60 (Or rather the arguments require us openly to acknowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a traditional dogmatic SNOOT’s pedagogy is merely elitism in action.) (back to text)
61 (I’m not a total idiot.) (back to text)
62ESPECIALLY GOOD EPIGRAPHS FOR THIS SECTION “Passive voice verbs, in particular, may deny female agency.”— DR. MARILYN SCHWARTZ AND THE TASK FORCE ON BIAS-FREE LANGUAGE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES “He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved.”— E. M. FORSTER (back to text)
63 (A pithier way to put this is that politeness is not the same as fairness.) (back to text)
64 E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists’ complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization. (back to text)
65A Dictionary of Modern American Usage includes a miniessay on vogue words, but it’s a disappointing one in which Garner does little more than list VWs that bug him and say that “vogue words have such a grip on the popular mind that they come to be used in contexts in which they serve little purpose.” This is one of the rare places in ADMAU where Garner is simply wrong. The real problem is that every sentence blends and balances at least two different communicative functions — one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker — and Vogue Usage throws this balance off. Garner’s “serve little purpose” is exactly incorrect: vogue words serve too much the purpose of presenting the speaker in a certain light (even if this is merely as with-it or hip), and people’s odd little subliminal BS-antennae pick this imbalance up, and that’s why even nonSNOOTs often find Vogue Usages irritating and creepy. It’s the same phenomenon as when somebody goes out of her way to be incredibly solicitous and complimentary and nice to you and after a while you begin to find her solicitude creepy: you are sensing that a disproportionately large part of this person’s agenda consists in trying to present herself as Nice. (back to text)
66 FYI, this snippet, which appears in ADMAU’s miniessay on obscurity, is quoted from a 1997 Sacramento Bee article entitled “No Contest: English Professors Are Worst Writers on Campus.” (back to text)
67 This was in his 1946 “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that despite its date (and the basic redundancy of its title) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell’s famous AE translation of the gorgeous “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift” part of Ecclesiastes as “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account” should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world. (back to text)
68 If you still think assertions like that are just SNOOT hyperbole, see also e.g. Dr. Fredric Jameson, author of The Geopolitical Aesthetic and The Prison-House of Language, whom The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism calls “one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English.” Specifically, have a look at the first sentence of Dr. Jameson’s 1992 Signatures of the Visible — The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
— in which not only is each of its three main independent clauses totally obscure and full of predicates without evident subjects and pronouns without clear antecedents, but whatever connection between those clauses justifies stringing them together into one long semicolonic sentence is anyone’s guess at all.
Please be advised (a) that the above sentence won 1997’s First Prize in the World’s Worst Writing Contest held annually at Canterbury University in New Zealand, a competition in which American academics regularly sweep the field, and (b) that F. Jameson was and is an extremely powerful and influential and oft-cited figure in US literary scholarship, which means (c) that if you have kids in college, there’s a good chance that they are being taught how to write by high-paid adults for whom the above sentence is a model of erudite English prose. (back to text)
69 Even in Freshman Comp, bad student essays are far, far more often the products of fear than of laziness or incompetence. In fact, it often takes so long to identify and help with students’ fear that the Freshman Comp teacher never gets to find out whether they might have other problems, too. (back to text)
70 (Notice the idiom’s syntax — it’s never “expresses his beliefs” or “expresses his ideas.”) (back to text)
71 (Please just don’t even say it.) (back to text)
72 (The student professed to have been especially traumatized by the climactic “I am going to make you,” which was indeed a rhetorical boner.) (back to text)
73 FYI, the dept. chair and dean did not, at the Complaint hearing, share her reaction… though it would be disingenuous not to tell you that they happened also to be PWMs, which fact was also remarked on by the complainant, such that the whole proceeding got pretty darn tense indeed, before it was over. (back to text)