David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

The insecurities that drive PCE, AE, and vocab-tape ads are far from groundless, though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and PR or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will — we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he “expresses himself” 70 have been thrown into big-time flux. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos ), and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument’s emotional impact, from pathos ) have now pretty much collapsed — or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it nearly impossible to advance an argument on “reason” alone.

A vividly concrete illustration here concerns the Official Complaint that a certain black undergraduate filed against me after one of my little in camera spiels described on pages 108–109. The complainant was (I opine) wrong, but she was not crazy or stupid; and I was able later to see that I did bear some responsibility for the whole nasty administrative swivet. My culpability lay in gross rhetorical naïveté. I’d seen my speech’s primary Appeal as Logical: the aim was to make a conspicuously blunt, honest argument for SWE’s utility. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, but it was true, plus so manifestly bullshit-free that I think I expected not just acquiescence but gratitude for my candor. 71 The problem I failed to see, of course, lay not with the argument per se but with the person making it — namely me, a Privileged WASP Male in a position of power, thus someone whose statements about the primacy and utility of the Privileged WASP Male dialect appeared not candid/hortatory/authoritative/ true but elitist/high-handed/authoritarian/racist. Rhetoric-wise, what happened was that I allowed the substance and style of my Logical Appeal to completely torpedo my Ethical Appeal: what the student heard was just another PWM rationalizing why his Group and his English were top dog and ought “logically” to stay that way (plus, worse, trying to use his academic power over her to coerce her assent 72).

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction, 73 I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to …?”

Now (still bracketing) consider the situation of any reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOT who sits down to prepare a prescriptive usage guide. It’s the millennium, post-everything: whence the authority to make any sort of credible Appeal for SWE at all?

It isn’t that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is perfect. It doesn’t seem to cover conversant in vs. conversant with, for example, or abstruse vs. obtuse, or to have anything on hereby and herewith (which I tend to use interchangeably but always have the uneasy feeling I’m screwing up). Garner’s got a good discussion of used to but nothing on supposed to . Nor does he give any examples to help explain irregular participles and transitivity (“The light shone” vs. “I shined the light,” etc.), and these would seem to be more important than, say, the correct spelling of huzzah or the plural of animalculum, both of which get discussed. In other words, a rock-ribbed SNOOT is going to be able to find stuff to kvetch about in any usage dictionary, and ADMAU is no exception.

But it’s still really, really good. Except for the VOGUE WORDS snafu and the absence of a pronunciation entry on trough, 74 the above were pretty much the only quibbles this reviewer could find. ADMAU is thorough and timely and solid, as good as Follett’s and Gilman’s and the handful of other great American usage guides of the century. Their format — which was Fowler’s — is ADMAU’ s, too: concise entries on individual words and phrases and expository cap-titled MINIESSAYS on any issue broad enough to warrant more general discussion. Because of both his Fowler Society and the advent of online databases, though, Garner has access to many more examples of actual published SWE than did Gilman nine years ago, and he uses them to great, if lengthy, effect. But none of this is why Bryan Garner is a genius.

ADMAU is a collection of judgments and so is in no way Descriptivist, but Garner structures his judgments very carefully to avoid the elitism and anality of traditional SNOOTitude. He does not deploy irony or scorn or caustic wit, nor tropes or colloquialisms or contractions … or really any sort of verbal style at all. In fact, even though Garner talks openly about himself and uses the 1-S pronoun throughout the whole dictionary, his personality is oddly effaced, neutralized. It’s like he’s so bland he’s barely there. For instance, as this reviewer was finishing the book’s final entry, 75 it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan A. Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more striking was that I hadn’t once wondered about any of this up to now; something about Garner’s lexical persona kept me from ever asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies were informing what he had admitted right up front were “value judgments.” This seemed very odd indeed. Bland people can have axes to grind, too, so I decided that bland probably wasn’t the right word to describe Garner’s ADMAU persona. The right word was probably more like objective, but with a little o, as in “disinterested,” “reasonable.” Then something kind of obvious occurred to me, but in an unobvious way — this small- o kind of objectivity was very different from the metaphysical, capital O -type Objectivity whose postmodern loss had destroyed (I’d pretty much concluded) any possibility of genuine Authority in issues of usage.

Then it occurred to me that if Objectivity still had a lowercase sense unaffected by modern relativism, maybe Authority did as well. So, just as I’d done w/r/t Garner’s use of judgment, I went to my trusty conservative American Heritage Dictionary and looked up authority .

Does any of this make sense? Because this was how I discovered that Bryan Garner is a genius.

Bryan Garner is a genius because A Dictionary of Modern American Usage just about completely resolves the Usage Wars’ problem of Authority. The book’s solution is both semantic and rhetorical. Garner manages to collapse the definitions of certain key terms and to control the compresence of rhetorical Appeals so cleverly that he is able to transcend both Usage Wars camps and simply tell the truth, and to tell the truth in a way that does not torpedo his own credibility but actually enhances it. His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn’t seem like there’s even an argument going on at all.