The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  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.’

  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?”

  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.

  43 (… not to mention color, gender, ethnicity—you can see how fraught and charged all this is going to get)

  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.*

  * (The above, while true, is an obvious attempt to preempt readerly sneers/winces at the term’s continued deployment in this article.)

  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 subdialect 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.

  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.”)

  47 (a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it from?” isn’t redundant [mainly because whence has receded into semi-archaism])

  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).

  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.

  50 (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smith’s cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus of 1568.)

  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.

  52 (It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides SWE.)

  53 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 BrownNoser, 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.

  * (Plus, because the teacher-Them are tall humorless punishers/rewarders, they come to stand for all adults and—in a shadowy, inchoate way—for the Parents, whose gradual shift from composing Us to defining Them is probably the biggest ideological adjustment of childhood.)

  54 (Elementary Ed professors really do talk this way.)

  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.

  * (That is, the teacher-/parent-Them becomes the Establishment, Society—Them becomes THEM.)

  56 (The skirt-in-school scenario was not personal stuf
f, though, FYI.)

  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.

  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.

  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.

  60 (Or rather the arguments require us openly to acknowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a traditional dogmatic SNOOT’s pedagogy is merely elitism in action.)

  61 (I’m not a total idiot.)

  62 ESPECIALLY GOOD EPIGRAPHS FOR THIS SECTION

  “Passive voice verbs, in particular, may deny female agency.”

  —DR. MARILYN SCHWARTZ AND THE TASK FORCE ON BIAS-FREE LANGUAGE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES

  “He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved.”

  —E. M. FORSTER

  63 (A pithier way to put this is that politeness is not the same as fairness.)

  64 E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists’ complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization.

  65 A Dictionary of Modern American Usage includes a miniessay on VOGUE WORDS, but it’s a disappointing one in which Garner does little more than list VWs that bug him and say that “vogue words have such a grip on the popular mind that they come to be used in contexts in which they serve little purpose.” This is one of the rare places in ADMAU where Garner is simply wrong. The real problem is that every sentence blends and balances at least two different communicative functions—one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker—and Vogue Usage throws this balance off. Garner’s “serve little purpose” is exactly incorrect: vogue words serve too much the purpose of presenting the speaker in a certain light (even if this is merely as with-it or hip), and people’s odd little subliminal BS-antennae pick this imbalance up, and that’s why even nonSNOOTs often find Vogue Usages irritating and creepy. It’s the same phenomenon as when somebody goes out of her way to be incredibly solicitous and complimentary and nice to you and after a while you begin to find her solicitude creepy: you are sensing that a disproportionately large part of this person’s agenda consists in trying to present herself as Nice.

  66 FYI, this snippet, which appears in ADMAU’s miniessay on OBSCURITY, is quoted from a 1997 Sacramento Bee article entitled “No Contest: English Professors Are Worst Writers on Campus.”

  67 This was in his 1946 “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that despite its date (and the basic redundancy of its title) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell’s famous AE translation of the gorgeous “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift” part of Ecclesiastes as “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account” should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world.

  68 If you still think assertions like that are just SNOOT hyperbole, see also e.g. Dr. Fredric Jameson, author of The Geopolitical Aesthetic and The Prison-House of Language, whom The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism calls “one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English.” Specifically, have a look at the first sentence of Dr. Jameson’s 1992 Signatures of the Visible—

  The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

  —in which not only is each of its three main independent clauses totally obscure and full of predicates without evident subjects and pronouns without clear antecedents, but whatever connection between those clauses justifies stringing them together into one long semicolonic sentence is anyone’s guess at all.

  Please be advised (a) that the above sentence won 1997’s First Prize in the World’s Worst Writing Contest held annually at Canterbury University in New Zealand, a competition in which American academics regularly sweep the field, and (b) that F. Jameson was and is an extremely powerful and influential and oft-cited figure in US literary scholarship, which means (c) that if you have kids in college, there’s a good chance that they are being taught how to write by high-paid adults for whom the above sentence is a model of erudite English prose.

  69 Even in Freshman Comp, bad student essays are far, far more often the products of fear than of laziness or incompetence. In fact, it often takes so long to identify and help with students’ fear that the Freshman Comp teacher never gets to find out whether they might have other problems, too.

  70 (Notice the idiom’s syntax—it’s never “expresses his beliefs” or “expresses his ideas.”)

  71 (Please just don’t even say it.)

  72 (The student professed to have been especially traumatized by the climactic “I am going to make you,” which was indeed a rhetorical boner.)

  73 FYI, the dept. chair and dean did not, at the Complaint hearing, share her reaction… though it would be disingenuous not to tell you that they happened also to be PWMs, which fact was also remarked on by the complainant, such that the whole proceeding got pretty darn tense indeed, before it was over.

  74 To be honest, I noticed this omission only because midway through working on this article I happened to use the word trough in front of the same SNOOT friend who compares public English to violin-hammering, and he fell sideways out of his chair, and it emerged that I have somehow all my life misheard trough as ending with a th instead of an f and thus have publicly mispronounced it God only knows how many score
s of times, and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether perhaps the error was so common and human and understandable that ADMAU had a good-natured entry on it—but no such luck, which in fairness I don’t suppose I can really blame Garner for.

  75 (on zwieback vs. zweiback)

  76 It’s this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics—how does one vote for No More Voting?

  77 (meaning literally Democratic—it Wants Your Vote)

  78 The last two words of this sentence, of course, are what the Usage Wars are all about—whose “language” and whose “well”? The most remarkable thing about the sentence is that coming from Garner it doesn’t sound naive or obnoxious but just… reasonable.

  79 (Did you think I was kidding?)

  80 Cunning—what is in effect Garner’s blowing his own archival horn is cast as humble gratitude for the resources made available by modern technology. Plus notice also Garner’s implication here that he’s once again absorbed the sane parts of Descriptivism’s cast-a-wide-net method: “Thus, the prescriptive approach here is leavened by a thorough canvassing of actual usage in modern edited prose.”

  81 (Here, this reviewer’s indwelling and ever-vigilant SNOOT can’t help but question Garner’s deployment of a comma before the conjunction in this sentence, since what follows the conjunction is neither an independent clause nor any sort of plausible complement for “strive to.” But respectful disagreement between people of goodwill is of course Democratically natural and healthy and, when you come right down to it, kind of fun.)