Consider the Lobster (9 page)

Dilige et quod vis fac.

— AUGUSTINE

D
ID YOU KNOW
that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?

For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the “corruption” and “permissiveness” of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special “Distinguished Usage Panel … of outstanding professional speakers and writers” is some dictionaries’ attempt at a compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel device as mere sham-populism, as in e.g. “Calling upon the opinions of the elite, it claims to be a democratic guide”?

Did you know that US lexicography even
had
a seamy underbelly?

The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press’s recent release of Mr. Bryan A. Garner’s
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage,
a book that Oxford is marketing aggressively and that it is my assigned function to review. It turns out to be a complicated assignment. In today’s US, a typical book review is driven by market logic and implicitly casts the reader in the role of consumer. Rhetorically, its whole project is informed by a question that’s too crass ever to mention up front: “Should you buy this book?” And because Bryan A. Garner’s usage dictionary belongs to a particular subgenre of a reference genre that is itself highly specialized and particular, and because at least a dozen major usage guides have been published in the last couple years and some of them have been quite good indeed,
¹
the central unmentionable question here appends the prepositional comparative “… rather than
that
book?” to the main clause and so entails a discussion of whether and how
ADMAU
is different from other recent specialty-products of its kind.

The fact of the matter is that Garner’s dictionary is extremely good, certainly the most comprehensive usage guide since E. W. Gilman’s
Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage,
now a decade out of date.
²
But the really salient and ingenious features of
A Dictionary of Modern American Usage
involve issues of rhetoric and ideology and style, and it is impossible to describe why these issues are important and why Garner’s management of them borders on genius without talking about the historical context
³
in which
ADMAU
appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology,
⁴
and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner’s dictionary so eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar can even be established; and in fact there’s no way even to begin the whole harrowing polymeric discussion without first taking a moment to establish and define the highly colloquial term
SNOOT
.

From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least going to need it—i.e., that offering counsel on the finer points of US English is preaching to the choir. The relevant choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched
The Story of English
on PBS (twice) and read Safire’s column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE—10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear
dialogue
used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of
suppurate
. There are lots of epithets for people like this—Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Grammar Battalion, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is
SNOOT
.
⁵
The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be loosely defined as somebody who knows what
dysphemism
means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

I submit that we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd. There are, granted, plenty of nerd-species in today’s America, and some of these are elitist within their own nerdy purview (e.g., the skinny, carbuncular, semi-autistic Computer Nerd moves instantly up on the totem pole of status when your screen freezes and now you need his help, and the bland condescension with which he performs the two occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid). But the SNOOT’s purview is interhuman life itself. You don’t, after all (despite withering cultural pressure), have to use a computer, but you can’t escape language: language is everything and everywhere; it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another; it’s what separates us from animals; Genesis 11:7-10 and so on. And we SNOOTs know when and how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and to keep participles from dangling, and we know that we know, and we know how very few other Americans know this stuff or even care, and we judge them accordingly.

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable with, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture.
⁶
We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults.
⁷
Plus a dash of the elitism of, say, Billy Zane in
Titanic
—a fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s public English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails. We
⁸
are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.

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 camps
⁹
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: