David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

The former are better known, though not because of dictionaries’ prologues or scholarly Fowlerites. When you read the columns of William Safire or Morton Freeman or books like Edwin Newman’s Strictly Speaking or John Simon’s Paradigms Lost, you’re actually reading Popular Prescriptivism, a genre sideline of certain journalists (mostly older males, the majority of whom actually do wear bow ties 20) whose bemused irony often masks a Colonel Blimp’s rage at the way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present. Some Pop Prescriptivism is funny and smart, though much of it just sounds like old men grumbling about the vulgarity of modern mores. 21 And some PP is offensively small-minded and knuckle-dragging, such as Paradigms Lost’ s simplistic dismissal of Standard Black English: “As for ‘I be,’ ‘you be,’ ‘he be,’ etc., which should give us all the heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a language with its roots in history but of ignorance of how a language works.” But what’s really interesting is that the plutocratic tone and styptic wit of Newman and Safire and the best of the Pop Prescriptivists are modeled after the mandarin-Brit personas of Eric Partridge and H. W. Fowler, the same twin towers of scholarly Prescriptivism whom Garner talks about revering as a kid. 22

Descriptivists, on the other hand, don’t have weekly columns in the Times . These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of structural (or “descriptive”) linguistics, they are doctrinaire positivists who have their intellectual roots in Comte and Saussure and L. Bloomfield 23 and their ideological roots firmly in the US Sixties. The brief explicit mention Garner’s preface gives this crew —

Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries got hijacked by the descriptive linguists, [24] who observe language scientifically. For the pure descriptivist, it’s impermissible to say that one form of language is any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it’s OK — and anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead…. Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems. Descriptivists want to record language as it’s actually used, and they perform a useful function — although their audience is generally limited to those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research. [25]

— is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the “approaching different problems” part, because it vastly underplays the Descriptivists’ influence on US culture. For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively — via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and — expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmental movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males 26 and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think Proposition 227. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid using he as a generic pronoun, or of the tense, deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.’s. Think of the modern ubiquity of spin or of today’s endless rows over just the names of things—“Affirmative Action” vs. “Reverse Discrimination,” “Pro-Life” vs. “Pro-Choice,” *“Undocumented Worker” vs. “Illegal Alien,” “Perjury” vs. “Peccadillo,” and so on.

*INTERPOLATION

EXAMPLE OF THE APPLICATION OF WHAT THIS ARTICLE’S THESIS STATEMENT CALLS A DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT TO A HIGHLY CHARGED POLITICAL ISSUE, WHICH EXAMPLE IS MORE RELEVANT TO GARNER’S ADMAU THAN IT MAY INITIALLY APPEAR

In this reviewer’s opinion, the only really coherent position on the abortion issue is one that is both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice.

Argument: As of 4 March 1999, the question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed. That is, given our best present medical and philosophical understandings of what makes something not just a living organism but a person, there is no way to establish at just what point during gestation a fertilized ovum becomes a human being. This conundrum, together with the basically inarguable soundness of the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,” appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life. At the same time, however, the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it, especially if that person feels that s/he is not in doubt” is an unassailable part of the Democratic pact we Americans all make with one another, a pact in which each adult citizen gets to be an autonomous moral agent; and this principle appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Choice.

This reviewer is thus, as a private citizen and an autonomous agent, both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. It is not an easy or comfortable position to maintain. Every time someone I know decides to terminate a pregnancy, I am required to believe simultaneously that she is doing the wrong thing and that she has every right to do it. Plus, of course, I have both to believe that a Pro-Life + Pro-Choice stance is the only really coherent one and to restrain myself from trying to force that position on other people whose ideological or religious convictions seem (to me) to override reason and yield a (in my opinion) wacko dogmatic position. This restraint has to be maintained even when somebody’s (to me) wacko dogmatic position appears (to me) to reject the very Democratic tolerance that is keeping me from trying to force my position on him/her; it requires me not to press or argue or retaliate even when somebody calls me Satan’s Minion or Just Another Shithead Male, which forbearance represents the really outer and tooth-grinding limits of my own personal Democratic Spirit. Wacko name-calling notwithstanding, I have encountered only one serious kind of objection to this Pro-Life + Pro-Choice position. But it’s a powerful objection. It concerns not my position per se but certain facts about me, the person who’s developed and maintained it. If this sounds to you both murky and extremely remote from anything having to do with American usage, I promise that it becomes almost excruciatingly clear and relevant below.

The Descriptivist revolution takes a little time to unpack, but it’s worth it. The structural linguists’ rejection of conventional usage rules in English depends on two main kinds of argument. The first is academic and methodological. In this age of technology, some Descriptivists contend, it’s the scientific method — clinically objective, value-neutral, based on direct observation and demonstrable hypothesis — that should determine both the content of dictionaries and the standards of “correct” English. Because language is constantly evolving, such standards will always be fluid. Philip Gove’s now-classic introduction to Webster’s Third outlines this type of Descriptivism’s five basic edicts: “1—Language changes constantly; 2—Change is normal; 3—Spoken language is the language; 4—Correctness rests upon usage; 5—All usage is relative.”