Our New Overlord: Standard Written (White) English

A fifteen-minute vacation from version 77 of the excel model I was working on (my motto: "yes, we can incorporate that…") took me to a British oil worker in Siberia exclaiming that the recent earthquake on Sakhalin Island likely caused several thousand dollars worth of improvements. From there, somehow, the interwebs directed me to a nameless finance drone who promised that his sub-prime heavy investment company, formerly headed by a Mr. Juggles, will "think twice" about where they invest client money in the future--which he notes is "a 100% increase in the amount of thinking we have done in the past." After some carefully masked lol-ing, I rounded the session out with this story on nerds from the New York times. Sayeth the liberal rag:

Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere. After all, “trends in music, dance, fashion, sports and language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African-American source,” but “unlike the styles of cool European American students, in nerdiness, African-American culture and language [do] not play even a covert role.

Holla! Finally, a way for the college-educated single white male working for The Man to escape the influence of Africa-American cultural (not to mention athletic) hegemony. (As an aside, you will recall that I blogged about my hellish experience as an upper-middle class white male victim of a earthquake while traveling to Hawaii on a corporate expense account.) While continuing to mull the idea over, I wondered what other resources out there could help me understand how the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale?

I, for one, praise our new Google overlords because a search asking that question brings up Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage by David Foster Wallace of Pomona College fame (w00t). What was the topic of this article that has had me thinking for days, while driving, while eating, while swimming? (btw, I have been swimming the long course at an Olympic pool nearby--the long course makes the distance sing by.) Why dictionaries of course!

What is a Snoot?

That’s right. A dictionary. But more precisely, a review of a dictionary. Wallace uses this review to launch into an expose of "warring" (think War on Participles not War on Terror) factions within the lexicographical community. Specifically, despite being one himself, Wallace wants to take snoots down a notch. What's a snoot? Explaineth Wallace:

Snoots are the sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this — Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is SNOOT. The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it. I submit that we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd.

Wallace meanders back and forth, taking his merry time setting up concepts and threads to weave together throughout the article. But, in the immortal words of both Curious George and George Bush: "F&#@ that s#@5," [Citation needed] I will just give you the LOL-lights--teasers that I thought were excellent and encourage you to read the article.

Pants vs Skirts as a Metaphor for Why Everyone Must Learn to Communicate in Standard Written (or White) English

Then let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant — as a thought experiment if nothing else — that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes — shout yes — to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

Why Snootlets get the Snot Beat Out of Them

Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTlets tend to have a very hard social time of it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who's wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you've seen them — these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out "How incalculably dreadful!" etc. The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable.

Why Political Correctness Blows

Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact — in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself — of vastly more help to conservatives and the U.S. status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)

How Many Dialects of English Do You Speak?

Maybe it's a combination of my SNOOTitude and the fact that I end up having to read a lot of it for my job, but I'm afraid I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but as a grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherences of Presidential English ("This is the best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reengineering weapons of mass destruction") or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak ("Our Mission: to proactively search and provide the optimum networking skills and resources to meet the needs of your growing business"); and in support of this utter contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE pegged as a "mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence" in which "it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."