Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

ARTICLE’S CRUX: WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS (I)

It isn’t that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is perfect. It doesn’t seem to cover conversant in vs. conversant with, for example, or abstruse vs. obtuse, or to have anything on hereby and herewith (which I tend to use interchangeably but always have the uneasy feeling I’m screwing up). Garner’s got a good discussion of used to but nothing on supposed to. Nor does he give any examples to help explain irregular participles and transitivity (“The light shone” vs. “I shined the light,” etc.), and these would seem to be more important than, say, the correct spelling of huzzah or the plural of animalculum, both of which get discussed. In other words, a rock-ribbed SNOOT is going to be able to find stuff to kvetch about in any usage dictionary, and ADMAU is no exception.

But it’s still really, really good. Except for the VOGUE WORDS snafu and the absence of a pronunciation entry on trough,74 the above were pretty much the only quibbles this reviewer could find. ADMAU is thorough and timely and solid, as good as Follett’s and Gilman’s and the handful of other great American usage guides of the century. Their format — which was Fowler’s — is ADMAU’s, too: concise entries on individual words and phrases and expository cap-titled MINIESSAYS on any issue broad enough to warrant more general discussion. Because of both his Fowler Society and the advent of online databases, though, Garner has access to many more examples of actual published SWE than did Gilman nine years ago, and he uses them to great, if lengthy, effect. But none of this is why Bryan Garner is a genius.

ADMAU is a collection of judgments and so is in no way Descriptivist, but Garner structures his judgments very carefully to avoid the elitism and anality of traditional SNOOTitude. He does not deploy irony or scorn or caustic wit, nor tropes or colloquialisms or contractions … or really any sort of verbal style at all. In fact, even though Garner talks openly about himself and uses the 1-S pronoun throughout the whole dictionary, his personality is oddly effaced, neutralized. It’s like he’s so bland he’s barely there. For instance, as this reviewer was finishing the book’s final entry, 75 it struck me that I had no idea whether Bryan A. Garner was black or white, gay or straight, Democrat or Dittohead. What was even more striking was that I hadn’t once wondered about any of this up to now; something about Garner’s lexical persona kept me from ever asking where the guy was coming from or what particular agendas or ideologies were informing what he had admitted right up front were “value judgments.” This seemed very odd indeed. Bland people can have axes to grind, too, so I decided that bland probably wasn’t the right word to describe Garner’s ADMAU persona. The right word was probably more like objective, but with a little o, as in “disinterested,” “reasonable.” Then something kind of obvious occurred to me, but in an unobvious way — this small-o kind of objectivity was very different from the metaphysical, capital O-type Objectivity whose postmodern loss had destroyed (I’d pretty much concluded) any possibility of genuine Authority in issues of usage.

Then it occurred to me that if Objectivity still had a lowercase sense unaffected by modern relativism, maybe Authority did as well. So, just as I’d done w/r/t Garner’s use of judgment, I went to my trusty conservative American Heritage Dictionary and looked up authority.

Does any of this make sense? Because this was how I discovered that Bryan Garner is a genius.