Consider the Lobster (10 page)

Who sets down all those rules that we know about from childhood—the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use
each other
for two things and
one another
for more than two … ? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them.

In
ADMAU’
s preface, Garner himself addresses the Authority question with a Trumanesque simplicity and candor that simultaneously disguise the author’s cunning and exemplify it:

As you might already suspect, I don’t shy away from making judgments. I can’t imagine that most readers would want me to. Linguists don’t like it, of course, because judgment involves subjectivity.
^[15]
It isn’t scientific. But rhetoric and usage, in the view of most professional writers,
^[16]
aren’t scientific endeavors. You
^[17]
don’t want dispassionate descriptions; you want sound guidance. And that requires judgment.

Whole monographs could be written just on the masterful rhetoric of this passage. Besides the FN 16 stuff, note for example the ingenious equivocation of
judgment,
which in “I don’t shy away from making judgments” means actual rulings (and thus invites questions about Authority), but in “And that requires judgment” refers instead to perspicacity, discernment, reason. As the body of
ADMAU
makes clear, part of Garner’s overall strategy is to collapse these two different senses of
judgment,
or rather to use the second sense as a justification for the first. The big things to recognize here are (1) that Garner wouldn’t be doing any of this if he weren’t
keenly
aware of the Authority Crisis in modern usage, and (2) that his response to this crisis is—in the best Democratic Spirit—rhetorical.

So …

COROLLARY TO THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE

The most salient and timely feature of Bryan A. Garner’s dictionary is that its project is both lexicographical and rhetorical. Its main strategy involves what is known in classical rhetoric as the Ethical Appeal. Here the adjective, derived from the Greek
e?248-175?thos,
doesn’t mean quite what we usually mean by
ethical
. But there are affinities. What the Ethical Appeal amounts to is a complex and sophisticated “Trust me.” It’s the boldest, most ambitious, and also most democratic of rhetorical Appeals because it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience’s own hopes and fears.
¹⁸

These latter are not qualities one associates with the traditional SNOOT usage-authority, a figure who for many Americans exemplifies snobbishness and anality, and one whose modern image is not helped by stuff like
The American Heritage Dictionary’
s Distinguished Usage Panelist Morris Bishop’s “The arrant solecisms of the ignoramus are here often omitted entirely, ‘irregardless’ of how he may feel about this neglect” or critic John Simon’s “The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled their merchandise.” Compare those lines’ authorial personas with Garner’s in, e.g., “English usage is so challenging that even experienced writers need guidance now and then.”

The thrust here is going to be that
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage
earns Garner pretty much all the trust his Ethical Appeal asks us for. What’s interesting is that this trust derives not so much from the book’s lexicographical quality as from the authorial persona and spirit it cultivates.
ADMAU
is a feel-good usage dictionary in the very best sense of
feel-good
. The book’s spirit marries rigor and humility in such a way as to let Garner be extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist put-down. This is an extraordinary accomplishment. Understanding why it’s basically a
rhetorical
accomplishment, and why this is both historically significant and (in this reviewer’s opinion) politically redemptive, requires a more detailed look at the Usage Wars.

You’d definitely know that lexicography had an underbelly if you read the different little introductory essays in modern dictionaries—pieces like
Webster’s DEU’
s “A Brief History of English Usage” or
Webster’s Third’
s “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography” or
AHD-2’
s “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage” or
AHD-3’
s “Usage in the Dictionary: The Place of Criticism.” But almost nobody ever bothers with these little intros, and it’s not just their six-point type or the fact that dictionaries tend to be hard on the lap. It’s that these intros aren’t actually written for you or me or the average citizen who goes to The Dictionary just to see how to spell (for instance)
meringue
. They’re written for other lexicographers and critics; and in fact they’re not really introductory at all, but polemical. They’re salvos in the Usage Wars that have been under way ever since editor Philip Gove first sought to apply the value-neutral principles of structural linguistics to lexicography in
Webster’s Third
. Gove’s now-famous response to conservatives who howled
¹⁹
when
W3
endorsed
OK
and described
ain’t
as “used colloquially by educated speakers in many regions of the United States” was this: “A dictionary should have no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive.” Gove’s terms stuck and turned epithetic, and linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.

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.”

These principles look prima facie OK—simple, commonsensical, and couched in the bland s.-v.-o. prose of dispassionate science—but in fact they’re vague and muddled and it takes about three seconds to think of reasonable replies to each one of them, viz.: