Hugh kenner on pop grammarians

68

omy, and a dedication to peace on show week after week in the Nation.

In doing so, she was carrying forward a dispute between anticommunists and anti-anti communists that has divided the Left for most of this century.

The character of the Nation, during Stalin's reign did not escape notice on the Left. In his recent book The Truants, William Barrett reprints from Partisan Review-then anti-Stalinist Marxist-a 1946 editorial, "The Liberal Fifth Column," in which he charged that the Nation was part of a "powerfully vocal lobby willing to override all concerns of international democracy and decency in the interests of a foreign power." Barrett explains why he has reprinted the piece: "Younger friends to whom I have shown the editorial have expressed amazement that things seem to be at the same pass now as thirty-five years ago."

Not exactly. There cannot have been many people at Town Hall on Sontag night who look to Moscow as the fount of their radicalism, and I haven't heard anyone in New York call Lech Walesa a counterrevolutionary. But the faithful do seem to need a place to which their faith can attach itself. For many years, far longer than mere reason can justify, Moscow was the Mecca of the world's Marxists. More recently, worshipers have turned their eyes . toward China or Cuba or Nicaragua; some Americans even found hope in the Ayatollah's Iran, and not long ago Susan Sontag carried on about Hanoi in a way that must mortify her today. Is there much doubt about where most of these seekers would have looked in the old days? Even now, many cannot bring themselves to say straight out that the Kirchwey-Del Vayo-Werth line was devilishly askew, yet they have the effrontery to claim Solidarity as their own, like collaborators trying to pass as victims after the camp gates have been broken down.

The Nation may have been more enlightening than the Reader's Digest, in general, but when it came to "the realities of communism," Digest readers were more accurately served. [] HARPER'S/ JUNE

1982

BOOl,S

•

The Word Police

by Hugh Kenner Slugging it out with the language pundits.

O

LD MAGAZINES get piled in the attic; likewise old words. The word attic we call a dictionary. (Might "Yux," for "hiccup," come in handy again? Johnson listed it in 1755 .

The Oxford English Dictionary has mislaid it.)

The earliest dictionaries were no more than lists of hard words. It was only in the eighteenth century that "cat" and "dog" joined them in the alphabet; not that anyone needed to look up "cat" and "dog."

No, the new-model dictionary, most famously Johnson's, reflected an interest in surveying the language, the way you can survey anything you can layout on sheets of paper, and it wasn't thought of until the new printing industry whetted an appetite for tidy overviews.

Hugh Kenner teaches at lohns Hopkins University. He has recently contributed to A Starchamber Quiry, a collection of essays 011 lames Ioyce, published by Methuen.

(There had been printing, yes, since about 1450. But the industry, highly organized and screaming for copy, was two centuries getting itself together and assembling its public.)

Lo, on this paper map, the World.

Lo, on these trim bound sheets, the Word of God. Lo, between these rectangular covers, the English Language! Behold now "cat," "dog," "that," "which," displayed in the same alphabetized list with "eleemosynary" and "assuefaction."

One effect was to dignify "that" and "which." They even got distinguished, by a process so subtle it eluded Samuel Johnson, whose second synonym for "that" is "which."

The distinction resembles the way theologians tell the eighth order of angels from the ninth, and a woman who used to read copy at The New Yorker is alleged to be the only person alive who really understands it. (The N ew Yorker is notoriously finical, and its failure to close a parenthesis some months ago got

•

69

•

widely read as a Sign of the Last Days.)

Collecting signs of the Last Days -the misattached "hopefully," the misapprehended "nubile," the misspelled "holistic"-is heavy work for John Simon (Paradigms Lost) and Edwin Newman (A Civil Tongue), a mere sideline for William Safire, whose weekly column "On Language" stays pretty cheerful, so entertaining does he find the ways of speech.

Sorting his mailbag, Safire can be a delight, or letting us listen while he telephones. His new hardback collection, What's the Good Word?, * preserves a conversation with a Miss Paulette Dufault (say "doo-foh") at Elizabeth Arden, who explained a product line they called "Millen-

ium." "'We were aware that "millennium" is spelled with two n's,' said Miss Dufault in a moist, creamysoft, permanently youthful voice.

