So Who Made You Dictator? 8/14/02

If you're going to be a language pundit, you need serious ammunition. The adversary is well-armed. Jill Walker, a hypertext theoretician, cites several writers at her blog (http://cmc.uib.no/jill/archives/blogtheory.html) who feel that there's something special, something different and unique about online text that magically frees it from the strictures of traditional publishing (pesky stuff like grammar and whatnot) in favor of an oral familiarity. The Web does allow any yokel with access to broadcast - but unless his ideas are formatted to accord with standard usage, all he announces to the world is that he's an illiterate. That's why I frequent sites like: The Vocabula Review.

There are exceptions, agreed. Various IRC and ICQ conventions have established particular stylistic rules for those mediums, but as regards the informational Website and Weblog, the publisher has chosen to publish for the CRT and LCD instead of paper, simultaneously accepting the duties of editor and designer. Do it right and you get mindshare.

So who gives the language critic his or her authority? William Safire's quip, "We are the ones who care - we've registered for the linguistic primary" says it in a nutshell. The Vocabula Review (http://www.vocabula.com/) is a good example of a registered candidate. The critic probably has at least a dozen dictionaries, style guides covering various eras and subjects, and he studies the usage wars between prescriptive and descriptive grammarians to maintain an intimate familiarity with the key campaigns.

In The Story of Webster's Third (ISBN: 0521558697), the editor, Philip Gove, exhorts his team to "read everything: matchbook covers, bus schedules..." in addition to newspapers and books. The language critic follows this advice and develops a sense of what "the usual thing" is in a particular case. No, he won't likely be a James Joyce, but he will be authoritative when he reads something and opines, "That isn't standard."

Knowing what is normal, what is expected, is the key element of crafting and editing prose that reads smoothly. Ideas can always be striking, but the mode of their delivery should not jar or startle the reader without good reason. Better for the language and form to take a back seat and let the thoughts of the writer flow forth cleanly from page to reader than for the text to draw attention to itself. As always, poetry, rhetoric, etc., will test this rule, but the exceptions only prove its validity.

So write well.