mills

Henry Fowler, the lexicographer best known for A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. David Foster Wallace, in his evidently quite-flawed essay “Tense Present,” described Fowler thusly:

If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field…

What interests me about Fowler’s claim is that I am often amused by the veneration of intelligence in the same communities that deplore the veneration of beauty or wealth, since intelligence is no less arbitrary in allotment, constructed in classification, and happenstance in appearance than those attributes. Indeed, it involves as many attendant flaws as they do, too: often, wit entails derision; brilliance, arrogance; knowledge, pedantic elitism.

Simen commented recently on the inequality of beauty, a fact which problematizes even the most pleasant utopias; those who hope to maintain in the face of the irresolvable unfairness of beauty’s inequitable distribution the plausibility of a fair society will have to claim that beauty is a fluid concept we can redefine, that it only matters because of the patriarchy or advertising, or some such idea reducing its import. I’ve long wondered what egalitarian revolutionaries propose to do about nature’s individuated and unequal distribution of attractiveness.

And what of intelligence? I believe intelligence is no more laudable than athleticism, morally; it makes one good at some things and not at others. It is not a moral virtue; it is not a mark of goodness; someone cannot be faulted for not possessing it; and Fowler is right: we should regard the display of knowledge as comparably vulgar to material ostentation.

Or is this not the case? Is there some quality to intelligence which distinguishes it from beauty, speed, height? Is there a connection, in theory or in fact, between intelligence and goodness (should there be such a thing)? Does it relate to this characteristic of mind?

Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kallerman in a rather fun article on whether ‘they’ is the best all-purpose pronoun. I occasionally make use of ‘s/he,’ but inconsistently; at times, a slash looks absurd in a line of prose. Traditionalists will be pleased to learn that while ‘they’ was once preferred it was a grammar book by Anne Fisher that popularized the notion that ‘he’ and ‘his’ and so on can be used to refer to both sexes.

The article also notes some amusing pronouns proposed to solve this problem, including ‘thon’ and ‘heer.’ Nevertheless, I suspect it won’t end the debate at my old school.

A demonym or gentilic is the name by which residents of a place are known: New Orleanian, for example, or Norwegian. It is notable that none of the suggested demonyms for residents of Conneticut were recognized by my spell-checker, nor was that given to residents of New Orleans, and nor indeed were the words demonym and gentilic!

It is possibly a controversial field. The Wikipedia article details skirmishes involving residents of Lesbos, the Scottish (as opposed to the Scotch), and many more. Because American is problematic insofar as it isn’t specific beyond a couple of continents, there is some discussion of our options:

United Statian is awkward in English, but it exists in Spanish (estadounidense), French (étatsunien(ne), although americain(e) is preferred), Portuguese (estado-unidense or estadunidense), Italian (statunitense), and also in Interlingua (statounitese).

As happy as I was to learn the words demonym and gentilic, I am happier to now introduce myself to others as a United Statian, which sounds like a breed of dog.

In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis uses precise and subtle strokes to draw the ludicrous pretension in characters like Bertrand, whose automatic deployment of an absolutely empty phrase exemplifies his affectation. I love Dixon’s baffled response: “Why shouldn’t they pardon the expression?” Why indeed.

Over time I’ve become painfully allergic to nonsense in language, and not merely such automatic, stock phrases as “if you’ll pardon the expression” as used above. When they’re not merely purposeless, their principle effect is problematic enough: what is clichéd lulls us into stuporous imperception; in not awakening us, though the freshly smart shock of novel language, to the reality beneath it, it isn’t merely uninteresting: it conceals beneath the banal what ought to be striking.

(This has to do with the evolutionary basis for human cognition, incidentally: something must be new for us to see it, and dead language is therefore actually obscuring. When people say something “is a cliché because it’s true,” they’re right, but the truth of it isn’t the point: what is needed is a way for us to see and feel the truth, and clichés cannot help with that).

