The insecurities that drive PCE, AE, and vocab-tape ads are far from groundless, though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and PR or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will—we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he “expresses himself”70 have been thrown into big-time flux. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal ( = an argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos), and Pathetic Appeal ( = an argument’s emotional impact, from pathos) have now pretty much collapsed—or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it nearly impossible to advance an argument on “reason” alone.
A vividly concrete illustration here concerns the Official Complaint that a certain black undergraduate filed against me after one of my little in camera spiels described here. The complainant was (I opine) wrong, but she was not crazy or stupid; and I was able later to see that I did bear some responsibility for the whole nasty administrative swivet. My culpability lay in gross rhetorical naïveté. I’d seen my speech’s primary Appeal as Logical: the aim was to make a conspicuously blunt, honest argument for SWE’s utility. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, but it was true, plus so manifestly bullshit-free that I think I expected not just acquiescence but gratitude for my candor.71 The problem I failed to see, of course, lay not with the argument per se but with the person making it—namely me, a Privileged WASP Male in a position of power, thus someone whose statements about the primacy and utility of the Privileged WASP Male dialect appeared not candid/hortatory/authoritative/true but elitist/high-handed/authoritarian/racist. Rhetoric-wise, what happened was that I allowed the substance and style of my Logical Appeal to completely torpedo my Ethical Appeal: what the student heard was just another PWM rationalizing why his Group and his English were top dog and ought “logically” to stay that way (plus, worse, trying to use his academic power over her to coerce her assent72).
If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction,73 I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far—any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to…?”
Now (still bracketing) consider the situation of any reasonably intelligent and well-meaning SNOOT who sits down to prepare a prescriptive usage guide. It’s the millennium, post-everything: whence the authority to make any sort of credible Appeal for SWE at all?
ARTICLE’S CRUX: WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS (I)
It isn’t that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is perfect. It doesn’t seem to cover conversant in vs. conversant with, for example, or abstruse vs. obtuse, or to have anything on hereby and herewith (which I tend to use interchangeably but always have the uneasy feeling I’m screwing up). Garner’s got a good discussion of used to but nothing on supposed to. Nor does he give any examples to help explain irregular participles and transitivity (“The light shone” vs. “I shined the light,” etc.), and these would seem to be more important than, say, the correct spelling of huzzah or the plural of animalculum, both of which get discussed. In other words, a rock-ribbed SNOOT is going to be able to find stuff to kvetch about in any usage dictionary, and ADMAU is no exception.
But it’s still really, really good. Except for the VOGUE WORDS snafu and the absence of a pronunciation entry on trough,74 the above were pretty much the only quibbles this reviewer could find. ADMAU is thorough and timely and solid, as good as Follett’s and Gilman’s and the handful of other great American usage guides of the century. Their format—which was Fowler’s—is ADMAU’s, too: concise entries on individual words and phrases and expository cap-titled MINIESSAYS on any issue broad enough to warrant more general discussion. Because of both his Fowler Society and the advent of online databases, though, Garner has access to many more examples of actual published SWE than did Gilman nine years ago, and he uses them to great, if lengthy, effect. But none of this is why Bryan Garner is a genius.
ADMAU is a collection of judgments and so is in no way Descriptivist, but Garner structures his judgments very carefully to avoid the elitism and anality of traditional SNOOTitude. He does not deploy irony or scorn or caustic wit, nor tropes or colloquialisms or contractions… or really any sort of verbal style at all. In fact, even though Garner talks openly about himself and uses the 1-S pronoun throughout the whole dictionary, his personality is oddly effaced, neutralized. It’s like he’s so bland he’s barely there. For instance, as this reviewer was finishing the book’s final entry,75 it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan A. Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more striking was that I hadn’t once wondered about any of this up to now; something about Garner’s lexical persona kept me from ever asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies were informing what he had admitted right up front were “value judgments.” This seemed very odd indeed. Bland people can have axes to grind, too, so I decided that bland probably wasn’t the right word to describe Garner’s ADMAU persona. The right word was probably more like objective, but with a little o, as in “disinterested,” “reasonable.” Then something kind of obvious occurred to me, but in an unobvious way—this small-o kind of objectivity was very different from the metaphysical, capital O–type Objectivity whose postmodern loss had destroyed (I’d pretty much concluded) any possibility of genuine Authority in issues of usage.
