MINI BOOK CLUB: Authority and American Usage (Patreon)

[Pictured: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays' cover]This is the first and only discussion thread for Authority and American Usage, the second piece of July's mini book club!Ellen talking, CJ locked in editing basement, not hostile, blah blah.One of my favourite classes last year was taught by an Austrian professor who studied the institutional movements of language change. His special area of focus was the shifting of "dialects" into "languages": when does, for example, Austrian-German stop being a subdialect of German and become Austrian, its own language. My professor kept coming back to the question of legitimacy and statehood, national identity, in-group and out-group language, and autonomy. Authority. My grandfather learned German when he was dating a German woman, and her family would only talk "High German" (German-German, as my professor would call it) when he was around them, because that's the most educated and "best" version of the language, the purest, the German that you speak when you're speaking the right way. This is also the German that my dad would later learn in university; it was the only form taught in higher education.Who even gets to have a language, let alone what the rules within that language are, is an incredibly political question. David Foster Wallace's essay brought alot of memories back from that class, and from conversations I've had as a Canadian between French-French speaking friends and Quebecois-French speaking friends. Speaking of Canada: the first specifically Canadian English Dictionary was published in 1998 by Oxford, and its only update arrived in 2004 to extremely little fanfare. The predominant academic response was "who needs this; use an American or British-English guide."Lots of linguistical combatants don't make it into the Usage Wars stage of discourse.Moving on from the philosophy of what gets to be a language, let's get into specifics of what Wallace does with his.---------------------Structure and FootnotesI enjoyed reading this essay in a way entirely different from Story of Your Life. They're very different pieces of writing that lent themselves to different types of reading, and because of that, reflection. A friend described his experience with Authority and American Usage to me as "watching somebody very skilled at a particular thing flex... very satisfying to read and mutter 'oh you bastard' about."My friend was particularly taken with the nested play of form: dictionary review hiding academic analysis hiding historical overview hiding personal essay, and I do agree with him that the structure of this thing is fascinating to think about.The footnotes add alot to that structural impact, along with those INTERPOLATIONS, because they reinforce the idea of their contents: how should language be used, and on what authority is that decided? Private? Public? Institutional? Familial? Finding the right way to present Wallace's expertise in various areas, in ways that self evidently display credibility, was the best way to get that point across (and its cute that Wallace's form and philosophy both mirror Bryan Garner's).

INTERPOLATION: Private VS Public Thinking

It's interesting what Wallace is willing to disclose in footnotes verses the main body of his essay, and the "burying" effect of his childhood history/intimate opinions underneath his (weaponized?) academic language. That too is an effective example of his own thesis about rhetorical appeal.

But isn't it also a strange compression of vulnerability, a tacit acknowledgement that personhood is strangely unwelcome in debate about personal expression?Another friend of mine, Haweya of Substack, reaserch group, and SNP infamy, more closely aligns with my own opinion about Wallace's essay structure: he had me in the first half im not gonna lie !!! he was making many valid points and then i felt like he dropped me from a 12 story building.Yes. Neither of us liked the black student monologue all that much. Rhetorical boner indeed.---------------------12 Story Building DropA further Haweya quote: [WALLACE IS] LIKE CONCLUSION: yes standard english is racist but SHRUG nothing to do bout that... his pessimism is soooo useless!!! its not true and its ugly and i dont believe it.What she said. My opinion diverges from Wallace at the critical second, partly for reasons that Wallace himself suggests in the article, partly because I am more of a filthy descriptivist than our SNOOT original author, partly because I do believe fiercely that "private language," as in the same word having specifically individual connotations and meaning for different users of the word, can be shared--and that this is the germination of new languages actually, valid and fantastic languages.At all times I am embroiled in THE GATEKEEPER'S DILEMMA and so I do sympathise with much of Wallace's feelings. I'm still with him through the Polical Correctness, The Ineffective Left Wants To Call People Poor In A Nicer Way!? spiel (changing the words we use to discuss various social inequalities is important but it is not the singular or most important action to be taken by far), but Wallace loses me by failing to impart the beauty of Standard-English and just doubling down on its efficacy.All languages are effective, at different things in different ways, and SE's virtue there is not special.---------------------There's too much material in this thing to enumerate myself entirely; I'm very curious what ideas spoke to everybody because there are simply so many jammed under the hood.If you're comfortable sharing--I'm also curious how everyone's different language backgrounds influenced their opinions. Much of what I wrote here and thought about is due to my feelings about Canadian-English and my allegiances to various French dialects.August's book: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman! It's short and snappy and timely and readable. Join us. Schedule will be posted soon.Until then, please know I'm considering your hopes and fears and reasons for caring enough about usage to bother with something like [BOOK CLUB] at all...