'We spelled our product with one n because it would be a trademark.'

When that was met with suspicious silence, she added tonily, 'And we liked the look of it.'"

So we discern an odd fact about written syllables, words shifted from voice to print, from time to space.

A word in space is no longer like wind but like real estate: somebody can own it. Xerox is owned. Somebody once told me the fee of the classics instructor who coined "Xerox" (from the Greek xeros, dry): as I recall, about $200. Kool and Arrid are owned; but no more than you can own a public bypath can you own a mere Webster word.

AFIRE can listen as well as read. He hears New Yorkers saying "take a haircut" and "play piano," also "No problem," when others would say "You're welcome." They ask for "change of a dollar," and in Brooklyn sit on something called a "stoop," which we're told is from Dutch stoep, steps plus porch. New York, in short, is like any linguistic community in staying equilibrated like a biological community. The local heritage

S

* Times

Books, $15.95.

(Dutch, Yiddish) prompts mutations, the need for viability constrains selection, and eventually visitors discern a species.

Such localisms have their charm, like the aardvark, and bother no one. What gets bothersome for Safire is a usage not referrable to any community save that of AP and CBS consumers. "'That was a fulsome answer,' said Ronald Reagan to a questioner ... last month; 'I hope you don't think I was filibustering.' " Aha, cries Satire; Reagan is echoing a widespread misuse. " 'Fulsome' is related to 'foul'; one meaning is 'loathsome,' or at least 'offensive.' A related meaning-and here's where the confusion starts-is 'excessive.'

The frequently used phrase 'fulsome praise' does not mean 'lavish praise'; rather, it means 'praise so excessive that it is obviously insincere and fawning.' " By that showing, if Reagan described his own answer as "fulsome" he was being excessively candid. But of course that's not what he meant.

And Aha, cries Jim Quinn in American Tongue in Cheek, * who sees "fulsome" as a favorite worry bead of the "Pop Grammarians," the likes of Satire, Simon, Newman, Theodore Bernstein. These moralists never look back past the late nineteenth century, and so don't see what is plain from the OED, that present "misusage" simply returns "fulsome" to its original meaning, "abundance," unchallenged from ca. 1250 till 1583. The association with "foul" was merely "ignorant," and the meaning Satire leans on, "gross or excessive, offensive to good taste like flattery," got established as late as 1633.

Leaving Jim Quinn to smack his lips after the kill,' we may turn to Maxwell Nurnberg's I Always Look Up the Word "Egtegious,"** where "fulsome," we're told, is "frequently misused." For "it no longer means full or abundant; it now has only the unfavorable meaning of excessive or overdone to the point of being in bad taste or even at times nauseating." But for whom does it

* Pantheon,

**

$11.95.

Prentice-Hall, $9.95 and $5.95.

"no longer mean" abundant? For consulters of a book such as Nurnberg's. However, when he says "frequently misused," he can only mean that for a lot of speakers, such as Ronald Reagan, it does mean "abundant," and not in the sixteenth century but right now. Yes, it does, and you can say "alas" if you like, reflecting that if you use it in Satire's and Nurnberg's sense you'll be misunderstood by Reagan and maybe by Quinn.

Q

UINN'S deadly arsenal is the OED, from which he arms his demonstrations that the Pop Grammarians don't know what they're talking about. Sometime in the past of the language, he can generally show you, the misuse they're moaning about was current usage; also it was good enough for Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray ... on and on.

This is meant to comfort just plain folks, but it ignores such considerations as that (a) Shakespeare the playwright was generally reproducing what he heard, not setting norms to write by; (b) evolution can produce distinctions, as between "oral" and "verbal," which it seems retrograde to discard, never mind that Pepys and Swift had not heard of them. Unhappily, there's no way to preserve a distinction mankind is apparently agreeing to ignore except among members of a subcommunity. This subcommunity is as distinct from the majority as readers of Harper's, for instance, are distinct from readers of TV Guide.

If you read both, which is quite possible, you are skilled at shifting between dialects, a skill possessed by most readers and speakers of English today.

So Jim Quinn's historical citations will only annoy the usage pundits. Now and then he overreaches himself, as when he catches Edwin Newman, his especial bete noire, "our linguistic Chicken Little," wishing we'd stop misusing the word "rhetoric." Writes Newman, "Rhetoric does not mean fustian, exaggeration, or grand and empty phrases.

It means-it meant-the effective HARPER'S/ JUNE 1982

70

use of language and the study of that use." Quinn jumps to the OED and finds "rhetoric" applied to false and empty phrases as long ago as 1562. Thus Newman is a fraud, and any dictionary "could have told him the real meaning of 'rhetoric.'''

"Real," what is real? "Rhetoric" meant the third part of the classical curriculum-Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, the Trivium: the study of Words, the study of Reasoning, the study of Words Deployed. If as late as 1562 they had noticed that Words Deployed could yield false and empty phrases, do not be surprised, but also do not call that "the real meaning of 'rhetoric.''' A general rule: beware of any statement containing the phrase "the real meaning." There is no reality to which it can point.

The best the OED itself can ever record is the state of literate usage at the time it went to press, and that time extends from 1884 for its first letters to 1928 for its last.

Also, since its sources were wholly written, it had no access to spoken usage at all except through the practice of novelists and playwrights.

DO word books tumble from the presses in such plenty? I have at my side a box of perhaps twenty, titles like Words Fail Me, What's Happening to American English?, The Dictionary of Diseased English, not to mention a pair by the "Underground Grammarian" Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say and The Graves of Academe. They sell, and authors come back with second helpings. And Safire's column of linguistic chitty-chat is syndicated.

A few are meant for use. For elegant definitions of what computer hackers mean by firmware or lawyers by battery (which need not batter) you'll want Don Ethan Miller's The Book of Jargon. * For a better-informed account of how words come and go than the pop grammarians can offer, try Charlton Laird's The Word.** From the

W

HY

*

Macmillan, $16.95.

Simon &Schuster, $12.95.

**

HARPER'S/ JUNE

1982

rest you will get mostly entertaining tidbits, with now and then an explosion of choice invective. The Underground Grammarian enjoys roasting "educators" slowly, and draws a crowd the way executioners used to.

Even so, why are word books such a popular genre? Observe, to start with, that the phenomenon is not new. On the Study of Words and English Past and Present, a doubleheader by Richard Chenevix Trench, was a sturdy seller in the old Everyman's Library. From the 1850s, when they were first delivered as lectures, these two grab bags of etymological lore' stayed in print for a century. So part of an answer is that words seem to interest everyone who can read.

Jim Quinn notes hands getting wrung throughout most of these books, and proposes a starker explanation: "Despair sells." He may be right. 'There is hardly an aspect of American life that has not made the best-seller lists after somebody was lucky enough to discover it was in the last stages of decline."

Quinn is not above employing this motif himself, since according to him a very last stage of decline is the rise of the Pop Grammarians to scare everybody. His publishers reinforced this thesis by commissioning a foreword from Benjamin DeMott, that veteran truffle-hound of elites to decry. "Ignorant," "repressive-authoritarian," "mean and humorless," are woof-woofs by which DeMott decries Safire & Mitchell & Newman & Simon & Bernstein & Co., though he partially (and rightly) exempts Safire. I've a dog named Thomas whose routine denunciations can ring more heavily, but this Chicken Little undeniably has his nose to the ground.

So you can sell a falling sky?

That may be part of it. But Safire's skies seldom fall, and as for Willard Espy, author of Have a Word on Me* and Say It My Way**: Espy, beaming above an upcurled rnustache, is positively euphoric without lapse, even when he's citing a Lehigh professor whose students

* Simon

**

& Schuster, $13.95.

Penguin, $5,95.

found seventeen ways to misspell "Appalachian. " Whatever is happening meets a linguistic need, affirms Espy; even the Psychobabble Cyra McFadden recorded in The Serial: "Kate told her friends how happy she was that she and Harvey had decided to split for a while, because it would give them a chance to get clear, and because her philosophy, like Sartre's, was that everybody was ultimately responsible for his own number."