But worse than cliché is the senseless phrase: the adjective coupled to the noun that seems to modify it absurdly, the journalistic trope that reduces a very specific disaster with specific victims to just another disaster, the sentence structure that betrays that the author wrote as the thought coursed through him, without pausing to interrogate it for meaning, symmetry, clarity, mere logic. And so many little pairs of words that are never separated! So many objects destined never to be subjects (and vice versa)! So much automatic grammar, automatic diction!

My own writing is no different: gibberish filler, unexamined passages, modifications that make little sense or detract from the point, the lies of transitions and conclusions, lumbering language that is directed by habit and not consideration. I find these pitiful little clumps of thoughtlessness everywhere and I feel like Dixon, perplexed and irritable and scornful: Why? Why?

It always makes me laugh. I have a fantasy that someday, at a cocktail party, I will give voice to Dixon’s question when someone says something like, “Well, to be perfectly honest, I…” Were they otherwise to have been imperfectly honest? Or perfectly dishonest? Or imperfectly dishonest? What is perfectible about honesty?

Etc. etc. etc.

Clive James on Walter Benjamin.

James’ brilliantly lucid, cogent, and comprehensive essays on various subjects from Louis Armstrong to Hegel to Raymond Aron to Leon Trotsky, have been one of my happier recent discoveries. I mentioned him previously here.

In his essay on Benjamin, he discusses the tragic intellectual figure more honestly than anyone I’ve yet read and gives me permission to finally admit something it is quite out of fashion to say: I not only don’t understand Benjamin, but don’t believe the fault is entirely mine.

While remaining sympathetic to Benjamin and frankly admiring his many talents -most notably a gift for examining the peripheral minutiae of life for their cultural meanings- James makes a strong case that Benjamin was mostly wrong: about Stalin and Marxism, certainly, and not just as exposed by history, about the relationship between art and reproduction, and about the theory of science that, as Popper would note, is not used or needed by scientists in any way.

Moreover, he argues persuasively that Benjamin is admired primarily for the reasons undergraduates often love Derrida: they understand him too poorly to do anything but fall prostrate intellectually before him and declare him a god. His suicide while fleeing the Nazis contributes a romantic air to his works, as well.

Most people, myself included, have a naturally arrogant and culturally solipsistic attitude towards thought: what they understand, they accept; what is just beyond their grasp, they may revere or reject based on aesthetics; and what they do not grasp, they declare “meaningless.” Ask an ordinary citizen about modern art and you’ll often hear that “if it doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t make sense.”

I have for years worried that my resistance to Benjamin’s ludicrously difficult and seemingly distracting style -a style which almost seems like a camouflage disguising obviousness or incoherence- was simply my ordinary vanity inclining me to believe that “if I don’t get it, it’s not worth a damn.”

But I don’t think this is the case any longer. James quotes Novalis: “To philosophize is to make vivid,” and on this basis alone I am comfortable abandoning my semi-annual efforts to appreciate Benjamin, whose prose makes vivid neither his subjects nor the esteem in which he is held.

Evgeny Dobrenko, writing in his introduction to Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard.

In art, the criticism of cliche makes contextual sense: a major criterion of value for any work of art is its originality, which justifies its creation. If a work merely repeats or reiterates something already expressed, its redundancy calls into question its purpose; in other words, cliche is an utterly fatal flaw in art: visual, musical, textual, whichever.

In ordinary life, the problem with cliche is that it obscures the nature of our experiences by reducing them to worn, formulaic phrases not commensurate with the vitality of existence. While cliches are often defended (“It’s a cliche because it’s true!”), the fact is that cliches aren’t problematic because they’re false -they’re not- but because their bland truth strangles the immediate power of our perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

As soon as some prescribed, oft-repeated, casually-bandied and accepted sentence superimposes commonality on your love, your fear, your shock, you’ve diluted its power, subordinated it to a mechanical expression of the culture at large. Cliche interposes banal formulae between you and your life, rounding reality to its nearest common shapes.

Art demolishes cliche by finding new ways to say things we’ve all known; one mark of excellent art is that it is at once novel and familiar.  Too much of the former and it might have lost its humanity and become mannered and academic; too much of the latter and it’s only repeating to you what you know, which might feel nice but doesn’t change the way you see the world.