A Sense of Style

My mother and her sister, Ellen at left in 1934

My mother would have enjoyed Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style, the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century! Though she might have raised an eyebrow at the trailing subtitle and exclamation point–she had a critical eye for overstatements.

Ruth never went to college. But let me back up.

Ruth went to work out of high school to help support the family during the Depression. No different than most immigrant families. Her father wasn’t the biblical leader he must have considered himself to be–failing at the stock market–selling his shoe business to buy stock in Pennsylvania coal companies shortly before the market collapsed on Black Friday.

Me, I’m all in for bit coins.

I knew only one of my grandparents–the one who raised me. No jolly bearded grandpappys bounced me on a bony leg with glee or any other way, and my father’s mother died before he did–weeks apart. They’d all gone to meet their maker before I’d made the scene.

After her husband’s small mistiming of the market, Ruth’s mother took in borders to help them stay in the house on Gates Street in Wilkes-Barre. Being the oldest of the three children, Ruth went to work soon as she could. It’s also said her father saw no value in a college education for his two daughters. If the obdurate Irish fool had had more foresight than blarney, after her husband died his daughter might not have suffered so many sleepless nights praying she’d make her family’s ends meet.

Ruth began working in a department store, then took the Pennsylvania civil service exam and grabbed a position at the Pennsylvania Poor Board. Like that name? Certainly better than Dickens’ poorhouse; they were Quakers after all. She began with the American Red Cross when our father became too ill to work anymore, ’47 or ’48, a career that lasted the rest of her working life.

Ruth was proud of being able to write and relished reading articles from the New Yorker because they presumed their audience comprised educated readers. She liked to laugh at New York City pretension, and likely would only shake her head at this latest peccadillo the City has brought down on the entire country. She used reading to educate herself–successfully. She once told the story of ghostwriting letters for several of the local Red Cross Chapter’s board chairmen, businessmen who struggled at that task, not having learned how to write let alone type. Business was run by men in those days, though we won’t say how well.

“Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures.” 

From A Sense of Style by Steven Pinker [1]

Ruth would have agreed with that statement.  Though I suspect Pinker’s book is not for a general audience.  Even word nerds can get lost in some of this.  His own writing style is fluid and friendly, his studies as a “psycholinguist and cognitive scientist”–yes that’s what he says–encourages him (lures, tempts perhaps taunts him?) deep into the weeds of grammar, syntax, and writing structure.  He finds a good deal of humor in those thickets.  He admits he loves style books, writing arcana to most of us. 

Pinker writes of Dear Abbey advising the newly married husband concerned about his wife being naked around the house to put an apron on when frying bacon.  Then praises the lucid description the physicist, Brian Greene gives to black holes and multi-universe theory. 

He discusses the Bad Writing Contest, created by Dennis Dutton, who liked to nominate the worst writing in a given year.  1998’s worst writing award went to a critic, Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Followed by Pinker’s comment: “A reader of this intimidating passage can marvel at Butler’s ability to juggle abstract propositions about still more abstract propositions, with no real world referent in sight.” Like he said.

And quotes Zonker Harris in a Doonesbury cartoon.

He pillories what he calls shudder quotes that some writers use to distance themselves from a common expression, as in:

She is a ‘quick study’ and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her.

The author seems to be saying “I couldn’t think of a better way of putting this, but please don’t think I’m a flibbertigibbet who talks this way; I am a serious scholar.” 

Pinker take a two-fer swipe at postmodernism and bad writing in:

The use of shudder quotes is taken to an extreme in the agonizingly self-conscious… style of postmodernism, which rejects the possibility that any word can ever refer to anything, or even that there is an objectively existing world for words to refer to.  Hence the 2004 headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion on the passing of postmodernism’s leading light: JACQUES DERRIDA “Dies”

I rather doubt my mother would have taken to postmodernism either; she was too well grounded in the real world. Harold Bloom, my literary critic hero despised the movement as flaccid thinking. We lost Bloom this year; he’s now upstairs taking the angels to task for misreading Shakespeare.

