches are in SWE, and why Morrison's and Angelou's and Baldwin's and Wideman's and West's

, books are full of totally ass-kicking SWE, and why black judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers communicate professionally in SWE. Some of these people grew.up in homes and .cornmunities where SWE was the native dialect, and these black people had it much easier in school, but the ones who didn't grow up with SWE realized at some point that they had to learn it and become able to write in it, and so they did. And [INSERT NAME HERE], you're going to .learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you.

I should note here that a couple of the stu- dents I've said this stuff to were offended-one lodged an Official Complaint-and thad 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 cul- tural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and of- fensive and unfair, and-thatpussvfooting 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 pol-

, itics of the Usage Wars sort of inside .out. I refer here to Politically Correct English

(PCE), under whose conventions failing stu- . dents 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 vari- ous pre-. and proscriptions are taken very seri- ously 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 peE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolu- tion-namely, the sixties-era rejections of tra- ditionaluuthority 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

-... 54 HARPER'S MAGAZI,NE I APRIL 2001

~-----------j

criticism of PCE seems to consist in making , fun of its trendiness or vapidity, This review-.

er's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but confused and dangerous.

Usage is alwayspolitical, of course, but it's com- plexly political. With respect, for instance, to po- litical change, usage conventions can function in two ways:'On the one hand they can be a re- flection' 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 po- litical efficacy what is really just a language's po- litical symbolism--enables the bizarreconviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and un- fairness, This is PCE's central fallacy-that a so- ciety's mode of expression is productive of its at- titudes rather than. a product of those 'attitudes-and of course it's nothing but the ob- verse of the politically conservative SNOOT'sdelu- sion that social change can be retarded by re- stricting change in standard usage.s? .

Forget Stalinization or Logic lO1-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 substitu- tion of the euphemisms of social equality fOl; social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the u.s. status quo than tra- ditional SNOOTprescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed taxation as a. means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described .as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to' mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and some- times offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual' political change rather than symbolic political change. In other

words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)

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 "economi- cally disadvantaged" rather than "poor."Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE term insult- ing-not just because it's patronizing but because it's hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue'Usage.v' PeE functions primarily to sig-

, nal and congratulate certain virtues in the speak- er-scrupulous' egalitarianism,con- cern for the dignity of all people, . CLCJSUFtE sophistication about the political implications of language-s-and so serves the self- ish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the person's 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 subLimecyborg wouLdinsinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic Lo- cations' 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 raciaLLyheterogLassic 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, cen- tered in the speaker's struggle to define his evolving self-construction.

Maybe it's a combination of my sxoortrude

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little more than list VW'. that bug him and say that "vogue words ha.e such a grip on the popular mind that they come to be used in con- tens in which they serVe little pur- PO"'" " This is one of the rai-e places inADMAUwhere Garner is sim- ply wrong. The. real problem i. that every .entenc~ blends and balances at least two diff~t com- municative functions-one the

4-0 E.!" this is the reaaoningbe-

hind many Pop Prescriptivisu' complaint that ohoddy uaar sig- nifies the Decline of Western Civ- ilization.

4-1A DietioruzroiModernAmer- iean Usage includes a mini......,. on VOGUE WORDS, but it's a disap-

: pointing on~ in,that Garner does

transmission of raw info, the oth. er the transmiasion of certain stuff about the speal:er-,nd Vogu'e U~ throws this balance off, Gar- ner's "serve little purpose" is ex- actly incorrect; vogue words serve too m';ch the purpose ofpresen~ 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 I!-onSNOOTs often find Vogue Uug<' irritating and creepy. ,

4~ FYI, this passage, which appears in ADMAU's entry on OBSCURI- 'rr, is quoted from a 1997 Sacra- mento Bee article entitled "No Contest: English PrOfesso~. Are Worst Writers on Campus."

FOLIO 55.

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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 incoher- ences 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' ..A,"'.- ..•41.., ,., / - ~'A across long passages which n I~ I~ ~ are 'almost completely lack- ,..AU '141'A t:)f~u~.1 ing in meaning."43 nl -/:",~ ~

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 func- tion is to signal the writer's erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a def- inite assertionthat 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 enhance- ment," "downsizing," "pre-owned," "proactive resource-allocation restructuring") that it's tempting to think AE's real purpose is conceal- ment and its real motivation fear. . .

The insecurity that drives AE, PCE, and vocab-tape ads is far from groundless, though. These aretense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodem rela-

"

tivism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising' and P.R. or the rise of Identity

• Politics or whatever you will-c-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 plau- sibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (= all 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 almostimpos- sible to advance an argument on "reason" alone.

