Why Fowler's Modern English Usage is Better than Sex

(edited 06/02)

(for “The Rock Where Moses Stood…” for friendship, wisdom, and for not being afraid to call me a sub-literate hack when necessary.)

There are three kinds of people in the world. The first are those who --as I do -- think that Fowler’s Modern English Usage is the best thing since Aristotle released his ”Live in the Lycaeum” concerts on vinyl (yes, I’m talking about the ones with Alexander the Great on bass). The second are people who have – alas for them! -- never heard of Fowler’s and the third, of course, are IDIOTS -- so beneath notice that their 15 seconds (inflation, baby) of fame is thoroughly exhausted by my invoking them just then.

But (sigh) you have that skeptical look again. "Better than SEX?" I hear you say in that supercilious way of yours. "I mean,we know he’s given to hyperbole (what the hell was "Hacks of Academe"?!) but what KIND of sex are we talking about here? I mean...I can see why reading Fowler’s might be better than teaching an introductory course on, say, “The Body and How Everyone Has Been, like, y'know, Mean To It throughout the History of Western Thought”, but...

But, nothing. Trust me, I know that of which I speak.

How about I start with the obvious things:

1) The prose: it’s astonishing. Truly. I mean, if you could see me now you’d know that I’m still (quite literally) slack-jawed and I haven't looked at the book for at least 24 hours. A drool scultpure is forming on the ground beside me in the shape of the Venus de Milo.

Sure, Fowler's not Evelyn Waugh or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but reading the guy is STILL like looking at a particularly ordinary looking-rock that’s surreptitiously shot through with diamonds: you have to stare at it for a while to see just how much it coruscates in even the dimmest of lights. Put differently: reading Fowler is like watching the driest of dry wits rub itself down with a towel in an unmistakably erotic way and then seeing it order a martini which it demands should bebe -especially- dry.

2) The reasoning: pellucid, calm, flawless. Not a diamond in the rough, but a rough diamond: all stodgy 3 meat and veg. common-sense on the one hand and outrageous, brilliant cravat-wearing, aphorism-dropping, "Importance of Being Earnest" aesthete on the other (asks you out for a beer and then tells you that he has nothing to declare but his genius.)

3) The combination of 1) and 2) culminating in one of those glorious “chicken-egg” ambiguities? Does the man write so well because he reasons so well, or does he reason so well because anyone who teaches themselves to write like that cannot HELP but teach himself how to think along the way?

4) The general project: as my good friend J.F. said, upon hearing me quote a particularly witty passage the other day: Fowler is someone who realises that the best way to combat slavish, idiotic pedantry is with ELEGANT, sensible pedantry. And yes, my clever lads and lasses: “elegant pedantry” IS an oxymoron, which is why it usually goes by more euphonious names like ‘discernment’ or “style. “

5) The worldview: the book both continuously preaches as well as demonstrates all that is compelling and humane about the idea of ‘autonomy’ . By “autonomy” I mean the idea that freedom neither consists in following any and all our impulses (which would make us slaves to said impulses and thus heteronomous) nor – obviously -- in kowtowing unthinkingly to any and all authorities in the perverse hope that slavish obedience will set us free. Against this, every sentence of Fowler’s says in an avuncular -- but not patronizing -- voice: we derive freedom through form. As in Kant's "Critique of Judgment" there is a mysterious combination of the sovereign freedom of the imagination, and the law-bounded nature of hte undersatnding. Put otherwise: form sits side by freedom, when knowledge emerges out of the interweaving of imagination and experience. We free our minds by leaping naked into the river, floating by as much of the Riverbank-world as we can, but also by dreaming of pyramids which we try to build into water become ice and ice become ice-sculptures.

Thus, we come to know this world, and through our knowing, we learn how to judge what we know. Judgment (I still have Kant on the brain) requires us to derive (in its 'dynamic' form) a rule (or a form) in the face of something singular, i.e. something for which we do not have a prior rule. We cannot be given absolute rules, but we can be given guidance. And the major source of our guidance is the river of English prose at its most sparkling and elegant. It's the thing that must be experienced (if we are to teach ourselves to judge and thus to write), something we need to experience in all seasons: n both its summer thaw and its winter chill, its days of roaring and its days babbling (the formal and the vernacular; the simple and the baroque; the serious and the humourous.)

The idea is that, if one knows BOTH the pertinent formal rules and the living contexts out of which the rules emerge one can eventually develop the faculty of judgment (what the Greeks called "phronesis") that allows us to make calls as to when we should submit to a rule; when we should consider that the spirit of the law is contradicted by the letter, when (if at all) we should declare an exception to the rule and when we need to do something rule-instituting: something singular that yet hopes to be exemplary (like great art). We can even come to have a sense of when we should choose to abandon a rule altogether as stuffy, priggish, ill-conceived and so on.

This is not to say that there aren't rules whose observation should be treated CATEGORICALLY. On the contrary: our experience of the world beyond the rule-tables may be precisely what leads us to think that there are some rules which should never, in fact, be broken. But with experience (and depth of experience) comes the ability to derive a sense of what is categorical and what is not. And in the combination of rules that we obey, rules that we stretch and rules that we abrogate in the name of staying true to their spirit, we start to encounter intimations of our own future-voice, our style, our own little boathouse alongside the river of language as it winds its way to the great ocean of the world's expressions in language.

An anecdote should help to make this clear. The other day I found myself wanting to write the following - - admittedly rather bland phrase as part of another – equally bland – sentence:

“X…is animated by two questions whose answers are likely to….”

