Consider the Lobster (41 page)

³³
In fact, the Methodological Descriptivists’ reasoning is known in social philosophy as the “Well, Everybody Does It” fallacy — i.e., if a lot of people cheat on their taxes, that means it’s somehow morally OK to cheat on your taxes. Ethics-wise, it takes only two or three deductive steps to get from there to the sort of State of Nature where everybody’s hitting each other over the head and stealing their groceries.
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³⁴
This phrase is attributable to Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss philologist who more or less invented modern technical linguistics, separating the study of language as an abstract formal system from the historical and comparative emphases of 19th-century philology. Suffice it to say that the Descriptivists like Saussure a
lot
. Suffice it also to say that they tend to misread him and take him out of context and distort his theories in all kinds of embarrassing ways — e.g., Saussure’s “arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” means something other and far more complicated than just “There’s no ultimate necessity to English speakers’ saying
cow
.” (Similarly, the structural linguists’ distinction between “language behavior” and “language” is based on a simplistic misreading of Saussure’s distinction between
“parole”
and
“langue.”
)
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³⁵
(If that last line of Pinker’s pourparler reminds you of Garner’s “Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems,” be advised that the similarity is neither coincidence nor plagiarism. One of the many cunning things about
ADMAU’
s preface is that Garner likes to take bits of Descriptivist rhetoric and use them for very different ends.)
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³⁶
Pinker puts it this way: “No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say
Apples the eat boy
or
The child seems sleeping
or
Who did you meet John and?
or the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.”
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³⁷
(FYI, there happens to be a whole subdiscipline of linguistics called Pragmatics that essentially studies the way statements’ meanings are created by various contexts.)
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³⁸
(presumably)
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³⁹
In the case of little Steve Pinker Jr., these people are the boy’s peers and teachers and crossing guards. In the case of adult cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the straight world and wear pants to those jobs, it’s bosses and coworkers and customers and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and tie to work, it’s mostly his boss, who doesn’t want his employees’ clothes to send clients “the wrong message.” But it’s all basically the same thing.
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⁴⁰
Even Garner scarcely mentions it, and just once in his dictionary’s miniessay on class distinctions: “[M]any linguistic pratfalls can be seen as class indicators — even in a so-called classless society such as the United States.” And when Bryan A. Garner uses a clunky passive like “can be seen” as to distance himself from an issue, you know something’s in the air.
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⁴¹
In fact, pretty much the only time one ever hears the issue made wholly explicit is in radio ads for tapes that promise to improve people’s vocabularies. These ads tend to be extremely ominous and intimidating and always start out with “DID YOU KNOW PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY THE WORDS YOU USE?”
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⁴²
To be honest, the example here has a special personal resonance for this reviewer because in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I’ve actually lost friends this way.
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⁴³
(… not to mention color, gender, ethnicity — you can see how fraught and charged all this is going to get)
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⁴⁴
Discourse Community
is a rare example of academic jargon that’s actually a valuable addition to SWE because it captures something at once very complex and very specific that no other English term quite can.
^*
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⁴⁵
Just how tiny and restricted a subdialect can get and still be called a subdialect isn’t clear; there might be very firm linguistic definitions of what’s a dialect and what’s a sub-dialect and what’s a subsub-, etc. Because I don’t know any better and am betting you don’t either, I’m going to use
subdialect
in a loose inclusive way that covers idiolects as distinctive as Peorians-Who-Follow-Pro-Wrestling-Closely or Geneticists-Who-Specialize-in-Hardy-Weinberg-Equilibrium.
Dialect
should probably be reserved for major players like Standard Black English et al.
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⁴⁶
(Plus it’s true that whether something gets called a “subdialect” or “jargon” seems to depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community. Garner himself has miniessays on airplanese, computerese, legalese, and bureaucratese, and he more or less calls all of them jargon. There is no
ADMAU
miniessay on dialects, but there is one on jargon, in which such is Garner’s self-restraint that you can almost hear his tendons straining, as in “[ Jargon] arises from the urge to save time and space — and occasionally to conceal meaning from the uninitiated.”)
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⁴⁷
(a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it
from?
” isn’t redundant [mainly because
whence
has receded into semi-archaism])
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⁴⁸
E.g., for a long time English had a special 2-S present conjugation — “thou lovest,” “thou sayest” — that now survives only in certain past tenses (and in the present of
to be,
where it consists simply in giving the 2-S a plural inflection).
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⁴⁹
A synthetic language uses grammatical inflections to dictate syntax, whereas an analytic languages uses word order. Latin, German, and Russian are synthetic; English and Chinese are analytic.
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⁵⁰
(Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smith’s cortex-withering
De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus
of 1568.)
