Consider the Lobster (40 page)

¹⁹
Really,
howled:
Blistering reviews and outraged editorials from across the country — from the
Times
and
The New Yorker
and the
National Review
and good old
Life,
or see e.g. this from the January ’62
Atlantic Monthly:
“We have seen a novel dictionary formula improvised, in great part, out of snap judgments and the sort of theoretical improvement that in practice impairs; and we have seen the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to miscellaneous confusions and corruptions. In fine, the anxiously awaited
^*
work that was to have crowned cisatlantic linguistic scholarship with a particular glory turns out to be a scandal and a disaster.”
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²⁰
It’s true: Newman, Simon, Freeman, James J. Kilpatrick… can George F. Will’s bestseller on usage be long in coming?
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²¹
Even the late Edwin Newman, the most thoughtful and least hemorrhoidal of the pop SNOOTs, sometimes let his Colonel B. poke out, as in e.g. “I have no wish to dress as many younger people do nowadays.… I have no wish to impair my hearing by listening to their music, and a communication gap between an electronic rock group and me is something I devotedly cherish and would hate to see disappear.”
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²²
Note for instance the mordant pith (and royal
we
) of this random snippet from Partridge’s
Usage and Abusage:
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anxious of.
‘I am not hopeless of our future. But I am profoundly anxious of it,’ Beverley Nichols,
News of England
, 1938: which made us profoundly anxious
for
(or
about
)—not
of
—Mr. Nichols’s literary future.

Or observe the near-Himalayan condescension of Fowler, here on some people’s habit of using words like
viable
or
verbal
to mean things the words don’t really mean:

slipshod extension
... is especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular.... The original meaning of
feasible
is simply doable (L.
facere
do); but to the unlearned it is a mere token, of which he has to infer the value from the contexts in which he hears it used, because such relatives as it has in English—
feat
,
feature
,
faction
, &c.—either fail to show the obvious family likeness to which he is accustomed among families of indigenous words, or are (like
malfeasance
) outside his range.

²³
FYI, Leonard Bloomfield’s 1933
Language
pretty much founded descriptive linguistics by claiming that the proper object of study was not language but something called “language behavior.”
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²⁴
Utter bushwa: As
ADMAU’
s body makes clear, Garner knows precisely where along the line the Descriptivists started influencing usage guides.
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²⁵
His SNOOTier sentiments about linguists’ prose emerge in Garner’s preface via his recollection of studying under certain eminent Descriptivists in college: “The most bothersome thing was that they didn’t write well: their offerings were dreary gruel. If you doubt this, go pick up any journal of linguistics. Ask yourself whether the articles are well-written. If you haven’t looked at one in a while, you’ll be shocked.”

INTERPOLATION

Garner’s aside about linguists’ writing has wider applications, though
ADMAU
mostly keeps them implicit. The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling — pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogaba-line, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead. See textual
INTERPOLATION
much below.
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²⁶
(which is in fact true)
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²⁷
(Q.v. the “Pharmakon” stuff in Derrida’s
La dissémination
— but you’d probably be better off just trusting me.)
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²⁸
Standard Written English (SWE) is sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the basic inditement-emphasis is the same. See for example
The Little, Brown Handbook’
s definition of Standard English as “the English normally expected and used by educated readers and writers.”

SEMI-INTERPOLATION

Plus let’s note that Garner’s preface explicitly characterizes his dictionary’s intended audience as “writers and editors.” And even the recent ads for
ADMAU
in organs like the
New York Review of Books
are built around the slogan “If you like to WRITE…
Refer to us
.”
^*
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²⁹
Granted, some sort of 100 percent compendious real-time Megadictionary might conceivably be possible online, though it would take a small army of lexical webmasters and a much larger army of
in situ
actual-use reporters and surveillance techs; plus it’d be GNP-level expensive (… plus what would be the point?).
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³⁰
New Criticism
refers to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks and Wimsatt & Beardsley and the whole autotelic Close Reading school that dominated literary criticism from the Thirties to well into the Seventies.
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³¹
(“EVIDENCE OF CANCER LINK REFUTED BY TOBACCO INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS”)
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³²
This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated just below, and although the demonstration is persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that once again you’d maybe be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.

INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word
pain
has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at all: the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word
blue
is what he “means” by
green,
etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a. p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.

The point here is that the idea of a private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.

In the case of private language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word like
pain
or
tree
has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee or to a picture of a tree in my head. But as Mr. L. Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations
proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument centers on the fact that a word like
tree
means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use
tree
. What makes this observation so powerful is that Wittgenstein can prove that it holds true even if I am an angst-ridden adolescent pot-smoker who believes that there’s no way I can verify that what I mean by
tree
is what anybody else means by
tree
. Wittgenstein’s argument is very technical but goes something like:

(1) A word has no meaning apart from how it is actually used, and even if

(2) “The question of whether my use agrees with others has been given up as a bad job,”
*
still,

(3) The only way a word can be used meaningfully even to myself is if I use it “correctly,” with

(4) Correctly here meaning “consistently with my own definition” (that is, if I use tree one time to mean a tree and then the next time turn around and use tree to mean a golf ball and then the next time willy-nilly use tree to mean a certain brand of high-cal corporate cookie, etc., then, even in my own little solipsistic universe, tree has ceased really to “mean” anything at all), but

(5) The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one individual language-user (viz., in this case, me). Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.” Wittgenstein’s basic way of putting it is:

Now how is it to be decided whether I have used the [privately defined] word consistently? What will be the difference between my having used it consistently and its seeming to me that I have? Or has this distinction vanished?... If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared, then so has the concept
correct
. It follows that the ‘rules’ of my private language are only impressions of rules. My impression that I follow a rule does not confirm that I follow the rule, unless there can be something that will prove my impression correct. “And that something cannot be another impression—for this would be as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”

Step (5) is the real kicker; step (5) is what shows that even if the involuted adolescent decides that he has his own special private definition of
tree
, he himself cannot make up the “rules of consistency” via which he confirms that he’s using
tree
the way he privately defined it—i.e., “The proof that I am following a rule must appeal to something
independent
of my impression that I am.”

If you are thinking that all this seems not just hideously abstract but also irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any interest in at all, I submit that you are mistaken. If words’ and phrases’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus,
†
then language is not only non-private but also irreducibly
public, political
, and
ideological
. This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about—class, race, sex, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: you name it.

And if you at least provisionally grant that meaning is use and language public and communication impossible without consensus and rules, you’re going to see that the Descriptivist argument is open to the objection that its ultimate aim—the abandonment of “artificial” linguistic rules and conventions—would make language itself impossible. As in Genesis 11:1–10–grade impossible, a literal Babel. There have to be
some
rules and conventions, no? We have to agree that
tree
takes
e
’s and not
u
’s and denotes a large woody thing with branches and not a small plastic thing with dimples and
TITLEIST
on it, right? And won’t this agreement automatically be “artificial,” since it’s human beings making it? Once you accept that at least some artificial conventions are necessary, then you can get to the really hard and interesting questions: which conventions are necessary? and when? and where? and who gets to decide? and whence their authority to do so? And because these are the very questions that Gove’s crew believes Dispassionate Science can transcend, their argument appears guilty of both
petitio principii
and
ignoratio elenchi,
and can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.
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