David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

The “unprecedented” and “full disclosure” here are actually good-natured digs at Garner’s Fowlerite predecessors, and a slight nod to one camp in the wars that have raged in both lexicography and education ever since the notoriously liberal Webster’s Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included terms like heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them. You can think of Webster’s Third as sort of the Fort Sumter of the contemporary Usage Wars. These wars are both the context and the target of a very subtle rhetorical strategy in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and without talking about them it’s impossible to explain why Garner’s book is both so good and so sneaky.

We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance. 14 Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who exactly decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed substandard or incorrect. Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what’s OK and what isn’t? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradition won’t work, because what’s considered correct changes over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular took a singular conjugation—“You is.” Earlier 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 egregious slang. And not 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 good 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 of language. In brief, the same sorts of political upheavals that produced everything from Kent State to Independent Counsels have produced an influential contra-SNOOT school for whom normative standards of English grammar and usage are functions of nothing but custom and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language experts boss them around. See for example MIT’s Steven Pinker in a famous New Republic article—“Once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the writing establishment, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations”—or, at a somewhat lower emotional pitch, Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way:

Who sets down all those rules that we know about from childhood — the idea that we must never end a sentence with 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, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them.

In ADMAU’ s preface, Garner himself addresses the Authority question with a Trumanesque simplicity and candor that simultaneously disguise the author’s cunning and exemplify it:

As you might already suspect, I don’t shy away from making judgments. I can’t imagine that most readers would want me to. Linguists don’t like it, of course, because judgment involves subjectivity. [15] It isn’t scientific. But rhetoric and usage, in the view of most professional writers, [16] aren’t scientific endeavors. You [17] don’t want dispassionate descriptions; you want sound guidance. And that requires judgment.

Whole monographs could be written just on the masterful rhetoric of this passage. Besides the FN 16 stuff, note for example the ingenious equivocation of judgment, which in “I don’t shy away from making judgments” means actual rulings (and thus invites questions about Authority), but in “And that requires judgment” refers instead to perspicacity, discernment, reason. As the body of ADMAU makes clear, part of Garner’s overall strategy is to collapse these two different senses of judgment, or rather to use the second sense as a justification for the first. The big things to recognize here are (1) that Garner wouldn’t be doing any of this if he weren’t keenly aware of the Authority Crisis in modern usage, and (2) that his response to this crisis is — in the best Democratic Spirit — rhetorical.

So …

COROLLARY TO THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE

The most salient and timely feature of Bryan A. Garner’s dictionary is that its project is both lexicographical and rhetorical. Its main strategy involves what is known in classical rhetoric as the Ethical Appeal. Here the adjective, derived from the Greek e?248–175?thos, 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 democratic of rhetorical Appeals because it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience’s own hopes and fears. 18

These latter are not qualities one associates with the traditional SNOOT usage-authority, a figure who for many Americans exemplifies snobbishness and anality, and one whose modern image is not helped by stuff like The American Heritage Dictionary’ s Distinguished Usage Panelist Morris Bishop’s “The arrant solecisms of the ignoramus are here often omitted entirely, ‘irregardless’ of how he may feel about this neglect” or critic John Simon’s “The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled their merchandise.” Compare those lines’ authorial personas with Garner’s in, e.g., “English usage is so challenging that even experienced writers need guidance now and then.”

The thrust here is going to be that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage earns Garner pretty much all the trust his Ethical Appeal asks us for. What’s interesting is that this trust derives not so much from the book’s lexicographical quality as from the authorial persona and spirit it cultivates. ADMAU is a feel-good usage dictionary in the very best sense of feel-good . The book’s spirit marries rigor and humility in such a way as to let Garner be extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist put-down. This is an extraordinary accomplishment. Understanding why it’s basically a rhetorical accomplishment, and why this is both historically significant and (in this reviewer’s opinion) politically redemptive, requires a more detailed look at the Usage Wars.

You’d definitely know that lexicography had an underbelly if you read the different little introductory essays in modern dictionaries — pieces like Webster’s DEU’ s “A Brief History of English Usage” or Webster’s Third’ s “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography” or AHD-2’ s “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage” or AHD-3’ s “Usage in the 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 fact 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 Dictionary just to see how to spell (for instance) meringue . They’re written for other lexicographers and critics; and in fact they’re not really introductory at all, but polemical. They’re salvos in the Usage Wars that have been under way ever since editor Philip Gove first sought to apply the value-neutral principles of structural linguistics to lexicography in Webster’s Third . Gove’s now-famous response to conservatives who howled 19 when W3 endorsed OK and described ain’t as “used colloquially by educated speakers in many regions of the United States” was this: “A dictionary should have no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive.” Gove’s terms stuck and turned epithetic, and linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.