A vividly concrete rillustration here' con" cerns. the Official Complainta blackunder-

graduate filed against this rev. after 'one of my little in camera spiels described on pages ,53-54. The com- plainant was (lapine) wrong, but she was not crazy

or stupid; and I was able later to see that I did bear someresponsibility 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.v- The' problem I failed to see, of course, lay not with the argu- ment per se but with the person making it-

.namely me, a Privileged WA,SP Male in a,posi- tion of power, thus someone whose statements

, about the primacy and utility of the Privileged WASP, Male dialect appeared not candid/hor- tatory / authoritative/ true but elitist/high- handed/authoritarian/racist. Rhetoric-wise, what happened was that I allowed the sub- stance and style of my Logical Appeal to corn- pletely torpedo my Ethical Appeal: What the student heard was just another PWM rational- izing why his Group and his English were top dog and, ought "logically" to stay that' way (plus, worse, trying to use his academic power over her to coerce her assent45).

If for any reason you-happen to find yourself sharing this particular student's perceptions and

• '''.1 •".

•. .:* .11

, saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiaste • as "Objective considerations of co~temporarypheriomena {om- pel the conclusion that success or failure in. competitive activi- ties emibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate ca- 44 Please Just don't even ~ay it.

pacity, but that a considerable el- ement of the unpeedieeable must invariably be ~en into account" should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the an- glophone world.

43 This was in hi. ~946 "Politics and the English Language," an essay that despite its date (and its tide's basic redundancy) remains . die definitive SNOOT .tatement oriAcade';ese. 0.....,11'. famous AE translation'ofthe gorgeous "I

56 HAjtPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2001

45 (She professed to have been especially traumatized by the cli- mactic "I am going to JDa!<eyou, " which in retrospect was indeed a mammoth rhetorical boner.)

reaction,46 I would ask that you bracket your feelings long enough to recognize that the PWM, instructor's very modem rhetorical dilemma in that office was really no different from the dilemma faced byamale 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 any- one over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc, The dilemma has nothing to dowlthwhether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far-any opponent with sufficiently strong feel- 'ings or a dogmatic bent candiscredit the argu- ments and pretty much foreclose all further\ dis- cussion with a single, terribly familiar rejoinder: "Of course you'd say that"; "Easy for you to say"; "What right do yol.{ have ... I"

Now (still bracketing) consider the situation of any reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOTwho 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?

ARTI OLE'S OR UX: WHY BRYAN A. GARNER

, . IS A GENIUS, THOUGH OF A' RATHER PARTICULAR KIND·"1t isn't that A Dictionary of Modern

American Usage is perfect. It doesn't' . . seem to cover conversan~ 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). Gamer's got a good discussion of used to but nothing on supposed to. Nor does he give

. any examples to help explain irregular partici- ples 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 VOGUEWORDSsnafu and the absence of a pro-

+6 (The Dept. head and Dean did not, U it happena, share her re- action ••. thoup. it would be disin- genuoUi not to tell you that they happened aBo to be PWM'a.which fact did not go unrellllU'ked by the complainant, such that the whole 'proceediDg got pretty darn tense, indeed, before it •••••all OYerj)

.•.~.. •

nunciation entry on trough.47 In other words, a SNOOTis going to be able to find stuff to quibble about in any usage dictionary, and ADMAU is no exception.

But 'it's still really, r~ally 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 Gariler structures his judgments very carefully to av~id-the elitism and anality of traditional SNOOTitude.H~ 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 Gamer talks openly about himself and uses the I-S pronoun throughout the whole die- rionary, his personality is oddly.effaced, neutral- ized. It's like he's so bland he's barely there. Eg., as this reviewer was finishing the book's final entry,48 it,struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan' Gamer was black' or' white, gay or straight, ,Democrat or Dittohead .. What was even more striking was that I hadn't once won- .. dered about any of this up to now; something about Gamer'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 Gamer is a genius because A Dictionary of Mo~m American Usage pretty much resolves the Usage Wars' Crisis of Authority. Gamer manages to control the compresence ofrhetorical Appeals so cleverly that he appears able to transcend both Osage 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 pre- sume ex officio.'In fact, a large part of the proj- ect of any contemporary usage dictionary will . consist in establishing this. authority. If that

., ..., j:. t.·'•• ,.r.., ..•. ..... · - ..•.I. •... ,

• " .' , •• fl-•.- •

e 'It, -,•• •.. •..., .( ••••••. .....·.'I -. .. •.•

• lifo.. .".,'. . - ...•' ~...'

t •• ..-"" .. .... ,,. ".',.· -:.. ' ,:...· .•.;" ..•..... "', •. '.

