Consider the Lobster (16 page)

Probably the most ingenious and attractive thing about his dictionary’s Ethical Appeal, though, is Garner’s scrupulousness about considering the reader’s own hopes and fears and reasons for caring enough about usage to bother with something like
ADMAU
at all. These reasons, as Garner makes clear, tend to derive from a reader’s concern about his/her
own
linguistic authority and rhetorical persona and ability to convince an audience that he/she cares. Again and again, Garner frames his prescriptions in rhetorical terms: “To the writer or speaker for whom credibility is important, it’s a good idea to avoid distracting
any
readers or listeners”; “Whatever you do, if you use
data
in a context in which its number becomes known, you’ll bother some of your readers.”
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage’
s real thesis, in other words, is that the purposes of the expert authority and the purposes of the lay reader are identical, and identically rhetorical—which I submit is about as Democratic these days as you’re going to get.

p. 67 “Distinguished Usage Panel …” = Morris Bishop, “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage,” an intro to the 1976 New College Edition of
published by Houghton Mifflin Co.

p. 67 “Calling upon the opinions of the elite …” = John Ottenhoff, “The Perils of Prescriptivism: Usage Notes and
”
v. 31 #3, 1996, p. 274.

p. 73-74 “I realized early …” =
preface, pp. xiv-xv.

p. 74 “Before going any …” =
p. x.

p. 74 FN 13 “the ten critical points … ” =
pp. x-xi.

p. 75-76 “Once introduced, a prescriptive …” = Steven Pinker, “Grammar Puss” (excerpted from ch. 12 of Pinker’s book
Morrow, 1994), which appeared in the
on 31 Jan. ’94 (p. 20). Some of the subsequent Pinker quotations are from the
excerpt because they tend to be more compact.

p. 76 “Who sets down … ?” = p. 141 of Bryson’s
(Avon, 1990).

pp. 76-77 “As you might already …” =
, preface, p. xiii.

p. 76 FN 16 “The problem for professional …” =
p. xi; plus the traditional-type definition of
is adapted from p. 1114 of the 1976
.

p. 78 “The arrant solecisms …” = Bishop, 1976
intro, p. xxiii.

p. 78 “The English language is being …” = John Simon,
(Crown, 1980), p. 106.

p. 79 FN 19 “We have seen a novel …” = Wilson Follett, “Sabotage in Springfield,” the
January ’62, p. 73.

p. 79 “A dictionary should have no …” = P. Gove in a letter to the
replying to their howling editorial, said letter reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt, eds.,
That
(Scott, Foresman, 1962), p. 88.

p. 79 FN 21 Newman’s “I have no wish …” =
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 10.

pp. 79-80 Simon’s “As for ‘I be,’ …” =
pp. 165-166.

p. 80 FN 22 The Partridge quotation is from p. 36 of
(Hamish Hamilton, 1947). The Fowler snippet is from
(Oxford, 1927), pp. 540-541.

pp. 80-81 “Somewhere along the line …” =
preface, p. xi.

p. 81 FN 25 “The most bothersome …” =
preface, p. xv.

p. 83 “1—Language changes …” = Philip Gove, “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography,” Introduction to
Reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt; Gove’s axioms appear therein on p. 67.

p. 84 FN 28 “the English normally expected …” = p. 459 of
Fourth Edition (Scott, Foresman, 1989).

pp. 87-88 FN 32 Norman Malcolm’s exegesis of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument (which argument occupies sections 258-265 of the
) appears in Malcolm’s
(Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 98-99.

p. 89 “A dictionary can be …” = “Usage Levels and Dialect Distribution,” intro to the
(Random House, 1962), p. xxv; reprinted in Gove’s letter to the
.

pp. 91-92 “[T]he words ‘rule’ …” = S. Pinker,
p. 371. The chunk also appears in Pinker’s “Grammar Puss”
article, p. 19.

p. 92 FN 36 “No one, not even …” =
p. 372.

pp. 92-93 “When a scientist …” = “Grammar Puss,” p. 19.

p. 96 FN 40 Garner’s
miniessay is on
s pp. 124-126.

p. 99 FN 46 “[Jargon] arises from …” =
p. 390.

p. 100 FN 51 “knowing when to split …” =
pp. 616-617.

p. 101 “hotly disputed …” =
s
miniessay, which is on pp. 603-604.

p. 105 FN 57 A concise overview of these studies can be found in Janice Neuleib’s “The Relation of Formal Grammar to Composition,”
October ’77.

p. 110 FN 62 Dr. Schwartz and the Task Force are listed as the authors of
(Indiana U. Press, 1995), in which the quoted sentence appears on p. 28. The Forster snippet is from the opening chapter of
.

p. 112 FN 65 “vogue words have such a grip …” =
p. 682.

p. 114 “At first encounter …” = Karen Volkman’s review of Michael Palmer’s
in the
October ’98, p. 6.

p. 114 FN 66 The
miniessay is on p. 462 of
.

p. 114 “This is the best and only way …” = President Clinton verbatim in mid-November ’98.

pp. 114-115 & p. 115 FN 67 Quoted bits of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” are from the essay as it appears in, e.g., Hunt and Perry, eds.,
Fifth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 670-682.

p. 115 FN 68 The Jameson sentence also appears in
s miniessay on
, p. 462; plus it appears in the same
article mentioned in FN 66.

p. 122 The various quoted definitions of
here come from
Third Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 124.

p. 123 “The reality I care about …” =
preface, pp. ix-x. The next five quotation-snippets—on pp. 123-124 and in FN 80—are also from the preface.

p. 124 “Sometimes people strive to …” =
p. 345.

p. 124 “To the writer or speaker for whom …” =
p. 604.

p. 124 “Whatever you do …” =
p. 186.

