74 To be honest, I noticed this omission only because midway through working on this article I happened to use the word trough in front of the same SNOOT friend who compares public English to violin-hammering, and he fell sideways out of his chair, and it emerged that I have somehow all my life misheard trough as ending with a th instead of an f and thus have publicly mispronounced it God only knows how many scores of times, and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether perhaps the error was so common and human and understandable that ADMAU had a good-natured entry on it — but no such luck, which in fairness I don’t suppose I can really blame Garner for. (back to text)
75 (on zwieback vs. zweiback) (back to text)
76 It’s this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics — how does one vote for No More Voting? (back to text)
77 (meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote) (back to text)
78 The last two words of this sentence, of course, are what the Usage Wars are all about — whose “language” and whose “well”? The most remarkable thing about the sentence is that coming from Garner it doesn’t sound naive or obnoxious but just… reasonable. (back to text)
79 (Did you think I was kidding?) (back to text)
8 °Cunning — what is in effect Garner’s blowing his own archival horn is cast as humble gratitude for the resources made available by modern technology. Plus notice also Garner’s implication here that he’s once again absorbed the sane parts of Descriptivism’s cast-a-wide-net method: “Thus, the prescriptive approach here is leavened by a thorough canvassing of actual usage in modern edited prose.” (back to text)
81 (Here, this reviewer’s indwelling and ever-vigilant SNOOT can’t help but question Garner’s deployment of a comma before the conjunction in this sentence, since what follows the conjunction is neither an independent clause nor any sort of plausible complement for “strive to.” But respectful disagreement between people of goodwill is of course Democratically natural and healthy and, when you come right down to it, kind of fun.) (back to text)
144 * Plus: Selected other responses from various times during the day’s flag-hunt when circumstances permitted the question to be asked without one seeming like a smartass or loon:
“To show we’re Americans and we’re not going to bow down to nobody”;
“It’s a classic pseudo-archetype, a reflexive semion designed to preempt and negate the critical function” (grad student);
“For pride.”
“What they do is symbolize unity and that we’re all together behind the victims in this war and they’ve fucked with the wrong people this time, amigo.” (back to text)
145 * Pace some people’s impression, the native accent around here isn’t southern so much as just rural. The town’s corporate transplants, on the other hand, have no accent at all — in Mrs. Bracero’s phrase, State Farm people “sound like the folks on TV.” (back to text)
146 † People here are deeply, deeply into lawn-care; my own neighbors mow about as often as they shave. (back to text)
147 * Mrs. Thompson’s living room is prototypical working-class Bloomington, too: double-pane windows, white Sears curtains w/ valence, catalogue clock with a background of mallards, woodgrain magazine rack with CSM and Reader’s Digest, inset bookshelves used to display little collectible figurines and framed photos of relatives and their families. There are two knit samplers w/ the Desiderata and Prayer of St. Francis, antimacassars on every good chair, and wall-to-wall carpet so thick that you can’t see your feet (people take their shoes off at the door — it’s basic common courtesy). (back to text)
148 * AP reporter Michael Mewshaw’s Short Circuit (Atheneum, 1983) is just one example of national-press stuff about drugs on the tour. (back to text)
149 * Or listen again to her report of how winning her first US Open felt: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.” This line haunts me; it’s like the whole letdown of the book boiled down into one dead bite. (back to text)
150 * Here I should point out that this RS editor, whose name was Mr. Tonelli, delivered the length-and-space verdict with sympathy and good humor, and that he was pretty much a mensch through the whole radically ablative editorial process that followed, which process was itself unusually rushed and stressful because right in the middle of it (the process) came Super Tuesday’s bloodbath, and McCain really did drop out — Mr. Tonelli was actually watching McCain’s announcement on his office TV while we were doing the first round of cuts on the telephone — and apparently Rolling Stone’s top brass’s fear of looking stupid came roaring back into their limbic system and they told poor Mr. Tonelli that the article had to be all of a sudden crammed into the very next issue of RS, even though that issue was scheduled to “close” and go to the printer in less than 48 hours, which, if you know anything about magazines’ normally interminable editing and fact-checking and copyediting and typesetting and proofreading and retype-setting and layout and printing processes, you’ll understand why Mr. Tonelli’s good humor through the whole thing was noteworthy. (back to text)
151 * In particular I never got to talk to Mr. Mike Murphy, who if you read the document you’ll understand why he’d be the one McCain staffer you’d just about give a nut to get three or four drinks into and then start probing. Despite sustained pestering and sleeve-tugging and pride-swallowing appeals to the Head Press Liaison for even just ten lousy minutes, though — and even after RS’s Mr. Tonelli himself called McCain2000 HQ in Virginia to bitch and wheedle — Mike Murphy avoided this reporter to the point of actually starting to duck around corners whenever he saw me coming. The unending pursuit of this one interview (what eventually in my notebook got called “MurphyQuest 2000”) actually turned into one of the great personal subdramas of the week, and there’s a whole very lengthy and sordid story to tell here, including some embarrassing but probably in retrospect kind of funny attempts to corner the poor man in all sorts of awkward personal venues where I figured he’d have a hard time escaping… nevertheless the crux here is that Murphy’s total inaccessibility to yrs. truly was not, I finally realized, anything personal, but rather a simple function of my being from Rolling Stone, a (let’s face it) politically featherweight organ whose readership was clearly not part of any GOP demographic that was going to help Mike Murphy’s candidate in SC or MI or any of the other upcoming sink-or-swim primaries. In fact, because the magazine was a biweekly with a long lead time — the Lebanese-Australian lady from the Boston Globe (see document) pointed all this out to yrs. truly after we’d just watched Murphy more or less fake an epileptic seizure to get out of riding in an elevator with me — even a droolingly pro-McCain Rolling Stone article wouldn’t actually appear until after 7 March’s Super Tuesday, by which time, she predicted (correctly), the nomination battle would effectively be over. (back to text)