David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

Privilege Even though some dictionaries OK it, to privilege is currently used only in a particular English subdialect that might be called academese. Example: “The patriarchal Western canon privileges univocal discourse situated within established contexts over the polyphonic free play of decentered utterance.” The contemporary form of this subdialect originated in literary and social theory but has now metastasized throughout much of the humanities. There is exactly one situation in which you’d want to use to privilege, to situate, to interrogate + some abstract noun phrase, or pretty much any construction that’s three times longer than it needs to be — this is in a university course taught by a prof. so thoroughly cloistered, insecure, or stupid as to believe that academese is good intelligent writing. A required course, one that you can’t switch out of. In any other situation, run very fast the other way.

Myriad As an adj., myriad means (1) an indefinitely large number of something (“The Local Group comprises myriad galaxies”) or (2) made up of a great many diverse elements (“the myriad plant life of Amazonia”). As a noun, it’s used with an article and of to mean a large number (“The new CFO faced a myriad of cash-flow problems.”) What’s odd is that some authorities consider only the adjective usage correct — there’s about a 50–50 chance that a given copyeditor will query a myriad of —even though the noun usage has a much longer history. It was only in nineteenth-century poetry that myriad started being used as an adj. So it’s a bit of a stumper. It’s tempting to recommend avoiding the noun usage so that no readers will be bugged, but at the same time it’s true that any reader who’s bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong — and you can usually rebut snooty teachers, copyeditors, et al. by directing them to Coleridge’s “Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.”

Dysphesia This is a medical noun with timely non-medical applications. We often use aphasia to refer to a brain-centered inability to use language, which is close but not identical to the medical meaning. Dysphesia can be similarly extended from its technical definition to mean really severe difficulties in forming coherent sentences. As anyone who’s listened to our current president knows, there are speakers whose lack of facility goes way beyond the range of clumsy or inarticulate . What G. W. Bush’s public English really is is dysphesiac .

Unique This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables,” that can be a little tricky. Among other uncomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not. Many writers get careless and try to modify uncomparables with comparatives like more and less or intensives like very . But if you really think about them, the core assertions in sentences like “War is becoming increasingly inevitable as Middle East tensions rise,” “Their cost estimate was more accurate than the other firms’,” and “As a mortician, he has a very unique attitude” are nonsense. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen; it cannot be bound to happen and then somehow even more bound to happen. Unique already means one-of-a-kind, so the adj. phrase very unique is at best redundant and at worst stupid, like “audible to the ear” or “rectangular in shape.” Uncomparable-type boners can be easily fixed—“War is looking increasingly inevitable”; “Their cost estimate was more nearly accurate”; “he has a unique attitude”—but for writers the hard part is noticing such errors in the first place. You can blame the culture of marketing for some of this difficulty. As the number and rhetorical volume of U.S. ads increase, we become inured to hyperbolic language, which then forces marketers to load superlatives and uncomparables with high-octane modifiers ( special → very special → Super-special! → Mega-Special!! ), and so on. A deeper issue implicit in the problem of uncomparables is the dissimilarities between Standard Written English and the language of advertising. Advertising English, which probably deserves to be studied as its own dialect, operates under different syntactic rules than SWE, mainly because AE’s goals and assumptions are different. Sentences like “We offer a totally unique dining experience,” “Come on down and receive your free gift,” and “Save up to 50 percent… and more!” are perfectly OK in Advertising English — but this is because Advertising English is aimed at people who are not paying close attention. If your audience is by definition involuntary, distracted, and numbed, then free gift and totally unique stand a better chance of penetrating — and simple penetration is what AE is all about. The goals and assumptions of Standard Written English are obviously way more complex, but one SWE axiom is that your reader is paying close attention and expects you to have done the same.

Beg In its main function, to beg serves as an improved modern synonym for the old crave, which now sounds very affected. Both verbs mean to request earnestly and from a kind of subordinate position — one begs a favor but demands a right. Beseech and implore are close to beg, but both imply a little extra anxiety and/or urgency. The only really egregious way you can screw up with this word is to misuse the phrase beg the question . This phrase does not — repeat, not — mean “invite the following obvious question,” and sentences like “This begs the question, why are our elected leaders silent on this issue?” are both increasingly common and deeply wrong. The idiom beg the question is the compressed Anglicization of the Latin petitio principii, which is the name of a particular kind of logical fallacy in which one bases a conclusion on a premise that turns out to be just as debatable as the conclusion. Genuine examples of begging the question are “The death penalty is the proper punishment for murder because those who kill forfeit their own right to life” and “True wisdom is speaking and acting judiciously.” Because of its extremely specific origin and meaning, beg the question will never mean “invite the question” no matter how widespread the usage becomes. Nor, strictly speaking, will it mean “avoid or ignore the real issue,” even though a subsidiary def. of beg is “to dodge or evade.” If you want to accuse someone of missing the point, you can say “You’re begging the real issue” or something, but it’s not right to use even this sense of beg with question unless you are sure that you’re talking about a case of petitio principii .

Critique I went to college in the mid-1980s, and there I was taught that there’s no such verb as to critique . The profs. who hammered this into me (both over fifty) explained that to criticize meant “to judge the merits and defects of, to analyze, to evaluate” and that critique (n.) was the noun for “a specific critical commentary or review.” Now, though, the dictionary’s primary def. of to criticize is usually “to find fault with”; i.e., the verb has taken on increasingly negative connotations. Thus some usage authorities now consider to critique to be OK; they argue that it can minimize confusion by denoting the neutral, scholarly-type assessment that used to be what criticize meant. Here’s the thing, though: it’s still only some usage experts who accept to critique . Dictionaries’ usage panels are usually now split about 50–50 on sentences like “After a run-through, the playwright and director both critiqued the actor’s delivery.” And it’s not just authorities. A fair percentage of educated people still find to critique either wrong or irksome. Why alienate smart readers unnecessarily? If you’re worried that criticize will seem deprecatory, you can say evaluate, explicate, analyze, judge … or you can always use the old bury-the-main-verb trick and do offer a critique of, submit a critique of, etc.