David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

Probably the most ingenious and attractive thing about his dictionary’s Ethical Appeal, though, is Garner’s scrupulousness about considering the reader’s own hopes and fears and reasons for caring enough about usage to bother with something like ADMAU at all. These reasons, as Garner makes clear, tend to derive from a reader’s concern about his/her own linguistic authority and rhetorical persona and ability to convince an audience that he/she cares. Again and again, Garner frames his prescriptions in rhetorical terms: “To the writer or speaker for whom credibility is important, it’s a good idea to avoid distracting any readers or listeners”; “Whatever you do, if you use data in a context in which its number becomes known, you’ll bother some of your readers.” A Dictionary of Modern American Usage’ s real thesis, in other words, is that the purposes of the expert authority and the purposes of the lay reader are identical, and identically rhetorical — which I submit is about as Democratic these days as you’re going to get.

p. 67 “Distinguished Usage Panel …” = Morris Bishop, “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage,” an intro to the 1976 New College Edition of published by Houghton Mifflin Co.

p. 67 “Calling upon the opinions of the elite …” = John Ottenhoff, “The Perils of Prescriptivism: Usage Notes and ” v. 31 #3, 1996, p. 274.

p. 73–74 “I realized early …” = preface, pp. xiv-xv.

p. 74 “Before going any …” = p. x.

p. 74 FN 13 “the ten critical points … ” = pp. x-xi.

p. 75–76 “Once introduced, a prescriptive …” = Steven Pinker, “Grammar Puss” (excerpted from ch. 12 of Pinker’s book Morrow, 1994), which appeared in the on 31 Jan. ’94 (p. 20). Some of the subsequent Pinker quotations are from the excerpt because they tend to be more compact.

p. 76 “Who sets down …?” = p. 141 of Bryson’s (Avon, 1990).

pp. 76–77 “As you might already …” = , preface, p. xiii.

p. 76 FN 16 “The problem for professional …” = p. xi; plus the traditional-type definition of is adapted from p. 1114 of the 1976.

p. 78 “The arrant solecisms …” = Bishop, 1976 intro, p. xxiii.

p. 78 “The English language is being …” = John Simon, (Crown, 1980), p. 106.

p. 79 FN 19 “We have seen a novel …” = Wilson Follett, “Sabotage in Springfield,” the January ’62, p. 73.

p. 79 “A dictionary should have no …” = P. Gove in a letter to the replying to their howling editorial, said letter reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt, eds., That (Scott, Foresman, 1962), p. 88.

p. 79 FN 21 Newman’s “I have no wish …” = (Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 10.

pp. 79–80 Simon’s “As for ‘I be,’ …” = pp. 165–166.

p. 80 FN 22 The Partridge quotation is from p. 36 of (Hamish Hamilton, 1947). The Fowler snippet is from (Oxford, 1927), pp. 540–541.

pp. 80–81 “Somewhere along the line …” = preface, p. xi.

p. 81 FN 25 “The most bothersome …” = preface, p. xv.

p. 83 “1—Language changes …” = Philip Gove, “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography,” Introduction to Reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt; Gove’s axioms appear therein on p. 67.

p. 84 FN 28 “the English normally expected …” = p. 459 of Fourth Edition (Scott, Foresman, 1989).

pp. 87–88 FN 32 Norman Malcolm’s exegesis of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument (which argument occupies sections 258–265 of the ) appears in Malcolm’s (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 98–99.

p. 89 “A dictionary can be …” = “Usage Levels and Dialect Distribution,” intro to the (Random House, 1962), p. xxv; reprinted in Gove’s letter to the.

pp. 91–92 “[T]he words ‘rule’ …” = S. Pinker, p. 371. The chunk also appears in Pinker’s “Grammar Puss” article, p. 19.

p. 92 FN 36 “No one, not even …” = p. 372.

pp. 92–93 “When a scientist …” = “Grammar Puss,” p. 19.

p. 96 FN 40 Garner’s miniessay is on s pp. 124–126.

p. 99 FN 46 “[Jargon] arises from …” = p. 390.

p. 100 FN 51 “knowing when to split …” = pp. 616–617.

p. 101 “hotly disputed …” = s miniessay, which is on pp. 603–604.

p. 105 FN 57 A concise overview of these studies can be found in Janice Neuleib’s “The Relation of Formal Grammar to Composition,” October ’77.

p. 110 FN 62 Dr. Schwartz and the Task Force are listed as the authors of (Indiana U. Press, 1995), in which the quoted sentence appears on p. 28. The Forster snippet is from the opening chapter of.

p. 112 FN 65 “vogue words have such a grip …” = p. 682.

p. 114 “At first encounter …” = Karen Volkman’s review of Michael Palmer’s in the October ’98, p. 6.

p. 114 FN 66 The miniessay is on p. 462 of .

p. 114 “This is the best and only way …” = President Clinton verbatim in mid-November ’98.

pp. 114–115 & p. 115 FN 67 Quoted bits of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” are from the essay as it appears in, e.g., Hunt and Perry, eds., Fifth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 670–682.

p. 115 FN 68 The Jameson sentence also appears in s miniessay on, p. 462; plus it appears in the same article mentioned in FN 66.

p. 122 The various quoted definitions of here come from Third Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 124.

p. 123 “The reality I care about …” = preface, pp. ix-x. The next five quotation-snippets — on pp. 123–124 and in FN 80—are also from the preface.

p. 124 “Sometimes people strive to …” = p. 345.

p. 124 “To the writer or speaker for whom …” = p. 604.

p. 124 “Whatever you do …” = p. 186.

1999

LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS

DATES: 11–13 SEPTEMBER 2001

SUBJECT: OBVIOUS

SYNECDOCHEIn true Midwest fashion, people in Bloomington aren’t unfriendly but do tend to be reserved. A stranger will smile warmly at you, but there normally won’t be any of that strangerly chitchat in waiting areas or checkout lines. But now, thanks to the Horror, there’s something to talk about that overrides all inhibition, as if we were somehow all standing right there and just saw the same traffic accident. Example: Overheard in the checkout line at Burwell Oil (which is sort of the Neiman Marcus of gas station/ convenience store plazas — centrally located athwart both one-way main drags, and with the best tobacco prices in town, it’s a municipal treasure) between a lady in an Osco cashier’s smock and a man in a dungaree jacket cut off at the shoulders to make a sort of homemade vest: “With my boys they thought it was all some movie like that Independence Day, till then they started to notice how it was the same movie on all the channels.” (The lady didn’t say how old her boys were.)

WEDNESDAYEveryone has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: you never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small, regular flag-sized flags. A lot of homeowners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. Plus thousands of the little handheld flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades — some yards have dozens of these stuck in the ground all over, as if they’d somehow all just sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. A good number of vehicles have them wedged in their grille or attached to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast. More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multistory flags hanging gonfalon-style down over their facades. It’s a total mystery where people can buy flags this big or how they got them up there, or when.