Then it occurred to me that if Objectivity still had a lowercase sense unaffected by modern relativism, maybe Authority did as well. So, just as I’d done w/r/t Garner’s use of judgment, I went to my trusty conservative American Heritage Dictionary and looked up authority.
Does any of this make sense? Because this was how I discovered that Bryan Garner is a genius.
WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS (II)
Bryan Garner is a genius because A Dictionary of Modern American Usage just about completely resolves the Usage Wars’ problem of Authority. The book’s solution is both semantic and rhetorical. Garner manages to collapse the definitions of certain key terms and to control the compresence of rhetorical Appeals so cleverly that he is able to transcend both Usage Wars camps and simply tell the truth, and to tell the truth in a way that does not torpedo his own credibility but actually enhances it. His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn’t seem like there’s even an argument going on at all.
WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS (III)
Rhetorically, traditional Prescriptivists depend almost entirely on the Logical Appeal. One reason they are such inviting targets for liberal scorn is their arrogance, and their arrogance is based on their utter disdain for considerations of persona or persuasion. This is not an exaggeration. Doctrinaire Prescriptivists conceive of themselves not as advocates of correct English but as avatars of it. The truth of what they prescribe is itself their “authority” for prescribing it; and because they hold the truth of these prescriptions to be self-evident, they regard those Americans who reject or ignore the prescriptions as “ignoramuses” who a
re pretty much beneath notice except as evidence for the general deterioration of US culture.
Since the only true audience for it is the Prescriptivists themselves, it really doesn’t matter that their argument is almost Euthyphrotically circular—“It’s the truth because we say so, and we say so because it’s the truth.” This is dogmatism of a purity you don’t often see in this country, and it’s no accident that hard-core Prescriptivists are just a tiny fringe-type element of today’s culture. The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die.76
The hard-line Descriptivists, for all their calm scientism and avowed preference for fact over value, rely mostly on rhetorical pathos, the visceral emotional Appeal. As mentioned, the relevant emotions here are Sixtiesish in origin and leftist in temperament—an antipathy for conventional Authority and elitist put-downs and uptight restrictions and casuistries and androcaucasian bias and snobbery and overt smugness of any sort… i.e., for the very attitudes embodied in the prim glare of the grammarian and the languid honk of Buckley-type elites, which happen to be the two most visible species of SNOOT still around. Whether Methodological or Philosophical or pseudo-progressive, Descriptivists are, all and essentially, demagogues; and dogmatic Prescriptivists are actually their most valuable asset, since Americans’ visceral distaste for dogmatism and elitist fatuity gives Descriptivism a ready audience for its Pathetic Appeal.
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.
Mr. Bryan A. Garner recognizes something that neither of these camps appears to get: given 40 years of the Usage Wars, “authority” is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio. In fact, a large part of the project of any contemporary usage dictionary will consist in establishing this authority. If that seems rather obvious, be apprised that nobody before Garner seems to have figured it out—that the lexicographer’s challenge now is to be not just accurate and comprehensive but credible. That in the absence of unquestioned, capital-A Authority in language, the reader must now be moved or persuaded to grant a dictionary its authority, freely and for what appear to be good reasons.
Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection of information and a piece of Democratic77 rhetoric. Its primary Appeal is Ethical, and its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist’s persona: the author presents himself not as a cop or a judge but as more like a doctor or lawyer. This is an ingenious tactic. In the same sort of move we can see him make w/r/t judgment and objective, Garner here alters the relevant AHD definitions of authority from (1) “The right and power to command, enforce laws, exact obedience, determine, or judge” / “A person or group invested with this power” to (2) “Power to influence or persuade resulting from knowledge or experience” / “An accepted source of expert information or advice.” ADMAU’s Garner, in other words, casts himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense. And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism. After all, do we call a doctor or lawyer “elitist” when he presumes to tell us what we should eat or how we should do our taxes?
