David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

If Most dictionaries’ usage notes for if are long and involved; it might be English’s hardest conjunction. From experience born of personal humiliation, I inform you that there are two main ways to mess up with if and make your writing look weak. The first is to use if for whether . They are not synonyms— if is used to express a conditional, whether to introduce alternative possibilities. True, abstract grammatical distinctions are hard to keep straight in the heat of composition, but in this case there’s a wonderfully simple test you can use: If you can coherently insert an “[or not]” after either the conjunction or the clause it introduces, you need whether . Examples: “He didn’t know whether [or not] it would rain”; “She asked me straight out whether I was a fetishist [or not]”; “We told him to call if [or not? no] he needed a ride [or not? no].” The second kind of snafu involves a basic rule for using commas with subordinating conjunctions (which are what if is one of). A subordinating conjunction signals the reader that the clause it’s part of is dependent — common sub. conjunctions include before, after, while, unless, if, as, and because . The relevant rule is easy and well worth remembering: Use a comma after the subordinating conjunction’s clause only if that clause comes before the independent clause that completes the thought; if the sub. conj.’s clause comes after the independent clause, there’s no comma. Example: “If I were you, I’d put down that hatchet” vs. “I’d put down that hatchet if I were you.”

Pulchritude A paradoxical noun because it refers to a kind of beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adj. form pulchritudinous . They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adj.), classy, colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for real things and real things themselves.

Mucous An adjective, not synonymous with the noun mucus . It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference. Mucus means the unmentionable stuff itself. Mucous refers to (1) something that makes or secretes mucus, as in “The next morning, his mucous membranes were in rocky shape indeed,” or (2) something that consists of or resembles mucus, as in “The mucous consistency of its eggs kept the diner’s breakfast trade minimal.”

Toward It might seem pedantic to point out that toward is the correct U.S. spelling and towards is British. On the other hand, so many writers at all levels seem ignorant of the difference that using toward becomes a costless, unpretentious way to signal your fluency in American English. It’s the same with gray (U.S.) and grey (Brit.), though so many Americans have been using them interchangeably for so long that some U.S. dictionaries now list grey as a passable variant. This is not likely to happen with toward/towards, though — at least not in our lifetimes. Nor will it happen with using as to mean since or because, which a lot of U.S. students like to do because they think it makes their prose look classier (“As Dostoevsky is so firmly opposed to nihilism, it should come as no surprise that he so often presents his novels’ protagonists with moral dilemmas”). As of 2003, the causal as is acceptable only in British English, and even there it’s OK only if the dependent as- clause comes at the start of the sentence, since if it comes in the middle the as can look temporal and cause confusion (“I declined her offer as I was on my way to the bank already”).

That There is widespread ignorance about how to use that as a relative pronoun, and two common that- errors are so severe that teachers, editors, and other high-end readers will make unkind judgments about you if you commit them. The first is to use which when you need that . Writers who do this usually think the two relative pronouns are interchangeable but that which makes you look smarter. They aren’t, and it doesn’t. For writers, the abstract rule that that introduces restrictive elements and which introduces nonrestrictive elements is probably less helpful than the following simple test: If there needs to be a comma before the rel. pron., you need which; otherwise, you need that . 1Examples: “We have a massive SUV that we purchased on credit last month”; “The massive SUV, which we purchased on credit last month, seats us ten feet above any other driver on the road.” The second error, even more common, is way worse. It’s using that when you need who or whom . (Examples: “She is the girl that he’s always dreamed of”; “Daddy promised the air rifle to the first one of us that cleaned out the hog pen.”) There’s a very basic rule: Who and whom are the relative pronouns for people; that and which are the rel. pronouns for everything else. It’s true that there’s a progressive-type linguistic argument to be made for the thesis that the “error” of using that with people is in fact the first phase of our language evolving past the who / that distinction, that a universal that is simpler and will allow English to dispense with the archaic incommodious subject- who -vs.-object- whom thing. This sort of argument is interesting in theory; ignore it in practice. As of 2003, misusing that for who or whom, whether in writing or speech, functions as a kind of class-marker — it’s the grammatical equivalent of wearing NASCAR paraphernalia or liking pro wrestling. If you think that last assertion is snooty or extreme, please keep in mind that the hideous PTL Club ’s initials actually stood for “People That Love.”

Effete Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven’t quite caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted”—and in a college paper for an older prof. you’d probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/or decadence; and in this writer’s opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see the extended definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for the extension, such as that effete derives from the Latin eff tus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that historically effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement or foppery or decadence.

Dialogue Noun-wise, the interesting thing about dialogue is that it means “a conversation or exchange between two or more people,” so it’s not wrong to say something like “The council engaged in a long dialogue about the proposal.” Avoid modifying it with certain adjectives, though— constructive dialogue and meaningful dialogue have, thanks mainly to political cant, become clichés that will make readers’ eyes glaze over. Please also avoid using dialogue as a verb — ever. This is despite the facts that (1) Shakespeare used it as a verb, and (2) There are all sorts of other accepted verbalizations of nouns in English that work the same way; e.g., to diet is reduced from “to go on a diet,” to trap from “to catch in a trap,” and so on. Maybe in thirty years, to dialogue will be just as standard, but as of now it strikes most literate readers as affected and jargonish. Same with to transition; same with to parent .