Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. 6 We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults. 7 Plus a dash of the elitism of, say, Billy Zane in Titanic—a

This kind of stuff is advanced US citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on.

indisputably easier to be Dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged.

The arrant solecisms of the ignoramus are here often omitted entirely, ‘irregardless’ of how he may feel about this neglect”

The New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove’s Methodological Descriptivists: they believed that there was such a thing as unbiased observation. And that linguistic meanings could exist “Objectively,” separate from any interpretive

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably

recording. It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re observing and tabulating, but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic.

People really do judge one another according to their use of language.

English—that are nearly incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t inside their very tight and specific Discourse Community (which of course is part of their function 46

the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on. Most of these dialectal adjustments are made below the level of conscious awareness, and our ability to make them seems part psychological and part something else—perhaps something hardwired into the same motherboard as Universal Grammar—and in truth this ability is a much better indicator of a kid’s raw “verbal IQ” than test scores or grades, since

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 that it is an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner

Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own résumé.

What the Descriptivists haven’t got is logic. The Dictionary can’t sanction everything, and the very possibility of language depends on rules and conventions, and Descriptivism offers no logos for determining which rules and conventions are useful and which are pointless/oppressive, nor any arguments for how and by whom such determinations are to be made. In short, the Descriptivists don’t have any kind of Appeal that’s going to persuade anyone who doesn’t already have an EAT THE RICH-type hatred of Authority per se. Homiletically speaking, the only difference between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists is that the latter’s got a bigger choir.

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.