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Harper's Magazine April, 2001 Tense Present.
Author/s: David Foster Wallace Democrat, English, and the Wars over Usage Discussed in this essay: A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner. Oxford University Press, 1998. 723 pages. $35. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler. Oxford University Press, 1926. Rev. by Sir Ernest Gowers, 1965. 725 pages. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker. William Morrow and Company, 1994. 494 pages. Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, E. W. Gilman, ed. Merriam-Webster Inc., 1989. 978 pages. Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, by Eric Partridge. Hamish Hamilton, 1957.392 pages. Dilige et quod vis fac. ST. AUGUSTINE Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad 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 an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism? Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly? | |
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