He doesn't know anything about math either:
'As you've probably begun to see,' David Foster Wallace writes in Everything and More, 'Aristotle manages to be sort of grandly and breathtakingly wrong, always and everywhere, when it comes to infinity...As for Wallace's book, the less said, the better. It's a sloppy production, including neither an index nor a table of contents, and after a while his breezy style grates. No one who is unfamiliar with the ideas behind his dense, user-unfriendly mathematical expositions could work their way through them to gain any insight into what he is talking about. Worse, anyone who is already familiar with these ideas will see that his expositions are often riddled with mistakes. The sections on set theory, in particular, are a disaster. When he lists the standard axioms of set theory from which mathematicians derive theorems about the iterative conception of a set, he gets the very first one wrong. (It is not, as Wallace says, that if two sets have the same members, then they are the same size. It is that two sets never do have the same members.) From there it is pretty much downhill. He goes on to discuss Cantor's unsolved problem, which I mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph. There are many different, equivalent ways of formulating the problem; Wallace gives four. The first and fourth are fine. The second, about whether the real numbers 'constitute' the set of sets of rational numbers, does not, as it stands, make sense. And the third, about whether the cardinal that measures the size of the set of real numbers can be obtained by raising 2 to the power of the smallest infinite cardinal, is simply wrong: we know it can. Any reader keen to gain insights into the infinite would do better to go back to Aristotle.Here's the article, but I've quoted everything having to do with him. I got it from Maud Newton. Posted by PF at December 25, 2003 07:47 PM
Oh dear. I've tried not to let my prejudices run away with me in the matter of DFW, but I'm beginning to wonder if there's any point.
Posted by language hat at December 25, 2003 09:10 PMI have been looking for your comments on the DFW Garner essay for over a year.
I love DFW, but yours is a totally killer demolishing. Or small w "wedgie-ing," if you prefer.
Posted by Jordan at February 27, 2004 06:36 PMWhy, thank you. I'm particularly glad to have it appreciated by a DFW fan, since I've tried to make it clear that I think he's a good writer, just out of his league on this subject (as is only to be expected).
Posted by language hat at February 27, 2004 06:48 PMPoor David. How I love his writing. There was a time when I thought I could learn so much from him. I was team-teaching a grammar course with him one semester--that year an illness took me out of commission. Anyway, he works a class to the point of suicide. Reading your apt remark (DFW's stance): "...nothing more than linguistic elitism, and like any elitism it's used as a club to harm the people least able to fight back. I despise it, and that's why I get testy with anyone who defends it and is used by others to defend it--" I believe--because I've seen him in action--that he's been the victim of that same dehumanizing "club" in his early life. The damage is clearly evident in his all-too-autobiographical writing, by the way. No big revelation. The saddest thing about all this is that yes, he is one of the most "charming and chatty" guys I've ever met. However, DFW's supreme erudition and mesmerizing charm won't save him from being forever the loneliest man on the planet. He makes it so.
Thanks for a most enlightening comment. This is why I hate closing comments on old entries. Spammers, spare this thread!
Posted by language hat at May 21, 2004 04:08 PMAren't you caught in a double bind here? If you choose to attack DFW's essay on the grounds that his spelling and grammar are poor, then you must surely help to prove his main contention: that correct spelling and grammar - as defined by experts such as yourself - are a major component in the creation of written authority. Had this essay been written by a student who had never been taught to use Standard English, and whose writing was therefore full of non-standard usages, ambiguous grammar and spelling, and the incorrect use of Latin tags, would you then approve of it as a representative work of those linguistically-disadvantaged people who are unable to fight back? Certainly it would be hypocritical of you then to criticise it on language grounds.
(My worry, to reply briefly to Rosemarie DiMatteo, is that by not introducing our own standards of writing to people outside this elite group we all occupy, we are continuing to exclude them. There must surely be a case for saying that the way to chip away at elitism is to bring as many people into the club as possible, rather than to deny that the club exists or that we don't belong to it ourselves. I'm sorry, I'm using 'club' in a different sense from the way it was used in the other comments here - although it seems to me a useful pun.)
You may delete this comment if you wish, as it seems as though you will have had a number of complaints already that the article is nitpicking. But I had expected some engagement with what he argues, which only appears in your list at the point about descriptivism (which point I think you have misunderstood). DFW may elide some of the argument, but it is familiar enough: a second-hand knowledge of (perfectly justifiable) descriptivism in academic linguistics led to many English teachers choosing to ignore the existence of rules or norms of language and encouraging instead the use of language for self-expression. I don't think - and I don't think DFW implies - that descriptivism inevitably results in this kind of approach to language teaching; and he certainly never claims that anyone ever imagined self-expression to be achievable only if language norms were ignored. But it is a verifiable historical corruption of the idea: even if I can only here point to my own experience of being taught no English grammar at school, and to the numerous defences of this method of teaching which were put forward on the basis of misunderstandings of these linguistic terms.
Still, I accept that you've shown DFW to be no professor of linguistics, and to be capable of errors in English and Latin usage (and no doubt more vulnerable to them than he himself believes). But to suggest that this destroys his argument is a mistake. The 'regular guy' stance that you so object to was surely intended to make clear his lack of academic qualifications in this area; his qualification to talk about it all may depend on his being a famous writer, and on his self-professed status as a SNOOT, but neither of these implies that he has made a wide study of the subject. What seems strange to me is that you seem to base your decision on whether to believe his argument on his qualifications as a linguist (as evidenced by his grammatical slips) rather than on the cogency of his presentation of the idea. Even an academic paper isn't treated like this, and the critic who tried to approach one in such a manner would be considered to be avoiding the main issue. No doubt professional linguists are capable of grammatical slips as well.
As a side-issue, did you know that DFW provides one of the citations (from a different book) for the OED definition of the word 'wedgie'? There he spells it without the capital letter. Perhaps it is possible that we could blame the Harper's copy editor for such a slip. Oh, and his examples of ambiguous writing may not be ambiguous if you read them aloud, but only because in reading them aloud you have resolved the ambiguity (that is, you have chosen to stress one meaning or another despite the absence of any evidence for the relevant meaning). In written language his examples genuinely are ambiguous, and there is no way of deciding except from context ("Does this make sense here? Is this a joke?") which of the meanings is the relevant one. And as I presume you must have noticed, it was the rules of written language that were under discussion.
I'm afraid I will have taken up all of your front page with this comment, for which I apologise. But I think we all - including yourself and DFW - agree that a high standard of written English tends to make an argument more convincing. Why, then, did this article so upset you?
No need to apologize -- I like long comments, and I certainly don't delete ones that disagree with me. But I'm not sure why you're wondering why this article upset me; I thought I made myself clear here:
"Prescriptivism" is nothing more than linguistic elitism, and like any elitism it's used as a club to harm the people least able to fight back. I despise it, and that's why I get testy with anyone who defends it and is used by others to defend it.
My argument is not with his style of writing (which, as I explicitly said, I enjoy) but the cause he uses it for in this article: presenting the standard prescriptivist case for why certain forms of language are "better," slightly modified for our more skeptical age with self-deprecating humor and nods in the direction of descriptivism. But basically it's the same old elitist crap, and I don't like it.
I don't think - and I don't think I've ever implied - that there are no uses for "proper English." It's de rigueur for job interviews, formal speeches, and other solemn occasions, and can still be very effective as a literary device. But it is not better than other forms of English; the fact that so many idiots think it is is precisely why it's important to teach it to those who have not absorbed it at home, so they will not be despised for something that is irrelevant to their qualifications. I never said that it shouldn't be taught, just that it should be presented as one choice among many; the analogy I like to use is to clothes. Everybody needs a suit to wear to job interviews and weddings, but the suit is no "better" than the t-shirt and jeans they like to wear at home. It's just different.
And no, I'm not caught in a double bind. I don't "attack DFW's essay on the grounds that his spelling and grammar are poor," I attack it on the grounds that he's pretending to an authority he doesn't have. If the essay had been "written by a student who had never been taught to use Standard English, and whose writing was therefore full of non-standard usages, ambiguous grammar and spelling, and the incorrect use of Latin tags," nobody would pay attention to it. It's precisely the fact that DFW is a Famous Writer and presumably knows whereof he speaks that makes it dangerous (and it is -- I've seen it quoted many, many times), and it's my aim to destroy that presumption.
(I've had it suggested to me before that the cap W may be Harper's fault, but that makes no sense -- no copy editor in the world would make that change, there's no reason for it. It could only have been made, and insisted on, by the Great Writer on the basis of his presumed authority. I mean, for chrissake, read the article -- they obviously let him write whatever and however he wanted!)
Posted by language hat at June 7, 2005 03:17 PMI think - as a reader of the (Manchester) Guardian - I have a lower opinion of copy-editors than you do: I have seen them mangle a perfectly sensible sentence so that it becomes totally meaningless; and I wouldn't put it past them to check 'wedgie' in the dictionary and to choose the definition relating to shoes. But this is only a guess, and may just reflect my own prejudices. Certainly DFW uses non-standard capitalisation throughout the article, which makes me think that whatever his claim to authority is here, it is not as an expert user of Standard English (which still seems to me to be the basis of your attack).
Actually, as I said, the explicit claims to authority he makes - although you dismiss them as disingenuous - are to being a 'regular guy' and, I think, implicitly, as 'a reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOT' (which is presented as a theoretical example but seems to fit pretty closely with his autobiographical presentation of himself in the article). At no point does he suggest that he should be listened to because he is a Famous Writer, or even because he has been a teacher of English. Perhaps there is an implicit claim to authority - listen to me because I use language so well, which is the one you attack - but it hardly seems the most important, and your attacks rarely affect the points he is making. His Latin and French could be better; but the few solecisms don't seem to me to undermine his case.
Despite your answer, though, I am still puzzled as to why you have taken against the article so much. Your analogy of the smart suit is precisely what DFW proposes throughout the article. I'll give a few quotes, although I have only a printout of the article and so will be unable to give page references:
"'Correct' English usage is, as a practical matter, a function of whom you're talking to and how you want that person to respond - not just to your utterance but also to you."
He then explicitly labels it a dialect, but only one among many, and argues that "may of these non-SWE dialects have their own highly developed and internally consistent grammars, and that some of these dialects' usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense than do their Standard counterparts." Perhaps you think this is just a sop in the direction of descriptivism, but it chimes with the main point he goes on to pursue. The main statement seems to me exactly what you have written yourself:
"The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as 'Standard' by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. ... This reviewer's opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an advocate of SWE's utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority."
This is being recommended as a rhetorical technique, but the rest of the article argues exactly the same point: that SWE is a useful dialect to have available, not that it is the best and only means of written communication. (Admittedly the first few pages set out to show that not all the rules of SWE are unhelpful or ridiculous, but again I suspect we can agree that this is true: good writing avoids unintentional ambiguity, and this seems to be the main point of most traditional grammatical rules.)
So it seems to me you would agree with his spiel to his students, which includes the lines: "In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. ... You can believe it's racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE..."
This is perhaps a bit overstated, but it's surely the same point we are all making. SWE isn't "better" - says DFW, it is to be defended on grounds of utility (in certain situations) and not because of its "innate superiority" or even on the basis of any linguistic or aesthetic advantages. But as he says - and you agree - it is important to be able to use it so that your arguments will be taken seriously. (As you say above: "If the essay had been 'written by a student who had never been taught to use Standard English [and all the other things I said]...' nobody would pay attention to it.")
At no point does he argue that Standard English is better than other dialects. He does say that the arguments for why it is worth learning SWE - the ones we've just seen - are "baldly elitist," but he corrects himself in the note: "Or require us openly to acknowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a dogmatic SNOOT's [prescriptivist] pedagogy is merely elitism in action." Again, isn't this what you've been saying yourself?
I don't know how DFW actually teaches, but I read his article as suggesting that students should be taught that there are advantages in being able to communicate using the dialect traditionally used in elite discourse, so that they can begin to join and open up that elite or even so that they can argue for its injustice in language that will help their views to be accepted. Of course this should be done with every attempt to avoid making other dialects seem intrinsically inferior, and DFW attempts this even if he doesn't succeed in it. And I'm perfectly willing to believe that his maths is bad.
I hope you really do like long comments - I shall try to write less in future.
Posted by candle at June 8, 2005 08:45 AMNo, no, I really do -- as long as you're making points rather than simply babbling, and you are. Up to a certain point, I can agree; he does indeed make the points you cite about "the dialect of the American elite," and had he left it at that I'd have had no problem with the thrust of the article (though I still would have enjoyed nitpicking it). But I must insist that that's put in as a sop to make his argument acceptable to people who instinctively distrust "the traditional SNOOT usage-authority, a figure who pretty much instantiates snobbishness and bow-tied anality." He wants you to say "Ah, he's not one of those bow-tied anal fops, he's a down-to-earth guy like me, so I'll trust his judgment on these Language Wars I don't know anything about." But that's a lot of crap; his attitude is basically that of the bow-tied brigade, he just doesn't wear the bow tie. The heart of the whole excessively long article is right here: "Descriptivists are wrong in thinking that the Scientific Method is appropriate to the study of language." Once you accept that, and accept his appeal to "Trust me," you're likely to accept all his dicta on good and bad English, which have no basis in fact except by accident -- because the only way to find out how language actually works is via linguistics, which is to say the "Scientific Method" he derides. Since he doesn't know or understand that, he's peddling the same old snake oil in a different bottle, asking us to trust him... why? That brings us to this:
the explicit claims to authority he makes... are to being a 'regular guy' and, I think, implicitly, as 'a reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOT'... At no point does he suggest that he should be listened to because he is a Famous Writer
Please. Of course he doesn't explicitly say that; he doesn't have to. That's like a corporate mogul saying "I'm just a regular guy..." The fact is, as he knows perfectly well, that his essay is being published and will be read with attention precisely because he is a Famous Writer; if he weren't, his argument would carry no weight. (Note that my far superior argument is known to hardly anyone, because I'm not a Famous Writer, I'm just another blogger.) He does the "regular guy" thing with panache, and it's a pleasure to watch him do the dance, but it's still bullshit. He's using his fame to try to influence people, which is his right, but his fame doesn't make his argument right, and it isn't.
By the way, I appreciate your coming by to argue, not only because arguing is fun but because I discovered that my link to the article was broken and replaced it with another (not as good, but better than a 404).
Posted by language hat at June 8, 2005 11:45 AMFair enough - I won't keep prolonging this, because at this rate we will end up colonising the entire internet with our arguing, and I have other work to do besides. Also, it looks like the source of the disagreement is pretty clear now, which is all anyone can hope for in an argument.
I think you're right that he takes needless swipes at Descriptivism - and we could certainly do without his ad hominem attacks on professors - but I suppose I'd taken those as relating only to the context of a usage guide. The problem all this is getting at is the question of what a usage guide (far more than a dictionary) is actually for. A descriptivist usage guide is, as you say, a guide to how language actually works, and the equivalent of a sociology textbook. But the fact remains that usage guides are often used, and are often explicitly intended, as the equivalent of ethics manuals: 'how to write proper'. And this is a useful function. I think dictionaries should certainly describe language; but I think there should be room for books which offer instruction on SWE usage, without claiming it to be an intrinsically superior dialect. This may not reflect any timeless and unchanging standard, and it is almost certainly a ridiculous way to look at language development (as David Crystal likes to point out); but it is a useful practical contribution to modern communications, and can preserve valuable distinctions (like that between 'refute' and 'deny'). I still maintain that this is what the DFW article argues for: in contrast to you, I evidently picked on that as the meat and the question of the correct approach to academic linguistics as the dressing. I guess it's too confused an article to deserve quite this much exegesis, though.
I still think it's unfair and unreasonable to ignore his explicit denial of special authority in favour of the inescapable fact that he is a famous writer: short of writing anonymously, he could hardly have escaped that. Even then, it would only imply that he knew how to write, which is not the same as a claim to understand the language wars better than anyone else. Certainly I'm not inclined to grant novelists any special expertise on the study of linguistics, unless they are Anthony Burgess. I wonder if it is an American thing? I'm surprised when DFW notes the existence of a panel of distinguished writers who comment on the correct use of English - I can't think of an equivalent in the UK - although it puts me in mind of the American practice of appointing novelists and poets as professors of English regardless of their qualifications for that job (which must surely extend beyond an experience of successful creative writing). This is all speculation, though, and I'm not trying to get at you or anyone else. And as promised, I'll make this my last contribution (on this subject!) and hope you'll agree to disagree. Thanks for engaging with the discussion!
Incidentally, I'm not an English professor, nor even a frustrated one, and I've never studied linguistics. But I do speak a few languages, and I teach Latin. If only I were a famous writer too...
Ave atque vale, o Candela! (though I hope you'll keep visiting)
You make good points, and it seems the core of our disagreement is in what he intended the core message of his article to be, which only he can say. I confess that I have a hair-trigger sensitivity to any and all arguments of the form "because I say so," especially when applied to language, so I may have overemphasized that aspect of his piece -- but I think it's pernicious no matter what accompanies it. And sure, usage guides are needed; that's why I always recommend the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which addresses all the usual points of concern but gives you the historical facts as well as the varying judgments made by other authorities and pseudo-authorities and lets you make up your own mind, rather than saying "Say this, not that." It's not that I don't want people making choices about what to say and write, I just want them making choices based on facts and sensible ways of thinking about them.
I have greatly enjoyed this dialog, and once again am glad I haven't closed off all past threads to comments, even though it leaves openings for spammers.
Posted by language hat at June 10, 2005 10:12 AMPlease tell me, where did Horace wrote that indignor quandoque bonus Homerus dormitat? I am uncertain about it, but I have a suspicion that it must be dormitet when put this way. Moreover, I studied the Classics in a grey past, Latin and Greek, and exactly the variant quandoque bonus Homerus dormitat, without the indignor, is the one I was taught. Anybody can be wrong anytime, but please tell me where Horace said it.
Posted by Folquerto at June 22, 2005 06:56 PMNo, I quoted it correctly: Ars Poetica 359. Google is your friend, you know.
Posted by language hat at June 22, 2005 07:09 PMverum operi longo fas est obrepere somnum.
You are right!
Thanks!
Folquerto.
Posted by Folquerto at June 29, 2005 05:51 PMThe problem with your "demolishing" (though I would call it something more along the lines of "totally-the-point-missing") is that you have no sympathy with Mr. Wallace, or his personal style of writing; this is a matter of taste, no doubt. I consider Wallace's writing to have what you might something like "perfect pitch," and find that I am able to admire almost every fanciful turn of phrase in his work; I don't generally care if/when he makes mistakes in usage, because I'm more interested in his meaning. There's quite a lot of fractured French in Infinite Jest, for example. But it's still one of the best novels of the 20th century because it makes its point, forcefully and very beautifully. This could be said of most of Wallace's writing. I suppose you can't bear Nabokov or Waugh, either, because they couldn't spell worth beans. Your loss, mon ami.
To take just your first complaint against "Tense Present": Wallace's mom is a grammarian, hence the "à clef" remark, which is intended to imply, kind of slangily, simply that the term is in use regarding real members of his own family, and/or those known to them. I find it hard to believe that this isn't really obvious. It's just a little lighthearted shorthand/slang for a the fairly literary audience of Harper's. The rest of your quarrels are along similar lines--pretty meaningless, except to someone with (a) no sympathy for the writer, and perhaps (b) unwilling or unable to respond to a joke.
Presumably a lot of Wallace's attitudes regarding grammar and usage were imbibed early on, in his learned family ... in any case, in "Tense Present" he isn't setting himself up as an authority, only as an interested longtime student, speaker and writer of English.
What you're pouncing on isn't the man himself, nor his style, but the fact that he is a celebrated writer, as you note above; he can hardly help that.
Posted by maria at September 15, 2005 04:24 PMNo, I'm afraid you're quite, quite wrong. I'm a huge fan of both Nabokov and Waugh, and very fond of stylish writing wherever it turns up. I am not opposed to Wallace's own style (though I think putting it in the company of those two is unfair to it, and causes its overelaborated fronds to wilt in the sun). This is not about his style or his fame (the latter is not the reason I object to his article, it's the reason I take the trouble to demolish it -- if he weren't famous, nobody would care what he had to say); it is about the fact that he is mouthing off on things he knows nothing about, and he is wrong, and he is quoted over and over again by people as ignorant as he is to support their own ignorance. You might call him the "intelligent design theorist" of language.
Now, I feel your pain. You have a tremendous crush on DFW the writer and you don't like to see him attacked, and that's human. But references to his mother are neither here nor there. The points I make are no more "meaningless" than his article itself, since it focuses on exactly such points. Come on, admit it, you don't know or care who's right about the issues I address, you just want DFW to be recognized as the supreme genius you feel he is. All I can say is that you should pick your venues more carefully, and perhaps force yourself to argue with less passion and more cogency. I care nothing about DFW's family quirks and (in this context) nothing about his style either; all that matters to me is that in this article he is a fatuous blowhard arguing from an authority he does not possess. You are, of course, free to disagree. But you might read my exchange with Folquerto, just above, for an example of how to discuss these matters in a civilized way, without casting aspersions on the reading preferences of someone you don't know from Adam.
Posted by language hat at September 15, 2005 08:23 PMHoly cow. In what way did I cast aspersions on your reading preferences? What I made was a joke, something it becomes increasingly evident that you are not in a position to follow. This joke was suggesting that anybody afflicted with excessive punctilio in the matter of spelling would be excluded from the company of Nabokov and Waugh, neither of whom could spell. I apologize if you found this joke uncivilized.
You can't "feel my pain," because I am not in pain. Sure I have a crush on David Foster Wallace, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest when other people can't stand him (many do not and who can blame them, for he can get as tedious as Nabokov can, which is to say, very.) I just popped in to say that in the case of Wallace, you may think you get it, but you absolutely do not. And it's just not on to be dissing people for your own deficiency, here. But I really didn't mean to make you mad, and I'm sorry about that, and I am quite willing to disagree cheerfully with you on the many literary matters upon which you and I are absolutely certain to clash. But as I was saying, you did not understand this article, which is not the law handed down from on high by a self-appointed authority, but rather consists entirely in the ruminations of an interested party whose mom is a grammarian, and who is himself a writer and interested in language, and who has had to teach school for a living.
I don't think I would have written on your blog, except that the article or your misapprehension of it went and made you so weirdly (and to my mind, incoherently) mad. And competitively so, in a manner where you have to say--yourself!--that you've 'demolished' another writer, famous or not, which one would think should be a judgment reserved for others to make. This phrase, 'fatuous blowhard'! What are you so scorched about? To say you "aren't opposed" to Wallace's style but accuse it of having "overelaborated fronds" (?!) Jeeps.
Doesn't surprise me a bit that you cite an instance of your correcting an interlocutor as the very last word in civilized discourse. (I kid!)
Posted by maria at September 15, 2005 09:23 PMWhat am I mad about? The fact that you come in here, tell me I'm completely wrong without addressing a single one of my points (except for the irrelevant remark about his mother), accuse me of having no feeling for style and no sense of humor, and repeat the offense in your second message (where the mask of politeness drops even further). You say "you did not understand this article" when what you mean is that I did not agree with and appreciate the article. Believe me, I understand it all too well. Do you seriously think I would waste my time attacking it if it were nothing more than "ruminations" of a teacher and the son of a grammarian? Life is too short. I'm attacking it because it is an extremely influential manifesto in favor of elitist prescriptions and against the eternal bugbear of descriptivism; I'd go dig up some links to people quoting it as Holy Writ in attacking lexicographers and linguists, but it's not worth the trouble, since there's obviously no changing your mind. But since you think Nabokov tedious, there's really no point discussing the matter with you anyway. And you accuse others of not having an appreciation for style!
Go, worship DFW in good health, but don't pretend you understand issues that you neither know nor care about.
Posted by language hat at September 16, 2005 09:16 AMThanks for a great read, and for showing me it's not necessarily my fault when I don't understand something DFW writes (e.g. his refutation of the idea of Private Language or Colors). I would observe, though, that some of your attacks do seem sort of personal and ad hominem. And it seems to me presumptuous to think you know another's motives. For example:
"He is more intent on proving that he knows how to use a big dictionary than in reading what it says there."
"the only point of his using it (since nobody else ever has or ever will, unless they foolishly copy it from him) is to make a point of his extreme accuracy in the tiniest of matters... and he gets it wrong."
"But I must insist that that's put in as a sop to make his argument acceptable"
I actually thought the capitalization of the word "Wedgies" was a stylistic decision. To me it sort of emphasizes the word and makes more vivid the image.
My first visit here. I'll be back. Thanks again.
Glad you liked the rant. But my very use of the word "rant" acknowledges it's not exactly a detached, scholarly analysis. It seriously pisses me off when people use a soapbox earned for other reasons to spread noxious misinformation about language. Don't worry, DFW can take it.
Posted by language hat at April 1, 2006 01:38 AMJust to keep the comment thread going: I think prescriptivism is more conventionalist than elitist. Most prescriptivists aren't especially elite; they're most often badly-paid eighth-grade teachers, junior-college comp teachers, etc. -- or those in general whose small upward mobility depended on education, and who are only elite in a very relative sense. (You'll even see, "A HArvard PhD should know about the split-infinitive rule", etc.)
On the other hand, prescriptivists probably are elitists after all. I just thought I'd say something.
Posted by John Emerson at August 1, 2006 08:38 AMOh, I agree about "most prescriptivists" -- my point is that prescriptivism is inherently elitist, and the fact that most people have bought into it is just one more chapter in the sad history of people stampeding directly away from their own best interests. (See: politics.)
Posted by language hat at August 1, 2006 11:21 AMJust out of curiosity, is there some source for the claim that Nabokov (or Waugh, for that matter) couldn't spell? I've never heard it before, and the only relevant page I've found with Google so far is a New York Times article that says:
Nabokov is punctilious about spelling.I'm not saying it isn't true, just wondering if it's documented somewhere. The Boyd biography?
Based on the chronology of this comments thread, I expect a reply circa 2009.
Posted by Christopher M at August 2, 2006 04:03 AMI should have linked to the Times article, which is here.
Posted by Christopher M at August 2, 2006 04:04 AMI suspect maria was simply full of crap. (Sorry, maria, if you're still checking in, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em. And if you have actual evidence for that claim, I trust you'll provide it.) I can't think of anyone less likely to be a poor speller than VV.
Posted by language hat at August 2, 2006 08:23 AMWell this was just about the most delightful way for a lover of aesthetics, language and all things excellent to spend the morning. DFW drubbed, de-fended and wizened; Nabokov vindicated; and elitists everywhere enervated (myself included, he writes with a sigh)...
