David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

Acknowledgements. To give off the impression. Instrumentality. Suffice to say. “The third-leading cause of death of both American men and women.” Positive for good . Alright. “This begs the question, why are our elected leaders silent on this issue?” To reference. To privilege, to gender. “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.” In so far as. “Chances of rain are prevalent.” NO TRUCK’S. Beyond the pail. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Rule and Regulation Amendment Task Force. Further for farther . “The Fred Pryor Seminar has opened my eyes to better time management techniques. 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.” Visualize, visualization. “Insert and tighten metric calibrated hexscrews (K) into arc (C) comprised of intersecting vertical pieces (A) along transverse section of Structure.” Creativity, creative. To message, to send a message, to bring our message to. To reach out to. Context. A factor, a major factor, a decisive factor. Myriads of decisive factors. “It is a federal requirement to comply with all safety regulations on this flight.” In this context, of this context. On a frequent basis. From the standpoint of. Contextualization. Within the parameters of this context. Decontextualization. Defamiliarization. Disorientated. “The artist’s employment of a radical visual idiom serves to decontextualize both conventional modes of representation and the patriarchal contexts on which such traditional hegemonic notions as representation, tradition, and even conventional contextualization have come to be seen as depending for their canonical privileging as aestheto-interpretive mechanisms.” I don’t feel well but expect to recoup. “As parents, the responsibility of talking to your kids about drugs is up to you.” Who would of thought? Last and final call. Achieve. Achievement. Excellence. Pursuit of a standard of total excellence. Partial completion. An astute observance. Misrepresent for lie . A long-standing tradition of achievement in the arena of excellence. “All dry cleaners are not the same.” Visible to the eye. Which for that, I for me. That which. With regards to this issue. Data as singular, media as singular, graffiti as singular. Remain for stay . On-task. Escalate as transitive. Community. “Iran must realize that it cannot flaunt with impunity the expressed will and law of the world community.” Community support. Community-based. Broad appeal. Rally support. Outpourings of support. “Tried to lay the cause at the feet of Congress.” Epidemic proportions. Proportionate response. Feasibility. “This anguishing national ordeal.” Bipartisan, nonpartisan. Widespread outbreaks. Constructive dialogue. To appeal for. To impact. Hew and cry. From this aspect. Hayday. Appropriate, inappropriate. Contingency. Contingent upon. Every foreseeable contingency. Audible to the ear. As for since . Palpably quiet. “The enormity of this administration’s accomplishments.” Frigid temperatures. Loud volume. “Surrounded on all sides, my workable options at this time are few in number.” Chaise lounge, nucular, deep-seeded, bedroom suit, reek havoc. “Her ten-year rein atop the competition? The reason why is because she still continues to hue to the basic fundamentals.” Ouster. Lucrative salaries, expensive prices. Forgo for forego and vice versa. Breech of conduct. Award for meretricious service. Substantiate, unsubstantiated, substantial. Re-elected to another term. Fulsome praise. Service. Public service. “A tradition of servicing your needs.” “A commitment to accountability in a lifetime of public service.” I thought to myself. As best as we can. WAVE ALL INTEREST FOR 90 DAYS. “But I also want to have — be the president that protects the rights 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, impinged on.” “Dr. Charles Frieses’ theories.” Conflict. Conflict-resolution. The mutual advantage of both sides in this widespread conflict. “We will make a determination in terms of an appropriate response.” Impact, to impact. Future plans. Don’t go there! PLEASE WAIT HERE UNTIL NEXT AVAILABLE CLERK. Fellow countrymen. Misappropriate for steal . Off of. I’ll be there momentarily. At some later point in time. I’m not adverse to that. Have a good one. Luv ya. Alot.

DID YOU KNOW that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?

For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the “corruption” and “permissiveness” of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special “Distinguished Usage Panel … of outstanding professional speakers and writers” is some dictionaries’ attempt at a compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel device as mere sham-populism, as in e.g. “Calling upon the opinions of the elite, it claims to be a democratic guide”?

Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press’s recent release of Mr. Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book that Oxford is marketing aggressively and that it is my assigned function to review. It turns out to be a complicated assignment. In today’s US, a typical book review is driven by market logic and implicitly casts the reader in the role of consumer. Rhetorically, its whole project is informed by a question that’s too crass ever to mention up front: “Should you buy this book?” And because Bryan A. Garner’s usage dictionary belongs to a particular subgenre of a reference genre that is itself highly specialized and particular, and because at least a dozen major usage guides have been published in the last couple years and some of them have been quite good indeed, 1 the central unmentionable question here appends the prepositional comparative “… rather than that book?” to the main clause and so entails a discussion of whether and how ADMAU is different from other recent specialty-products of its kind.

The fact of the matter is that Garner’s dictionary is extremely good, certainly the most comprehensive usage guide since E. W. Gilman’s Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, now a decade out of date. 2 But the really salient 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 context 3 in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology, 4 and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner’s dictionary 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 first taking a moment to establish and define the highly colloquial term SNOOT .