61 * (or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT) (back to text)
1 (the best and most substantial of these being The American Heritage Book of English Usage, Jean Eggenschwiler’s Writing: Grammar, Usage, and Style, and Oxford/Clarendon’s own The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage) (back to text)
2The New Fowler’s is also extremely comprehensive and fine, but its emphasis is on British usage. (back to text)
3 Sorry about this phrase; I hate this phrase, too. This happens to be one of those very rare times when “historical context” is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn’t even worse (I actually tried “lexico-temporal backdrop” in one of the middle drafts, which I think you’ll agree is not preferable).
INTERPOLATION
The above ¶ is motivated by the fact that this reviewer nearly always sneers and/or winces when he sees a phrase like “historical context” deployed in a piece of writing and thus hopes to head off any potential sneers/winces from the reader here, especially in an article about felicitous usage. One of the little personal lessons I’ve learned in working on this essay is that being chronically inclined to sneer/wince at other people’s usage tends to make me chronically anxious about other people’s sneering/wincing at my usage. It is, of course, possible that this bivalence is news to nobody but me; it may be just a straightforward instance of Matt. 7:1’s thing about “Judge not lest ye be judged.” In any case, the anxiety seems worth acknowledging up front. (back to text)
4 One of the claim-clusters I’m going to spend a lot of both our time arguing for is that issues of English usage are fundamentally and inescapably political, and that putatively disinterested linguistic authorities like dictionaries are always the products of certain ideologies, and that as authorities they are accountable to the same basic standards of sanity and honesty and fairness as our political authorities. (back to text)
5 SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one. (back to text)
6 This is true in my own case, at any rate — plus also the “uncomfortable” part. I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one — it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else. (back to text)
7 N.B. that this article’s own title page features blocks of the typical sorts of contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that tend to make a SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. (N.B. further that it took only about a week of semi-attentive listening and note-taking to assemble these blocks — the Evil is all around us.) (back to text)
8 Please note that the strategically repeated 1-P pronoun is meant to iterate and emphasize that this reviewer is very much one too, a SNOOT, plus to connote the nuclear family mentioned supra. SNOOTitude runs in families. In ADMAU’s preface, Bryan Garner mentions both his father and grandfather and actually uses the word genetic, and it’s probably true: 90 percent of the SNOOTs I know have at least one parent who is, by profession or temperament or both, a SNOOT. In my own case, my mom is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sorts of subtle ways. Here’s an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. The really chilling thing, though, is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same “game” with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.
INTERPOLATION
As something I’m all but sure Harper’s will excise, I will also insert that we even had a fun but retrospectively chilling little family song that Mom and we little SNOOTlets would sing in the car on long trips while Dad silently rolled his eyes and drove (you have to remember the theme to Underdog in order to follow the song):
When idiots in this world appear
And fail to be concise or clear
And solecisms rend the ear
The cry goes up both far and near
for Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Blunderdog
Pen of iron, tongue of fire
Tightening the wid’ning gyre
Blunderdo-O-O-O-O-O-O… [etc.]*
9 (It seems to be a natural law that camps form only in opposition to other camps and that there are always at least two w/r/t any difficult issue.) (back to text)
10 If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field, from Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage to Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer to Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage to Gilman’s ’89 Webster’s. (back to text)