Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause. Here is my argument for that opinion. Usage is always political, but it’s complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: on the one hand they can be a reflection of political change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. What’s important is that these two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them—in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language’s political symbolism—enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE’s core fallacy—that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes 63 —and of course it’s nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT’s delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.