Of course, Garner really is a technocrat. He’s an attorney, recall, and in ADMAU he cultivates just the sort of persona good jurists project: knowledgeable, reasonable, dispassionate, fair. His judgments about usage tend to be rendered like legal opinions—exhaustive citation of precedent (other dictionaries’ judgments, published examples of actual usage) combined with clear, logical reasoning that’s always informed by the larger consensual purposes SWE is meant to serve.
Also technocratic is Garner’s approach to the whole issue of whether anybody’s even going to be interested in his 700 pages of fine-pointed counsel. Like any mature specialist, he simply assumes that there are good practical reasons why some people choose to concern themselves with his area of expertise; and his attitude about the fact that most Americans “could care less” about SWE usage isn’t scorn or disapproval but the phlegmatic resignation of a professional who realizes that he can give good advice but can’t make you take it:
The reality I care about most is that some people still want to use the language well.[78] They want to write effectively; they want to speak effectively. They want their language to be graceful at times and powerful at times. They want to understand how to use words well, how to manipulate sentences, and how to move about in the language without seeming to flail. They want good grammar, but they want more: they want rhetoric[79] in the traditional sense. That is, they want to use the language deftly so that it’s fit for their purposes.
It’s now possible to see that all the autobiographical stuff in ADMAU’s preface does more than just humanize Mr. Bryan A. Garner. It also serves to detail the early and enduring passion that helps make someone a credible technocrat—we tend to like and trust experts whose expertise is born of a real love for their specialty instead of just a desire to be expert at something. In fact, it turns out that ADMAU’s preface quietly and steadily invests Garner with every single qualification of modern technocratic authority: passionate devotion, reason and accountability (recall “in the interests of full disclosure, here are the ten critical points…”), experience (“… that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on”), exhaustive and tech-savvy research (“For contemporary usage, the files of our greatest dictionary makers pale in comparison with the full-text search capabilities now provided by NEXIS and WESTLAW”80), an even and judicious temperament (see e.g. this from his HYPERCORRECTION: “Sometimes people strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately”81), and the sort of humble integrity (for instance, including in one of the entries a past published usage-error of his own) that not only renders Garner likable but transmits the kind of reverence for English that good jurists have for the law, both of which are bigger and more important than any one person.
Probably the most ingenious and attractive thing about his dictionary’s Ethical Appeal, though, is Garner’s scrupulousness about considering the reader’s own hopes and fears and reasons for caring enough about usage to bother with something like ADMAU at all. These reasons, as Garner makes clear, tend to derive from a reader’s concern about his/her own linguistic authority and rhetorical persona and ability to convince an audience that he/she cares. Again and again, Garner frames his prescriptions in rhetorical terms: “To the writer or speaker for whom credibility is important, it’s a good idea to avoid distracting any readers or listeners”; “Whatever you do, if you use data in a context in which its number becomes known, you’ll bother some of your readers.” 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.
BONUS FULL-DISCLOSURE INFO ON THE SOURCES OF CERTAIN STUFF THAT DOES OR SHOULD APPEAR INSIDE QUOTATION MARKS IN THIS ARTICLE
Here “Distinguished Usage Panel…” = Morris Bishop, “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage,” an intro to the 1976 New College Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published by Houghton Mifflin Co.
Here “Calling upon the opinions of the elite…” = John Ottenhoff, “The Perils of Prescriptivism: Usage Notes and The American Heritage Dictionary,” American Speech, v. 31 #3, 1996, p. 274.
Here “I realized early…” = ADMAU, preface, pp. xiv–xv.
Here “Before going any…” = Ibid., p. x.
Here FN 13 “the ten critical points…” = Ibid., pp. x–xi.
Here “Once introduced, a prescriptive…” = Steven Pinker, “Grammar Puss” (excerpted from ch. 12 of Pinker’s book The Language Instinct, Morrow, 1994), which appeared in the New Republic on 31 Jan. ’94 (p. 20). Some of the subsequent Pinker quotations are from the NR excerpt because they tend to be more compact.
Here “Who sets down…?” = p. 141 of Bryson’s Mother Tongue (Avon, 1990).
Here “As you might already…” = ADMAU, preface, p. xiii.
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