Pinker decimates academic writing e.g.:

And then there’s compulsive hedging. Many writers cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply they are not willing to stand behind what they are saying, including… the ubiquitous ‘I would argue’ (does this mean that you would argue for your position if things were different, but will not argue for it now?).

And criticizes those who contend one can only use the word “decimate” in its first meaning (“To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of” while overlooking its more common usage today: “To destroy or remove a large proportion of; to subject to severe loss, slaughter, or mortality.” OED). Pinker suggests that if we only use a word’s original meaning, December (the Roman tenth month of the year) would need to be renamed. Right on!

He relishes the inadvertency:

ADMITTED OLYMPIC SKATER NANCY KERRIGAN ATTACKER BRIAN SEAN GRIFFITH DIES.

A blogger posted a commentary entitled “Admitted Olympic Skater Nancy Kerrigan Attacker Brian Sean Griffith Web Site Obituary Headline Writer Could Have Been Clearer.”

LAW TO PRESERVE SQUIRRELS HIT BY MAYOR

I enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever.

MANUFACTURING DATA HELPS INVIGORATE WALL STREET.

Including the classic press release from a student group at Yale re. their Campus-Wide Sex Week:

“The week involves… a faculty panel on sex in college with four professors…”

Not the school I recall–and in any case, my professors, all great architects, didn’t induce lust in my heart as Jimmy Carter might say–they weren’t particularly handsome. Jim Sterling was a stodgy Englishman with a seldom lit stogie, and Charlie Moore had lost his hair as I recall.

The mangled cliché:

Recently a White House official referred to the American Israeli Political Affairs Committee as “the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” confusing the elephant in the room (something everyone pretends to ignore) with an 800-pound gorilla (something that’s powerful enough to do whatever it wants, from the joke “Where does a 800-pound gorilla sit?”

Then he takes on zombie nouns (verbs transfigured into obscurant nouns):

“Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.”

Pinker’s translation: “We presented participants with a sentence followed by the words TRUE or FALSE.”

Pinker assails one of my pet peeves, namely the common writing advice to avoid the passive tense like the plague. Why avoid the passive tense, you might ask? Dunno. An explanation of why it’s scandalous to employ a perfectly intelligible verb form has never been put forward. Ain’t exactly no double negative, or screwing up the case between subjects and it’s verb.

And in arguing for the obvious fact the language inevitably evolves over time, (no shit, Sherlock), he presents (quotes) one of those dry English one liners worthy of Oscar Wilde:

In resigning themselves to the role of chronically ever-changing usage [lexicographers] are acknowledging the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle’s famous reply to Margaret Fuller’s statement ‘I accept the universe’: “Gad, she’d better.”

Billboards on NC Route 158

After Thanksgiving, as we were taking our sad leave-taking of the Outer Banks I was finishing A Sense of Style as D was driving the first leg of the trip. Passing the whistle-stop village of Coinjock, I spied these two billboards:

• Sound Feet Shoes Apparently, this company won’t abide less than sound extremities. That the shoe company’s name refers to the nearby Albemarle Sound may escape vacationers from New Jersey.

Then there’s…

• “BBQ and GAS!” Some folks are downright candid, don’t you know.

Lastly We Come to the Internet’s Self Help Industry

The ten best ways to know when the twenty things your thirty-odd advisors are insisting you follow of their one hundred most revealing tips to avoid the ultimately worst thing in the universe, including the care of your twenty-odd (or just plain odd) relatives! TAKE THE COURSE! In less than five minutes. Our happy Santa’s elves have their ear buds on and are waiting on your click!!!!!

I hear they’re back in time for Christmas.

Illiteracy ROOLS!

The only photo I can find of Granny smiling—and who wouldn’t be—holding my 2 month old personage?

[1] I’m using indents in this blog to replace quotation marks to limit them to strictly Pinker’s.