Consider the Lobster (39 page)

²
I’m not referring to lost-in-translation stuff here. Tonight’s whole occasion
^[*]
notwithstanding, I have to confess that I have very little German, and the Kafka I know and teach is Mr. and Mrs. Muir’s Kafka, and though Lord only knows how much more I’m missing, the funniness I’m talking about is funniness that’s right there in the good old Muirs’ English version.
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³
There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche. A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development — the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn
*
— it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is
escape,
i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s understandable that most of us are going to view “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, or maybe even see it as a repulsive instance of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite.
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⁶¹
* (or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT)
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¹
(the best and most substantial of these being
The American Heritage Book of English Usage,
Jean Eggenschwiler’s
Writing: Grammar, Usage, and Style,
and Oxford/Clarendon’s own
The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage
)
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²
The New Fowler’s
is also extremely comprehensive and fine, but its emphasis is on British usage.
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³
Sorry about this phrase; I hate this phrase, too. This happens to be one of those very rare times when “historical context” is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn’t even worse (I actually tried “lexico-temporal backdrop” in one of the middle drafts, which I think you’ll agree is not preferable).

INTERPOLATION

The above ¶ is motivated by the fact that this reviewer nearly always sneers and/or winces when he sees a phrase like “historical context” deployed in a piece of writing and thus hopes to head off any potential sneers/winces from the reader here, especially in an article about felicitous usage. One of the little personal lessons I’ve learned in working on this essay is that being chronically inclined to sneer/wince at other people’s usage tends to make me chronically anxious about other people’s sneering/wincing at my usage. It is, of course, possible that this bivalence is news to nobody but me; it may be just a straightforward instance of Matt. 7:1’s thing about “Judge not lest ye be judged.” In any case, the anxiety seems worth acknowledging up front.
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⁴
One of the claim-clusters I’m going to spend a lot of both our time arguing for is that issues of English usage are fundamentally and inescapably political, and that putatively disinterested linguistic authorities like dictionaries are always the products of certain ideologies, and that as authorities they are accountable to the same basic standards of sanity and honesty and fairness as our political authorities.
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⁵
SNOOT (
n
) (
highly colloq
) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one.
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⁶
This is true in my own case, at any rate — plus also the “uncomfortable” part. I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced
only
can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to
chill about usage
this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one — it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else.
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⁷
N.B. that this article’s own title page features blocks of the typical sorts of contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that tend to make a SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. (N.B. further that it took only about a week of semi-attentive listening and note-taking to assemble these blocks — the Evil is all around us.)
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⁸
Please note that the strategically repeated 1-P pronoun is meant to iterate and emphasize that this reviewer is very much one too, a SNOOT, plus to connote the nuclear family mentioned
supra
. SNOOTitude runs in families. In
ADMAU’
s preface, Bryan Garner mentions both his father and grandfather and actually uses the word
genetic,
and it’s probably true: 90 percent of the SNOOTs I know have at least one parent who is, by profession or temperament or both, a SNOOT. In my own case, my mom is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sorts of subtle ways. Here’s an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually
denying you oxygen
by speaking incorrectly. The really chilling thing, though, is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same “game” with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.

INTERPOLATION

As something I’m all but sure
Harper’s
will excise, I will also insert that we even had a fun but retrospectively chilling little family
song
that Mom and we little SNOOTlets would sing in the car on long trips while Dad silently rolled his eyes and drove (you have to remember the theme to
Underdog
in order to follow the song):

When idiots in this world appear

And fail to be concise or clear

And solecisms rend the ear

The cry goes up both far and near

for Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Pen of iron, tongue of fire

Tightening the wid’ning gyre

Blunderdo-O-O-O-O-O-O... [etc.]
*

⁹
(It seems to be a natural law that camps form only in opposition to other camps and that there are always at least two w/r/t any difficult issue.)
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¹⁰
If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field, from Eric Partridge’s
Usage and Abusage
to Theodore Bernstein’s
The Careful Writer
to Wilson Follett’s
Modern American Usage
to Gilman’s ’89
Webster’s
.
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¹¹
(Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten. I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20.
De gustibus non est disputandum
.)
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¹²
From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and repeatedly Wedgied — see
sub
.
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¹³
What follow in the preface are “the ten critical points that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on.” These points are too involved to treat separately, but a couple of them are slippery in the extreme — e.g., “10.
Actual Usage
. In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness,” of which both “educated” and “actual” would really require several pages of abstract clarification and qualification to shore up against Usage Wars–related attacks, but which Garner rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in his dictionary itself. Garner’s ability not only to stay out of certain arguments but to render them irrelevant ends up being very important — see much
sub
.
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¹⁴
There’s no better indication of The Dictionary’s authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this day living down the outcome of a high-stakes bet on the correct spelling of
meringue,
a bet made on 14 September 1978.
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¹⁵
This is a clever half-truth. Linguists compose only one part of the anti-judgment camp, and their objections to usage judgments involve way more than just “subjectivity.”
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¹⁶
Notice, please, the subtle appeal here to the same “writing establishment” that Steven Pinker scorns. This isn’t accidental; it’s rhetorical.
^*
What’s crafty is that this is one of several places where Garner uses professional writers and editors as support for his claims, but in the preface he also treats these language pros as the primary
audience
for
ADMAU,
as in e.g. “The problem for professional writers and editors is that they can’t wait idly to see what direction the language takes. Writers and editors, in fact, influence that direction: they must make decisions.… That has traditionally been the job of the usage dictionary: to help writers and editors solve editorial predicaments.”

This is the same basic rhetorical move that President R. W. Reagan perfected in his televised Going-Over-Congress’s-Head-to-the-People addresses, one that smart politicians ever since have imitated. It consists in citing the very audience you’re addressing as the source of support for your proposals: “I’m pleased to announce tonight that we are taking the first steps toward implementing the policies that you elected me to implement,” etc. The tactic is crafty because it (1) flatters the audience, (2) disguises the fact that the rhetor’s purpose here is actually to persuade and rally support, not to inform or celebrate, and (3) preempts charges from the loyal opposition that the actual policy proposed is in any way contrary to the interests of the audience. I’m not suggesting that Bryan Garner has any particular political agenda. I’m simply pointing out that
ADMAU’
s preface is fundamentally rhetorical in the same way that Reagan’s little Chats With America were.
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¹⁷
See?
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¹⁸
In this last respect, recall for example W. J. Clinton’s “I feel your pain,” which was a blatant if not especially deft Ethical Appeal.
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