It was one of those extraordinary "On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer" moments, to be reckoned alongside learning that Santa Claus is a myth or becoming conscious of how babies are made. I was in third grade. One of my classmates needed to be excused.
"Mrs. Ruesink, can I use the bathroom, please?"
"I have no idea. I assume you can."
Poor Garrett stood there fidgeting. Our teacher said:
"Of course you may use the bathroom. And thank you for saying ‘please.’"
Like one of stout Cortez’s men, I remember looking at Garrett with a wild surmise. We had both been introduced, in the span of about 15 seconds, to linguistic prescriptivism, a cause to which I have been more or less faithful ever since.
Too often debates between so-called descriptivists and their prescribing foes over questions of English usage have been held along comically reductive lines. Was Mrs. Ruesink right in momentarily delaying this visit to the boys’ room? Can Garrett use can when others insist that he means may? We all know the descriptivists’ answer: "Of course. He did, didn’t he, right there in the classroom at Andrews Elementary School in 1998?"
But this is trivial, is-ought moralizing, only a step or two removed from asserting that "The Star-Spangled Banner" is a histrionic ballad because it has been one on the lips of so many pop stars since Whitney Houston’s ghastly performance at Super Bowl XXV. The question is not whether Garrett can or whether he may—even Eric Partridge never suggested that poor usage should be a criminal offense—but whether he ought to have done so.
Enter Bryan Garner, a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law and the current editor of Black’s Law Dictionary. The first edition of his Modern American Usage was the subject of one of David Foster Wallace’s best essays, and it is generally considered the best book of its kind now in print. The present volume comprises the text of Modern American Usage, substantially revised, plus additional information on British spelling and other transatlantic differences in custom.
The change in title is significant. Garner is being handed the mantle of H.W. Fowler, the author of the original Modern English Usage and one of the great linguistic reactionaries of his or any age. (In The King’s English, he and his brother Francis decried the enormity of "envisage" as the sort of whimsical nonsense only Keats would write.) Having his name on the front cover is in certain lexicographical circles the equivalent of receiving a baronetcy.
For Garner, questions about usage are largely a matter of prudence. We write to communicate, to tell people things. "To the writer or speaker for whom credibility is important," he tells us, "it’s a good idea to avoid distracting any readers or listeners." Rank sloppiness distracts; so does snobbery. If I write, "Sally is taller than she," what am I really telling the reader other than that I hold the opinion that "than" is a conjunction and that I am proud of holding this opinion?
The best illustration of his moderate forbearing attitude is the entry on "Skunked Terms," words he thinks careful writers should abandon because to use them necessarily involves either confusing the uninitiated—what is "effete" about Ted Cruz?—or poking the bear. Take "decimate," for example. How much mileage are we ever going to get out of a word that means to "to kill one in every ten of (a group of people)"? Dropping it altogether would be a small price to pay for never again having to explain that "Tim Duncan Celebrates Birthday After Spurs Decimate the Memphis Grizzlies" makes no sense unless San Antonio’s basketball team is made up of ruthless killers.
This is not to say that Garner abandons the spirit of Fowler. He is uncompromising on who and whom, fortuitous, enormity, reticent, rarely ever, and scarcely used with negatives. Every editor in the English-speaking world should read the entry on "Titular Tomfoolery," a satisfying indictment of the anarthrous noun modifier or false title—e.g., "actor Tom Cruise." Leave aside for a moment the question of whether readers need to be reminded that Bill Clinton was once the president of these United States or informed that Hegel wrote philosophy and was German. Would it really be so reactionary a move, so profligate an expenditure of column-inches or, as the case may be, pixels, to revert to pre-Time magazine usage and write "Ke$ha, the singer"?
Likewise, we could all do with a reminder of how much jargon and pseudery we allow to creep into everyday usage. Open a newspaper and ask yourself why "sustained injuries," a phrase at which no one blinks, should not be replaced with "was injured"; why people who would balk at translating "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" insist on writing "indices" for "indexes"; how, while we’re on the subject, anyone ever got it into his head that "octopi" was a word in English or any other language or that methodology, the science of methods, was a fancy synonym for method. Garner is excellent on the linguistic habits of bureaucrats and, naturally, lawyers, with their acronym addictions and "zombie nouns"— "computerization," "maximization," "utilization." But the real eye-opener is his entry on "Airlinese":
The JARGON of the airline business is notable in several ways. … [I]t relies heavily on DOUBLESPEAK, with a dose of ZOMBIE NOUNS; seat cushions may be used as flotation devices means "if we crash in water, use your seat cushion to float"; in the event of a loss in cabin pressure means "if we lose cabin pressure so that no one can breathe"; please use the trash dispenser for anything other than bathroom tissue means "don’t try to flush paper towels or anything other than bathroom tissue down the commode."
An uncomfortable amount of stuff in books and magazines sounds like this. Should we really be taking our stylistic cues from Delta and Southwest?
No one in Garner’s position will please every reader all the time. I do not think it is "picayunish pedantry," even for those of us who have mostly come to terms with most of the common one-word sentence adverbs, to find "More important" preferable to "More importantly" at the beginning of a sentence. I was baffled by his assertion that illegal alien is the "predominant" term for persons who have entered a country unlawfully and now reside there: The words appear regularly in no major newspaper, and have even been banned from the subject index at the Library of Congress. It would be good in future editions to see references to "Great Britain," the name of an island, replaced with "the United Kingdom" when Garner means the nation of which Queen Elizabeth II is sovereign.
Let’s not get sidetracked, though. This is a delightful volume, equally suitable for last-minute reference and lazy weekend browsing. The entries have been composed with as much wit as they have learning—see, for example, the one on variant spellings of "negligee." Garner is no snob: Shakespeare and Bertie Wooster cheerfully inhabit these pages alongside Alanis Morissette and Yosemite Sam. The 11 different analogies—drawn from golf, report cards, etiquette, and so on—used in the language-change index to illustrate the relative shamefulness of a given slip-up are helpful and amusing: Who wants to pull off the triple bogey of using bimonthly in place of semimonthly or make wind loudly at the table by misspelling hale and hearty?
If you care at all about writing English, you can buy this wonderful book. You certainly may, and you probably should.