But as I wrote this,I found myself worrying about whether or not I could legitimately use the word ‘whose’ in this context. Somewhere I’d got the idea that one should only use “whose” for a PERSON and thus that I would be forced to write:

“ ...these two questions, the answers to which…. “. But given that my original sentence was already long, the new version became particularly cumbersome. I decided to turn to the Mighty Fowler for an answer. This is (a part of) what he says:

Whose = of which. A literary critic observes of an author: “His style is clear and flexible; yet it still needs a little clarifying == weeding out ‘whose’ as a relative pronoun of the inanimate and the like.” If one knows neither who the author nor who the critic is, one cannot help suspecting that the flexibility condemned may owe something to that condemned whose; in the starch that stiffens the English style one of the most effective ingredients is the rule that whose should apply only to persons. To ask a man to write flexible English, but forbid him whose ‘as a relative pronoun of the inanimate’ is like sending a solider on ‘active’ service and insisting that his tunic collar shall be tight and high; activity and stocks do not agree.

..

When I read this I felt like an adolescent who’s just been told by his hero that all Holy Books basically boil down to: “hey: do what feels good; it works for me AND it never fails...and...everyone will like you...dude...!” (

(Note: I’m not defending the wisdom of said adolescent at this point only noting the likelihood of his happiness. And ,yes, I’m using the male pronoun for a change because this is dedicated to “The Rock” who dislikes my P.C. substitutions.)

If you like the above example, let me assure you that it is at once representative (the whole book's as terse and illuminating as the passage quoted) and that at the same time the above passage is simply an –average- entry, not one of the more luminous. Sure, I'd probably convince you more if I quoted the real gems, but then you wouldn't be able to stumble upon them yourselves, would you?

As I said before: each entry is something which looks dull from a distance: you really have to read several to get a sense of just how extraordinary the whole thing really is. And the guy, of course -- the big F. was a school teacher – far from being Professor of all Things in the Sub-Lunary World, seems to lived out his days untroubled by this fact.

Finally: to bring this post more in line with the usual concerns of this blog, I’ll address a question that I’m sure you’ve all been dying to ask. Why (apart from the obvious) do I insist that people who refuse to agree with me as to the glory of Fowler’s be irrevocably branded as idiots in something close to the etymological sense of the word? (from idion, household god: an IDIOT, ergo, is someone who contents themselves with knowing only 'house-rules' -- who can follow all the rules if they are made up and abjudicated by himself, but who flounders if he should ever have to LEAVE his house or submit to a standard that he has not invented in favour of his living up to it.)

Well, I make this claim because the kind of people I’ve met who hate the very idea of a book like Fowler’s tend to believe (often without reading what they're condemning) that books like his exist not to enrich us and thus free us (or free us by enriching us) – but instead to put us into a strait-jacket with the word 'arbitrary' stitched across the front and "authority" across the arse.

Worse, they see our strait-jacketed bodies locked into some dank Victorian cell from which no light or life can ever emerge. Of course the kind of person who would think this, i.e. someone who is super-sensitive about the prospect of anyone anywhere thinking that they're better than someone else, is rarely, in my experience, a real egalitarian, their pretensions aside. Instead, he is usually someone who insists on giving himself enormous kudos for enormously little: i.e. a person of numerous pretentions for whom 'egalitarianism' is (idiotically) not somthing tested, but a self-assigned jewel in the crown of his (self-professed) virtues .

You know the type, I’m talking about: the kind of person who thinks that every time they do something like put a word like “good” in scare quotes another nation is saved from poverty or degradation -- or who thinks that just by never having thought something like "universal murder rocks!" (or worried about how they were writing a sentence) that they have undone centuries of racial prejudice such that if they had been Cortes the conquest of the Americas would have been a peaceful interaction between two cultures.

The problem with such people is that they do not actually object to arbitrary declarations of superiority as they claim, but rather fear that their OWN arbitrary declarations of superiority will get punctured if anyone holds them to some kind of (non-arbitrary) standard (of grammar, of writing, of virtue et cetera).

But the thing about standards is precisely that they are –NOT- arbitrary: a standard applied without fear or favour is almost always more egalitarian than the ABSENCE of standards because anyone can potentially meet a standard by attaining the appropriate accomplishments just as anyone can fail to meet it. Conversely, an absence of standards can lead to a jungle-like situation where whatever comes to the top of the pile gets to DICTATE the standards for all the pile-dwellers from here to eternity: even and especially when those occupying the top blithely disavow any and all standards in the name of the pseudo-egalitarian accents of banal and self-contradictory relativism.

Like most people with a functioning frontal lobe, I infinitely prefer the 'levelling effect' of a common standard for all (even if I do not do well according to said standard) than the condescending 'tolerance' of someone who pays lip-service to the idea that we should all respect that which is "Other", but who condemns anyone who disagrees with them as leprous with evil.

At the source of the idea that everyone should win all competitions, we do not find the humane and honourable desire to share life's bounties equally, but instead naked, human all-too-human resentment against anyone having something that I do myself do not.

Enough said for now. I have to get back to work and then to writing my “Crank-spotting” post for you all. (No, it's not a confession! It's the religion thang again, this time Pt 3.)

Last point: how can I possibly profess to love such a book when I make so many mistakes on my blog and write so many bloody awful lead-balloon sentences?

Basically: Because it takes a sinner to love a saint. Saints are too busy doin' saint-stuff.

P.S. The title of my post practically BEGS you to make hilarious comments of the: ‘you really don’t get out enough, do you’ variety and the “I don’t know what kind of action you're getting, but -I-...” kind, so DO be creative on this one. I didn’t feed you such lines just so you could be OBVIOUS.

Love and endless sexiness,

-Mal.