The reality I care about most is that some people still want to use the language well. [78] They want to write effectively; they want to speak effectively. They want their language to be graceful at times and powerful at times. They want to understand how to use words well, how to manipulate sentences, and how to move about in the language without seeming to flail. They want good grammar, but they want more: they want rhetoric [79] in the traditional sense. That is, they want to use the language deftly so that it’s fit for their purposes.
It’s now possible to see that all the autobiographical stuff in ADMAU’s preface does more than just humanize Mr. Bryan A. Garner. It also serves to detail the early and enduring passion that helps make someone a credible technocrat — we tend to like and trust experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of just a desire to be expert at something. In fact, it turns out that ADMAU’s preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with every single qualification of modern technocratic authority: passionate devotion, reason and accountability (recall “in the interests of full disclosure, here are the ten critical points …”), experience (“… that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on”), exhaustive and tech-savvy research (“For contemporary usage, the files of our greatest dictionary makers pale in comparison with the full-text search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WESTLAW” 80), an even and judicious temperament (see e.g. this from his HYPERCORRECTION: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately” 81), and the sort of humble integrity (for instance, including in one of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that not only renders Garner likable but transmits the kind of reverence for English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one person.
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.
BONUS FULL-DISCLOSURE INFO ON THE SOURCES OF CERTAIN STUFF THAT DOES OR SHOULD APPEAR INSIDE QUOTATION MARKS IN THIS ARTICLE
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.