11 (Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten. I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.) (back to text)
12 From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and repeatedly Wedgied — see sub. (back to text)
13 What follow in the preface are “the ten critical points that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on.” These points are too involved to treat separately, but a couple of them are slippery in the extreme — e.g., “10. Actual Usage. In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness,” of which both “educated” and “actual” would really require several pages of abstract clarification and qualification to shore up against Usage Wars — related attacks, but which Garner rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in his dictionary itself. Garner’s ability not only to stay out of certain arguments but to render them irrelevant ends up being very important — see much sub. (back to text)
14 There’s no better indication of The Dictionary’s authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this day living down the outcome of a high-stakes bet on the correct spelling of meringue, a bet made on 14 September 1978. (back to text)
15 This is a clever half-truth. Linguists compose only one part of the anti-judgment camp, and their objections to usage judgments involve way more than just “subjectivity.” (back to text)
16 Notice, please, the subtle appeal here to the same “writing establishment” that Steven Pinker scorns. This isn’t accidental; it’s rhetorical. * What’s crafty is that this is one of several places where Garner uses professional writers and editors as support for his claims, but in the preface he also treats these language pros as the primary audience for ADMAU, as in e.g. “The problem for professional writers and editors is that they can’t wait idly to see what direction the language takes. Writers and editors, in fact, influence that direction: they must make decisions.… That has traditionally been the job of the usage dictionary: to help writers and editors solve editorial predicaments.”
This is the same basic rhetorical move that President R. W. Reagan perfected in his televised Going-Over-Congress’s-Head-to-the-People addresses, one that smart politicians ever since have imitated. It consists in citing the very audience you’re addressing as the source of support for your proposals: “I’m pleased to announce tonight that we are taking the first steps toward implementing the policies that you elected me to implement,” etc. The tactic is crafty because it (1) flatters the audience, (2) disguises the fact that the rhetor’s purpose here is actually to persuade and rally support, not to inform or celebrate, and (3) preempts charges from the loyal opposition that the actual policy proposed is in any way contrary to the interests of the audience. I’m not suggesting that Bryan Garner has any particular political agenda. I’m simply pointing out that ADMAU’s preface is fundamentally rhetorical in the same way that Reagan’s little Chats With America were. (back to text)
17 See? (back to text)
18 In this last respect, recall for example W. J. Clinton’s “I feel your pain,” which was a blatant if not especially deft Ethical Appeal. (back to text)
19 Really, howled: Blistering reviews and outraged editorials from across the country — from the Times and The New Yorker and the National Review and good old Life, or see e.g. this from the January ’62 Atlantic Monthly: “We have seen a novel dictionary formula improvised, in great part, out of snap judgments and the sort of theoretical improvement that in practice impairs; and we have seen the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to miscellaneous confusions and corruptions. In fine, the anxiously awaited * work that was to have crowned cisatlantic linguistic scholarship with a particular glory turns out to be a scandal and a disaster.” (back to text)
20 It’s true: Newman, Simon, Freeman, James J. Kilpatrick… can George F. Will’s bestseller on usage be long in coming? (back to text)
21 Even the late Edwin Newman, the most thoughtful and least hemorrhoidal of the pop SNOOTs, sometimes let his Colonel B. poke out, as in e.g. “I have no wish to dress as many younger people do nowadays.… I have no wish to impair my hearing by listening to their music, and a communication gap between an electronic rock group and me is something I devotedly cherish and would hate to see disappear.” (back to text)
22 Note for instance the mordant pith (and royal we) of this random snippet from Partridge’s Usage and Abusage: (back to text) anxious of. ‘I am not hopeless of our future. But I am profoundly anxious of it,’ Beverley Nichols, News of England, 1938: which made us profoundly anxious for (or about) — not of—Mr. Nichols’s literary future.
Or observe the near-Himalayan condescension of Fowler, here on some people’s habit of using words like viable or verbal to mean things the words don’t really mean: slipshod extension… is especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular…. The original meaning of feasible is simply doable (L. facere do); but to the unlearned it is a mere token, of which he has to infer the value from the contexts in which he hears it used, because such relatives as it has in English—feat, feature, faction, &c. — either fail to show the obvious family likeness to which he is accustomed among families of indigenous words, or are (like malfeasance) outside his range.
23 FYI, Leonard Bloomfield’s 1933 Language pretty much founded descriptive linguistics by claiming that the proper object of study was not language but something called “language behavior.” (back to text)
24 Utter bushwa: As ADMAU’s body makes clear, Garner knows precisely where along the line the Descriptivists started influencing usage guides. (back to text)
25 His SNOOTier sentiments about linguists’ prose emerge in Garner’s preface via his recollection of studying under certain eminent Descriptivists in college: “The most bothersome thing was that they didn’t write welclass="underline" their offerings were dreary gruel. If you doubt this, go pick up any journal of linguistics. Ask yourself whether the articles are well-written. If you haven’t looked at one in a while, you’ll be shocked.”