46 (Plus it’s true that whether something gets called a “subdialect” or “jargon” seems to depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community. Garner himself has miniessays on airplanese, computerese, legalese, and bureaucratese, and he more or less calls all of them jargon. There is no ADMAU miniessay on dialects, but there is one on jargon, in which such is Garner’s self-restraint that you can almost hear his tendons straining, as in “[Jargon] arises from the urge to save time and space — and occasionally to conceal meaning from the uninitiated.”) (back to text)
47 (a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it from?” isn’t redundant [mainly because whence has receded into semi-archaism]) (back to text)
48 E.g., for a long time English had a special 2-S present conjugation — “thou lovest,” “thou sayest” — that now survives only in certain past tenses (and in the present of to be, where it consists simply in giving the 2-S a plural inflection). (back to text)
49 A synthetic language uses grammatical inflections to dictate syntax, whereas an analytic languages uses word order. Latin, German, and Russian are synthetic; English and Chinese are analytic. (back to text)
50 (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smith’s cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus of 1568.) (back to text)
51 N.B., though, that he’s sane about it. Some split infinitives really are clunky and hard to parse, especially when there are a lot of words between to and the verb (“We will attempt to swiftly and to the best of our ability respond to these charges”), which Garner calls “wide splits” and sensibly discourages. His overall verdict on split infinitives — which is that some are “perfectly proper” and some iffy and some just totally bad news, and that no one wide tidy dogmatic ukase can handle all s.i. cases, and thus that “knowing when to split an infinitive requires a good ear and a keen eye” — is a fine example of the way Garner distinguishes sound and helpful Descriptivist objections from wacko or dogmatic objections and then incorporates the sound objections into a smarter and more flexible Prescriptivism. (back to text)
52 (It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides SWE.) (back to text)
53AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #1 The SNOOTlet is, as it happens, an indispensable part of the other children’s playground education. School and peers are kids’ first socialization outside the family. In learning about Groups and Group tectonics, the kids are naturally learning that a Group’s identity depends as much on exclusion as inclusion. They are, in other words, starting to learn about Us and Them, and about how an Us always needs a Them because being not-Them is essential to being Us. Because they’re little children and it’s school, the obvious Them is the teachers and all the values and appurtenances of the teacher-world. * This teacher-Them helps the kids see how to start to be an Us, but the SNOOTlet completes the puzzle by providing a kind of missing link: he is the traitor, the Us who is in fact not Us but Them. The SNOOTlet, who at first appears to be one of Us because like Us he’s three feet tall and runny-nosed and eats paste, nevertheless speaks an erudite SWE that signals membership not in Us but in Them, which since Us is defined as not-Them is equivalent to a rejection of Us that is also a betrayal of Us precisely because the SNOOTlet is a kid, i.e., one of Us. Point: The SNOOTlet is teaching his peers that the criteria for membership in Us are not just age, height, paste-ingestion, etc., that in fact Us is primarily a state of mind and a set of sensibilities. An ideology. The SNOOTlet is also teaching the kids that Us has to be extremely vigilant about persons who may at first appear to be Us but are in truth not Us and may need to be identified and excluded at a moment’s notice. The SNOOTlet is not the only type of child who can serve as traitor: the Teacher’s Pet, the Tattletale, the Brown-Noser, and the Mama’s Boy can also do nicely… just as the Damaged and Deformed and Fat and Generally Troubled children all help the nascent mainstream Us-Groups refine the criteria for in- and exclusion. In these crude and fluid formations of ideological Groupthink lies American kids’ real socialization. We all learn early that community and Discourse Community are the same thing, and a fearsome thing indeed. It helps to know where We come from. (back to text)
54 (Elementary Ed professors really do talk this way.) (back to text)
55AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #2 And by the time the SNOOTlet hits adolescence it’ll have supplanted the family to become the most important Group. And it will be a Group that depends for its definition on a rejection of traditional Authority. * And because it is the recognized dialect of mainstream adult society, there is no better symbol of traditional Authority than SWE. It is not an accident that adolescence is the time when slang and code and subdialects of subdialects explode all over the place and parents begin to complain that they can hardly even understand their kids’ language. Nor are lyrics like “I can’t get no / Satisfaction” an accident or any kind of sad commentary on the British educational system. Jagger et al. aren’t stupid; they’re rhetoricians, and they know their audience. (back to text)
56 (The skirt-in-school scenario was not personal stuff, though, FYI.) (back to text)
57 There is a respectable body of English-Ed research to back up this claim, the best known being the Harris, Bateman-Zidonis, and Mellon studies of the 1960s. (back to text)
58 There are still some of them around, at least here in the Midwest. You know the type: lipless, tweedy, cancrine — old maids of both genders. If you ever had one (as I did, 1976–77), you surely remember him. (back to text)
59INTERPOLATIVE BUT RELEVANT, IF ONLY BECAUSE THE ERROR HERE IS ONE THAT GARNER’S ADMAU MANAGES NEVER ONCE TO MAKEThis kind of mistake results more from a habit of mind than from any particular false premise — it is a function not of fallacy or ignorance but of self-absorption. It also happens to be the most persistent and damaging error that most college writers make, and one so deeply rooted that it often takes several essays and conferences and revisions to get them to even see what the problem is. Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you’re trying to argue for. Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually incredibly hard to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract, (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more things of the spirit. The injunctions require of the student both the imagination to conceive of the reader as a separate human being and the empathy to realize that this separate person has preferences and confusions and beliefs of her own, p/c/b’s that are just as deserving of respectful consideration as the writer’s. More, (1) and (2) require of students the humility to distinguish between a universal truth (“This is the way things are, and only an idiot would disagree”) and something that the writer merely opines (“My reasons for recommending this are as follows:”). These sorts of requirements are, of course, also the elements of a Democratic Spirit. I therefore submit that the hoary cliché “Teaching the student to write is teaching the student to think” sells the enterprise way short. Thinking isn’t even half of it. (back to text)