1999

LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS

DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER 2001

SUBJECT: OBVIOUS

SYNECDOCHE
In true Midwest fashion, people in Bloomington aren’t unfriendly but do tend to be reserved. A stranger will smile warmly at you, but there normally won’t be any of that strangerly chitchat in waiting areas or checkout lines. But now, thanks to the Horror, there’s something to talk about that overrides all inhibition, as if we were somehow all standing right there and just saw the same traffic accident. Example: Overheard in the checkout line at Burwell Oil (which is sort of the Neiman Marcus of gas station/ convenience store plazas—centrally located athwart both one-way main drags, and with the best tobacco prices in town, it’s a municipal treasure) between a lady in an Osco cashier’s smock and a man in a dungaree jacket cut off at the shoulders to make a sort of homemade vest: “With my boys they thought it was all some movie like that
Independence Day,
till then they started to notice how it was the same movie on all the channels.” (The lady didn’t say how old her boys were.)

WEDNESDAY
Everyone has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: you never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small, regular flag-sized flags. A lot of homeowners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. Plus thousands of the little handheld flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades—some yards have dozens of these stuck in the ground all over, as if they’d somehow all just sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. A good number of vehicles have them wedged in their grille or attached to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast. More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multistory flags hanging gonfalon-style down over their facades. It’s a total mystery where people can buy flags this big or how they got them up there, or when.

My own next-door neighbor, a retired bookkeeper and USAF vet whose home- and lawn-care are nothing short of phenomenal, has a regulation-size anodized flagpole secured in eighteen inches of reinforced cement that none of the other neighbors like very much because they feel it draws lightning. He says there’s a very particular etiquette to having your flag at half-mast: you’re supposed to first run it all the way up to the finial at the top and
then
bring it halfway down. Otherwise it’s some kind of insult. His flag is out straight and popping smartly in the wind. It’s far and away the biggest flag on our street. You can also hear the wind in the cornfields just south; it sounds roughly the way light surf sounds when you’re two dunes back from the shore. Mr. N—-’s pole’s halyard has metal elements that clank against the pole when it’s windy, which is something else the neighbors don’t much care for. His driveway and mine are almost right together, and he’s out here on a stepladder polishing his pole with some kind of special ointment and a chamois cloth—I shit you not—although in the morning sun it’s true that his metal pole does shine like God’s own wrath.

“Hell of a nice flag and display apparatus, Mr. N—-.”

“Ought to be. Cost enough.”

“Seen all the other flags out everywhere this morning?”

This gets him to look down and smile, if a bit grimly. “Something, isn’t it.” Mr. N—- is not what you’d call the friendliest next-door neighbor. I really only know him because his church and mine are in the same softball league, for which he serves with great seriousness and precision as his team’s statistician. We are not close. Nevertheless he’s the first one I ask:

“Say, Mr. N—-, suppose somebody like a foreign person or a TV reporter or something were to come by and ask you what the purpose of all these flags after what happened yesterday was, exactly—what do you think you’d say?”

“Why” (after a little moment of him giving me the same sort of look he usually gives my lawn), “to show our support towards what’s going on, as Americans.”
^*

The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to make a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you
don’t
have a flag out. It’s not totally clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t happen to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the Fourth of July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they know to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under
Flag
. At some point there starts to be actual tension. Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, how come your house doesn’t have a flag?,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine them thinking it. Even a sort of half-collapsed house down the street that everybody thought was abandoned has one of the little flags on a stick in the weeds by the driveway. None of Bloomington’s grocery stores turn out to stock flags. The big novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are actually open, but even the closed ones are now displaying some sort of flag. It’s almost surreal. The VFW hall is obviously a good bet, but it can’t open until noon if at all (it has a bar). The counter lady at Burwell Oil references a certain hideous KWIK-N-EZ convenience store out by I-55 at which she’s pretty sure she recalls seeing some little plastic flags back in the racks with all the bandannas and NASCAR caps, but by the time I get down there they all turn out to be gone, snapped up by parties unknown. The cold reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody’s yard is clearly just out of the question. I’m standing in a fluorescent-lit KWIK-N-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn’t get really bad until people come over and ask if I’m OK and I have to lie and say it’s a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen).

… And so on until, in one more of the Horror’s weird twists of fate and circumstance, it’s the KWIK-N-EZ proprietor himself (a Pakistani, by the way) who offers solace and a shoulder and a strange kind of unspoken understanding, and who lets me go back and sit in the stockroom amid every conceivable petty vice and indulgence America has to offer and compose myself, and who only slightly later, over styrofoam cups of a strange kind of perfumey tea with a great deal of milk in it, suggests construction paper and “Magical Markers,” which explains my now-beloved and proudly displayed homemade flag.

AERIAL & GROUND VIEWS
Everyone here gets the local news organ, the
Pantagraph,
which is roundly loathed by most of the natives I know. Imagine, let’s say, a well-funded college newspaper co-edited by Bill O’Reilly and Martha Stewart. Wednesday’s headline is:
After two pages of AP stuff, you get to the real
Pantagraph
. Everything to follow is
sic
. Wednesday’s big local headers are: STUNNED CITIZENS RUN THROUGH MANY EMOTIONS; CLERGY OPEN ARMS TO HELP PEOPLE DEAL WITH TRAGEDY; ISU PROFESSOR: B-N NOT A LIKELY TARGET; PRICES ROCKET AT GAS PUMPS; AMPUTEE GIVES INSPIRATIONAL SPEECH. There’s a half-page photo of a student at Bloomington Central Catholic HS saying the rosary in response to the Horror, which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer. The Op-Ed column for 9/12 starts out: “The carnage we have seen through the eyes of lenses in New York City and Washington, D.C., still seems like an R-rated movie out of Hollywood.”