Thanks muchly, language hat.
~br.
My pleasure! Mind you, I'm perfectly capable of being elitist myself -- just one of the many reasons I shouldn't run the world.
Posted by language hat at August 2, 2006 03:18 PMUltimately, it's because of your self deprecating style such as in that last sentence you've written that I'm always happy to hear your opinions squire.
Like the illusory left-or-right dichotomy of politics, I think an either/or situation on the prescriptivism/descriptivism front is pretty silly.
Sometimes being prescriptivist is not being elitist - in some teaching situations, in some discussions with peers and in certain circumstances to express opposition to a stylistic clanger (of course that's personal), I think it's perfectly acceptable to voice an 'opinion of conservation'.
But likewise it's all about the communication and as long as we understand each other then it's all good. I love neologisms and concatamerizings and useful verbializations and emergent rephrasings and translanguage pollenizing. It makes language dynamic and all the more beautiful, even for the linguistically unedumacated such as myself.
Anyway, I didn't come here to argue (wellll) - I just noticed the mention of your 4th blog birthday on wood s lot and came by for a gander. I don't get across here as much as I'd like -- some of us must devote energy to making our homes look pretty so that the dirth of comments doesn't stop people visiting!
Many happy returns and thanks for the entertainment. (Who's DFW? Heh.)
Posted by peacay at August 2, 2006 04:15 PMGlad you dropped by, and I'm not sure which I appreciate more, the fact that wood s lot regularly wishes LH a happy anniversary or that it's accompanied by that wonderful photo of a crowd of hats.
Posted by language hat at August 2, 2006 05:29 PMI wrote to Maria to ask her, and she couldn't recall offhand but graciously offered to poke around her books when she gets a chance and let me know if she finds anything. I'll report back if I hear anything. In the meantime, here's an interesting anecdote about Nabokov's synaesthesia (he experienced letters or sounds as having specific, characteristic colors), which may be relevant but doesn't clearly cut one way or the other:
Though it's by no means especially a writer's ailment, Somerset Maugham , William Burroughs, Jung and Nabokov were all sufferers - indeed, the latter insisted his mother take his spelling bricks back to the shop because they were the "wrong" colours.
From this article by Julie Myerson.
Posted by Christopher M at August 2, 2006 07:48 PMLoved your evisceration of DFW's article!
Other than the gibe about "nickname a clef" (which I understood--without much difficulty--to mean "codename"), everything else was spot on. I'm especially glad you didn't let that slithy "...one Charles Fries'..." bit get by without reproach. What bad manners that man has!
You certainly could have piled it on a bit more without much trouble. For example: right after the Fries' bit comes an infelicitous use of "epigone". Is he trying to say here that the American College Dictionary is a second-rate follower of the "notoriously liberal" Webster's Third? I guess so. Use of this term for an inanimate object, though, only muddies its meaning. "Norm-wise" is also lame, and doesn't make much sense as a modifier for the sentence it heads. His whole argument with the hypothetical physics textbook and how some americans believe electricity runs better downhill was shockingly illogical and immaterial.
I suspect you don't really appreciate DFW's prose stylings as much as you profess to in some of your follow-up comments. I don't see how you could! He's verging on Dan Brown-ness. To even bring him up with Nabokov and Waugh, as one person did, makes my eyes burn with anger!
Posted by Simon at August 3, 2006 04:15 PMOh, I understood "nickname a clef"—I just didn't think it a proper or felicitous use of à clef. And yeah, I don't want to claim DFW is my favorite writer or anything, I'm just trying to make sure my criticism is seen for what it is: an attack on his pretensions to knowledge, not his writerly virtues.
Posted by language hat at August 3, 2006 05:24 PMAnyone who has been grabbed by the waistband, hoisted onto a rusted bolt seven feet off the bathroom floor, and left to dangle over the urinal knows that "wedgie" can be capitalized.
Posted by Matthew Young at August 27, 2006 10:18 PM