Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses — places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.
—David Foster Wallace, American novelist and essayist, Everything and More, 2003

Posted on November 28, 2003 at 7:24 AM

David Foster Wallace quotations | Permalink | Comments

Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what's OK and what isn't? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradition won't work, because what's considered correct changes over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular pronoun took a singular conjugation—"You is." Earlier still, the standard 2-S pronoun wasn't you but thou. Huge numbers of now acceptable words like clever, fun, banter, and prestigious entered English as what usage authorities considered errors or egregious slang. And not just usage conventions but English itself changes over time; if it didn't, we'd all still be talking like Chaucer. Who's to say which changes are natural and which are corruptions?
—David Foster Wallace, American novelist and essayist, "Tense Present," Harper's Magazine, April 2001

Posted on November 21, 2003 at 9:30 PM

David Foster Wallace quotations | Permalink | Comments

From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least going to need it, i.e., that offering counsel on the finer points of U.S. English is Preaching to the Choir. The relevant Choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched Story of English on PBS (twice) and read W. Safire's column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE—10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this—Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is SNOOT. The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it.
—David Foster Wallace, American novelist and essayist, "Tense Present," Harper's Magazine, April 2001