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⁵¹
N.B., though, that he’s sane about it. Some split infinitives really are clunky and hard to parse, especially when there are a lot of words between
to
and the verb (“We will attempt to swiftly and to the best of our ability respond to these charges”), which Garner calls “wide splits” and sensibly discourages. His overall verdict on split infinitives — which is that some are “perfectly proper” and some iffy and some just totally bad news, and that no one wide tidy dogmatic ukase can handle all s.i. cases, and thus that “knowing when to split an infinitive requires a good ear and a keen eye” — is a fine example of the way Garner distinguishes sound and helpful Descriptivist objections from wacko or dogmatic objections and then incorporates the sound objections into a smarter and more flexible Prescriptivism.
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(It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides SWE.)
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AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #1
The SNOOTlet is, as it happens, an indispensable part of the other children’s playground education. School and peers are kids’ first socialization outside the family. In learning about Groups and Group tectonics, the kids are naturally learning that a Group’s identity depends as much on exclusion as inclusion. They are, in other words, starting to learn about Us and Them, and about how an Us always needs a Them because being not-Them is essential to being Us. Because they’re little children and it’s school, the obvious Them is the teachers and all the values and appurtenances of the teacher-world.
^*
This teacher-Them helps the kids see how to start to be an Us, but the SNOOTlet completes the puzzle by providing a kind of missing link: he is the traitor, the Us who is in fact not Us but
Them
. The SNOOTlet, who at first appears to be one of Us because like Us he’s three feet tall and runny-nosed and eats paste, nevertheless speaks an erudite SWE that signals membership not in Us but in Them, which since Us is defined as not-Them is equivalent to a rejection of Us that is also a
betrayal
of Us precisely because the SNOOTlet is a kid, i.e., one of Us. Point: The SNOOTlet is teaching his peers that the criteria for membership in Us are not just age, height, paste-ingestion, etc., that in fact Us is primarily a state of mind and a set of sensibilities. An ideology. The SNOOTlet is also teaching the kids that Us has to be
extremely vigilant
about persons who may at first appear to be Us but are in truth
not
Us and may need to be identified and excluded
at a moment’s notice
. The SNOOTlet is not the only type of child who can serve as traitor: the Teacher’s Pet, the Tattletale, the Brown-Noser, and the Mama’s Boy can also do nicely… just as the Damaged and Deformed and Fat and Generally Troubled children all help the nascent mainstream Us-Groups refine the criteria for in- and exclusion. In these crude and fluid formations of ideological Groupthink lies American kids’ real socialization. We all learn early that community and Discourse Community are the same thing, and a fearsome thing indeed. It helps to know where We come from.
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(Elementary Ed professors really do talk this way.)
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⁵⁵
AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #2
And by the time the SNOOTlet hits adolescence it’ll have supplanted the family to become the
most
important Group. And it will be a Group that depends for its definition on a rejection of traditional Authority.
^*
And because it is the recognized dialect of mainstream adult society, there is no better symbol of traditional Authority than SWE. It is not an accident that adolescence is the time when slang and code and subdialects of subdialects explode all over the place and parents begin to complain that they can hardly even understand their kids’ language. Nor are lyrics like “I can’t get no / Satisfaction” an accident or any kind of sad commentary on the British educational system. Jagger et al. aren’t stupid; they’re rhetoricians, and they know their audience.
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(The skirt-in-school scenario was not personal stuff, though, FYI.)
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⁵⁷
There is a respectable body of English-Ed research to back up this claim, the best known being the Harris, Bateman-Zidonis, and Mellon studies of the 1960s.
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⁵⁸
There are still some of them around, at least here in the Midwest. You know the type: lipless, tweedy, cancrine — old maids of both genders. If you ever had one (as I did, 1976–77), you surely remember him.
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⁵⁹
INTERPOLATIVE BUT RELEVANT, IF ONLY BECAUSE THE ERROR HERE IS ONE THAT GARNER’S
ADMAU
MANAGES NEVER ONCE TO MAKE
This kind of mistake results more from a habit of mind than from any particular false premise — it is a function not of fallacy or ignorance but of self-absorption. It also happens to be the most persistent and damaging error that most college writers make, and one so deeply rooted that it often takes several essays and conferences and revisions to get them to even see what the problem is. Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you’re trying to argue for. Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually
incredibly hard
to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract, (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more things of the spirit. The injunctions require of the student both the imagination to conceive of the reader as a separate human being and the empathy to realize that this separate person has preferences and confusions and beliefs of her own, p/c/b’s that are just as deserving of respectful consideration as the writer’s. More, (1) and (2) require of students the humility to distinguish between a universal truth (“This is the way things are, and only an idiot would disagree”) and something that the writer merely opines (“My reasons for recommending this are as follows:”). These sorts of requirements are, of course, also the elements of a Democratic Spirit. I therefore submit that the hoary cliché “Teaching the student to write is teaching the student to think” sells the enterprise way short. Thinking isn’t even half of it.
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