2003 all over again

We are in London, posting this from Computer Lab 2 in the basement of 99 Great Russell. The Labour Movement statue of the scarf-wearing man bending down to help up another man is still there. Exchange rate is a bit better this time, though.

We live in a community next to Hampstead Heath. Families and flowerboxes are much in evidence. It's bitterly cold (not as bad as Berlin in December '03, though--not cold that drives you into every corner coffeeshop.) Tonight we're meeting friends to see New Year's Eve fireworks. The rest of the faculty don't arrive until next week, so I've got plenty of time to practice walking the three miles from our flat to Great Russell until I can get here without getting lost. On Friday I will get my British Library Reader Card and begin delving into the India Office materials and missionary manuscripts. You get a free extra year of BL access if you're going for a PhD (keep that in mind, boys.)

Do any of you have Skype?

Happy Birthday Mr Maclean

After completing his doctorate, Maclean taught English at the University of Chicago for the rest of his career. Here he is in January of 1970 lecturing on Shakespeare. A new book from the University of Chicago Press, The Norman Maclean Reader, includes some literary criticism, unpublished writings on Custer, an interview, and a couple of shorter pieces in the vein of A River Runs Through It and his posthumous Young Men and Fire.

Why I Feel Safe In My Snobbery About Proper Language

Because David Foster Wallaces agrees with me.

In this long but highly entertaining article from Harper's Magazine, David Foster Wallace discusses dictionaries, their uses, and the foibles of those who don't believe that languages should have rules.

Read it. I laughed a lot and felt intelligent while reading it. All anyone wants in the world, right?

Excerpts:

To understand this, you have only to accept the proposition that language is by its very nature public — i.e., that there can be no such thing as a Private Language[23] and then to observe the way Methodological Descriptivists seem either ignorant of this fact or oblivious to its consequences, as in for example one Charles Fries's introduction to an epigone of Webster's Third called The American College Dictionary:

A dictionary can be an "authority" only in the
sense in which a book of chemistry or of physics
or of botany can be an "authority": by the accuracy
and the completeness of its record of the observed
facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest
principles and techniques of the particular science.

This is so stupid it practically drools. An "authoritative" physics text presents the results of physicists' observations and physicists' theories about those observations. If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a "valid" theory in the textbook — just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply, the use becomes an ipso facto "valid" part of the language. Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not, finally, scientists but census-takers who happen to misconstrue the importance of "observed facts." It isn't scientific phenomena they're tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are — to be blunt — moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an "authoritative" ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.

and

Take, for example, the Descriptivism claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable. 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.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a U.S. male and also have a U.S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself — you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. In our culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is Making a Statement that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences.

You see where this is going.

Happy Holidays from the North Locust Boys!

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