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+7 To be honest, I notic~ this omiaaion only because midwaJ' through working on this artide I happened to use the word troup. in front of the same SNOOT friend who likes to compare public Eng- lish to nolin-hammering. and he fell sideways out of his chair,

and it emerged that I have some- hoY all my life misheard trougIJ as ending with a tb instead of an fand thus have publicly mis- pronounced it God knows how many sc6res of timea. and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether perhaps the error was 10 common and hum.an and

48 (on mebac:lva. zweibadr)

understandable that Garner him- selfhad a good-natured enay on it, but no such lud, which in fair- ne •• I don't suppose I can .really blame {ltarner for. •

,. '. ::

FOLIO 57 ~ ..--•.~ ........ -

" seems rather obvious, be 'apprised that nobody before Gamer seems to have figured it out-s-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 read~r must now be moved or persuaded to grant a dictionary its authority, freely and for what appear to be good reasons,

Gamer'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 auto- cratic sense-but in a .technocratic sense, And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatabie,image of Authority but also immune to ' , the charges Ofelitism/classismthat have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism,

Of course, Garner really is a technocrat. He's a lawyer, recall, and, in ADMAU he conseiously projects a sort of wise juridicalpersona: knowl- edgeable; dispassionate, fair, with an almost En- lightenment-grade passion for reason, His judg- . ments about usage tend to be rendered like legal

.- opinions-exhaustive citation ofon accident precedent (other dictionaries' judg- ments, published.examples of actual

usage) c~mbined with clear, logical reas(;ming that's always informed by the larger consensual purposes SWE is meant to serve. ,. ,Also thoroughgoit;lgly. technocratIC IS Garner's approach to the issue of whether any- body's even going to be interested in his ~OO pages of fine-pointed counsel.' Like any spec.ml-.

, ist, he simply presumes that there are practical reasons why some people choose to cor:cern themselves with SWE usage; and his attitude

.; about the fact that most Americans "could care less" isn't scorn or disapproval but the phleg- matic resignation of, a doctor or. lawyer who realizes that he can give good advice but can't make you take it:

The reality Icare about most'is that some people still want to use the language well.SO They want to' write effectively;they want to speak effective- ly. They' want their' language to be graceful at times.and powerfulat times. They want to under-

. stand how to use words well, how to manipulate sentences, aitd how to 'move about in the lan- guagewithout seeming td. flail, They .want good grammar, ,but they want more: they want.

"

rhetoricf I, in the traditional sense. That is, they wantto US~ the languagedeftly so that it's fit for their purposes. '

. It's now possible' tosee that all the autobio- graphical stuff in ADMAU's Preface does more than justhurnanize Mr. Bryan A Garner: It als,6 serves to detail the early and enduring passion ,that helps make someone, a credible techno- crat-we tend 'to like and trust experts whose. expertise is both of a real love for their special- ty instead of ju~t a desire to be expert at s9m~- thing, In fact, it' turns out that ADMAU s Preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with every single qualification of modern techno-.: cratic Authority: passionate devotion; reason, and accountability (recall "in: the interests of full disclosure, here are the ten critical points. : ,."), experience ("th~t, after years ,?f working, on usage problems, I ve settled on ), exhaustive and tech-savvy research ("For con-- temporary usage, the .files of 0l\r greatest dictio-

. nary makers pale in .comparison with the full- text search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WES1LAW"), an even-and judicious tempera- ment (see e.g. this from HYPERCORRECfION: "Sometimes people strive to .abide QY the strictest 'etiquette, but in the,' process behave' inappropriately'fi"), and the sort of humble

,j . integrity (for instance, including inon~ of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that not only renders Garner likable but trans- mits the same,kind of reverence for English that good jurists ha~e for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one perso~.

Probably the most attractive thing' about ADMAU's Ethical Appeal, though, is Garner's scrupulous consideration' of the reader's con- cern about his (or her) ownlinguisti<; 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." A Dictionary of Modem American Usage's real the- sis, in other words, is that the purposes of the expert authority and the purposes of the lay reader are identical, and identically rhetori- cal~, which I submit is 'about as Democratic

••these days as you're going to get.

most remarkable thing a~ut this 52 (Here this reviewer's indwelling sentence is that coming from Gar;- .• and ever-vigilant SNO<Yr can't help , 'iler it'doesn'tsound,naive or ob- but questton why Garner uses a noxious but just .. : reas~nable. comma before the conjunction

. in'this sentence, since what fol- lows the conjunction is nei~er an independent clause nor any

4,9 (mean4>g literally Qemocra- tic-it Wants Your Vote)

" , 50 The lasttwo';'orcls of this sen- tenc.e, of course I are what the

, Usage Wars are abol1l>-'whose"lan-

guage" and whose ·well~? The

·51 Did you think I was kidding?

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 2001

kind of plausible complement for strive to. But respectful dis- ~ment between people of 'good- willis of course Democraticallynat-

ural and hulthy and, when you 'come right down to it, kind of fun.) .