The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE

  Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in US English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a “Democratic Spirit.” A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

  This kind of stuff is advanced US citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit’s constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that the other camps9 are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

  I submit, then, that it is indisputably easier to be Dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding “correctness” in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be literally worked out instead of merely found.

  A distinctive feature of ADMAU is that its author is willing to acknowledge that a usage dictionary is not a bible or even a textbook but rather just the record of one bright person’s attempts to work out answers to certain very difficult questions. This willingness appears to me to be informed by a Democratic Spirit. The big question is whether such a spirit compromises Bryan Garner’s ability to present himself as a genuine “authority” on issues of usage. Assessing Garner’s book, then, requires us to trace out the very weird and complicated relationship between Authority and Democracy in what we as a culture have decided is English. That relationship is, as many educated Americans would say, still in process at this time.

  A Dictionary of Modern American Usage has no Editorial Staff or Distinguished Panel. It’s been conceived, researched, and written ab ovo usque ad mala by Mr. Bryan A. Garner. This Garner is an interesting guy. He’s both a lawyer and a usage expert (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics wholesaler and a DEA agent). His 1987 A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage is already a minor classic; and now, instead of practicing law anymore, he goes around conducting writing seminars for JDs and doing prose-consulting for various judicial bodies. Garner’s also the founder of something called the H. W. Fowler Society,10 a worldwide group of usage Trekkies who like to send one another linguistic boners clipped from different periodicals. You get the idea. This Garner is one serious and very hard-core SNOOT.

  The lucid, engaging, and extremely sneaky preface to ADMAU serves to confirm Garner’s SNOOTitude in fact while undercutting it in tone. For one thing, whereas the traditional usage pundit cultivates a remote and imperial persona—the kind who uses one or we to refer to himself—Garner gives us an almost Waltonishly endearing sketch of his own background:

  I realized early—at the age of 15[11]—that my primary intellectual interest was the use of the English language.… It became an all-consuming passion.… I read everything I could find on the subject. Then, on a wintry evening while visiting New Mexico at the age of 16, I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage. I was enthralled. Never had I held a more exciting book.… Suffice it to say that by the time I was 18, I had committed to memory most of Fowler, Partridge, and their successors.

  Although this reviewer regrets the bio-sketch’s failure to mention the rather significant social costs of being an adolescent whose overriding passion is English usage,12 the critical hat is off to yet another personable preface-section, one that Garner entitles “First Principles”: “Before going any further, I should explain my approach. That’s an unusual thing for the author of a usage dictionary to do—unprecedented, as far as I know. But a guide to good writing is only as good as the principles on which it’s based. And users should be naturally interested in those principles. So, in the interests of full disclosure…”13

  The “unprecedented” and “full disclosure” here are actually good-natured digs at Garner’s Fowlerite predecessors, and a slight nod to one camp in the wars that have raged in both lexicography and education ever since the notoriously liberal Webster’s Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included terms like heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them. You can think of Webster’s Third as sort of the Fort Sumter of the contemporary Usage Wars. These wars are both the context and the target of a very subtle rhetorical strategy in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and without talking about them it’s impossible to explain why Garner’s book is both so good and so sneaky.

  We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance.14 Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who exactly decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed substandard or incorrect. Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what’s OK and what isn’t? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradition won’t work, because what’s considered correct changes over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular took a singular conjugation—“You is.” Earlier still, the standard 2-S pronoun wasn’t you but thou. Huge numbers of now-acceptable words like clever, fun, banter, and prestigious entered English as what usage authorities considered errors or egregious slang. And not just usage conventions but English itself changes over time; if it didn’t, we’d all still be talking like Chaucer. Who’s to say which changes are natural and good and which are corruptions? And when Bryan Garner or E. Ward Gilman do in fact presume to say, why should we believe them?

  These sorts of questions are not new, but they do now have a certain urgency. America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters of language. In brief, the same sorts of political upheavals that produced everything from Kent State to Independent Counsels have produced an influential contra-SNOOT school for whom normative standards of English grammar and usage are functions of nothing but custom and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language experts boss them around. See for example MIT’s Steven Pinker in a famous New Republic article—“Once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the writing establishment, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations”—or, at a somewhat lower emotional pitch, Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way:

  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 p
assage. 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 ēthos, 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 howled19 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 ties20) 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. Bloomfield23 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 Males26 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 CHARGE
D 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.