This portends not a falling sky but a social fact: "We see ourselves as caught up in a process of incessant readjustment to new conditions.

When the need passes, so will the jargon." Gloom and sorrow cheerfully dismissed, Espy turns to his real business, entertainment. Only two English nouns, he will tell you, join the Latin suffix "<ation" to a nonLatin stem; they are "flirtation," coined by the jocular Colley Cibber in 1718, and "starvation," devised as an orator's projectile in 1775.

He will tell you a lot more like that, and you can read it the way you eat peanuts, in no special order. "Chevron" comes, via French, from the Latin caper, goat; when goats lock horns we see inverted V's. Picus is Latin for woodpecker, whence piccare, to peck, later to jingle; and in Provence they named a little jingling coin picaioun, whence Louisiana's "picayune." A bulldog is not named for a bull, but from French boule, ball, for the roundness of its head.

â&#x20AC;˘

O

N AND ON; if you see the resemblance to a peanut jar you glimpse one more explanation for the copious supply of word books. They need not be read from beginning to end. Good bedside books for the guest room, they can be paged through at random, with no residual guilt about wasting them. Americans, Russell Baker once said, like to find ways of combining an agreeable time with something improving. He instanced singing hymns at the seashore, an analogy to recall the moral strain so blithely lacking in Espy, fitfully apparent in Safire,

â&#x20AC;˘

71

•

dominant in Simon, Newman, Mitchell, who devise hells for other people, not for their readers.

Other people? The Media mavens, Madison Avenue, all Watergate spokesmen: they it is who are sawing loose the props of the sky. We are free to drift off to sleep wishing them bad cess and trying to remember what it was about "quark."

"Quark," Espy tells us, a physicist's abstraction, got its name from a coinage of James Joyce's in Finnegans Wake, and amid his pride over spelling the title correctly (no apostrophe!) he proceeds to misquote the line. "Quark," says Jim Quinn, "first appeared in Finnegans Wake, but the inventor of the scientific term, Murray Gell-Man, is frequently quoted as saying that he did not know that at the time. He just wanted a funny-sounding word for a funny-acting particle."

Next, a look into Jeremy Bernstein's Science Observed* suggests that Quinn is not only misspelling Gell-Mann but saying the thing that is not. Gell-Mann, it was possible to read in The New Yorker as long ago as July 18, 1977, was a Wake fan of twenty-four years' standing when he named the quark in 1963.

Joyce's phrase is "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" (spoken by seagulls), and the word appealed because quarks come in threes. .

Bernstein next divigates into guesses about where Joyce got the word. Quark is German for cottage cheese; did some sign in Ziirich, "Drei Mark fur Muster-Quark," three marks for a model cottage

by Alan Brinkley cheese, suggest a transposition of the nouns ... ?

The Souring of Teddy White, That is where Jim Quinn might have made his routine pounce, and we can only guess that by the time America in Search of Itself: The he'd written 177 pages of his book Making of the President, 1956-J980, his OED had been repossessed. For by Theodore H. White. Harper & Quinn's bible, the OED, was as far Row, 480 pp. $15.95. as Joyce needed to look for a verb ARLY in the evening of Octhat means to make a croaking tober 31, 1980-Halloween sound: example, "Rooks cawing night, four days before the and quarking." It was just the word presidential election- Theto be uttered by his circling seaodore H. White sat in his browngulls. stone on the east side of Manhattan There, that's something settled.

Sweet dreams.

0 watching the evening news on television. The news included coverage * Basic, $16.95.

..

)

AmerlCaS Lost Liberal

••

E

1956-1982. of the last stages of the Reagan and Carter campaigns; rumors of a deal to free the hostages in Iran; new evidence of economic troubles. But one report in particular caught his eye: the story of a Halloween celebration by a crowd of New York gays dressed in skull-and-skeleton costumes. "As I watched," White recalls, "it occurred to me: no one Alan Brinkley teaches American history at MIT. His book Voices of Protest was published by Knopf in April.

HARPER'S/ JUNE

1982