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.
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 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?