SNOOTs, according to the late David Foster Wallace, are “the small percentage of American citizens who…combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults…We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”
Perhaps one might refer to Language Nazis or Usage Mavens instead, but I have grown quite fond of SNOOT as a handy all-purpose term for anyone who cringes, visibly or not, any time somebody says or writes The cause is due to numerous factors or Processing the information was part of the information process or The carnage made me nauseous.
Hi. My name is Scott, and I’m a SNOOT (Hi, Scott!) However, I need no 12-step program to help me kick SNOOT-itude. Rather, I embrace my addiction to the flexibility and expressiveness of English. I may be only a foot soldier in the ongoing battle against debased English, but I try to keep my kit clean, my rifle oiled, and my participles unfused.
In my home office I keep the following references within arm’s reach:
Fowler’s Modern English Usage, First Edition
Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Third (Burchfield) Edition
Theodore M. Bernstein: The Careful Writer
Bryan A. Garner: Garner’s Modern American Usage, Third Edition (and Second sometimes as well.)
A subtlety in the above list merits comment. You will notice that I treat the first and third editions of Fowler as two separate books, each with a line to itself, but I lump the second and third editions of Garner together. This is not carelessness. The original edition of Fowler is the classic example of what is nowadays referred to as prescriptivism—that is, a usage guide which concerns itself in telling us how we should be speaking and writing, rather than documenting the way we actually do speak and write. Fowler dates back to the 1920s and therefore subsequent editions were required to keep the work timely. The second edition did just that without changing the overall flavor of Fowler’s meticulous pronouncements, but R.W. Burchfield, in his third edition, refashioned Fowler as a descriptivist—i.e., a linguist more concerned with cataloguing English as it is spoken, without handing down pronouncements of correct vs. incorrect speech. That doesn’t render Fowler3 useless by any means, but by SNOOT standards it belongs distinctly below the salt.
Garner’s Modern American Usage (GMAU) avoids hysterical extremes but at the same time falls much more squarely in the prescriptivist camp than the descriptivist. Garner may describe sub-par usage, but he decries practices that debase clarity, subtlety, and depth. Bernstein’s The Careful Writer stands for pure prescriptivism, and may it live long and prosper.
I decided to run two of my pet peeves through each book, not only to find out what each author has to say about the issue at hand, but also to find out whether my biases are justified or just instances of uppity SNOOT-itude.
Peeve the First: using nauseous to mean nauseated.
Fowler1 has nothing to say on the subject—the two terms had not merged in the 1920s. Fowler3, on the other hand, takes the purely descriptivist path: “nauseous is most often used as a predicate adjective meaning “nauseated” literally; it has some figurative use as well…Any handbook that tells you that nauseous cannot mean “nauseated” is out of touch with the contemporary language.”
Bernstein, therefore, is apparently out of touch: “A thing is nauseous if it makes one sick to the stomach; the unfortunate victim of this malaise is nauseated…A person who feels sick is no more nauseous than a person who has been poisoned is poisonous.”
Garner adopts a somewhat more diplomatic tone, but only a bit around the edges: “Nauseous (= inducing nausea) for nauseated (= experiencing nausea) is becoming so common that to call it an error is to exaggerate. Even so, careful writers tend to be sickened by the slippage and to follow the traditional distinction in formal writing.” A bit later in the article, Garner also refers to nauseous = nauseated as a “peccadillo”, thereby clarifying his stance.
Peeve the Second: adjectival “couple” without “of” following, such as: “at least a dozen major usage guides have been published in the last couple years and some of them have been quite good indeed.” To my ear, couple years grates badly, sounding like the vapid mouthings of valley-girl cheerleaders or laid-back dudes slinking through the local mall. However, the quotation is from David Foster Wallace, a fellow SNOOT who possessed an extraordinary ear for contemporary American English.
So what’s to be done about it? Fowler1 has nothing to say on the subject, but Fowler3 does: “The type ‘a couple weeks later’, i.e., with no of between couple and weeks, is well established in AmE (first recorded in 1925). This use sounds alien to British ears.” And to my oh-so-American ones.
Garner finds it to be “unidiomatic and awkward”, and refers to it as a low casualism, defined as “expressions characteristic of speech…that declare either freedom from inhibition or an utter lack of solemnity. They may add a relaxed freshness, or may seem inappropriately unbuttoned. They make up the least formal type of standard English, and they’re standard only in informal contexts.” A bit later, Garner adds: “Expressions on the low side of informality often blend into slang, perhaps because the references tend to be uncivil or unpleasant, or to sound adolescent.”
That leads us to Bernstein on the subject of casualism, in which he says: “The designation casualism does not imply that the expression is necessarily unsuitable for serious writing. It is not a red light; it is an orange light.”
All in all, I find my squeamishness concerning both practices to be justified. I am a SNOOT rather than a snob, possessing a discerning ear rather than a disdainful attitude. (At least concerning the issues at hand.)
To conclude, a bit from “The Ongoing Struggles of Garlic-Hangers”, Garner’s introductory essay for GMAU 3:
For all intensive purposes, some linguistic shifts may past mustard, even those that don’t harp back to Middle English or Early Modern English. People with an overweening interest in oversighting English sometimes, as a kind of guttural reaction, take all this for granite. There will never be paralyzation of a living language, nor even hiati in its evolution. And it may give piece of mind to know that linguistic change isn’t something to be measured in decades, much less per anum. Improprietous words and phrases that may once have been considered abdominable, slightly course, or otherwise beyond the pail may, over time, become fully acceptable and no long peak anyone’s interest.
Enjoy sipping your way through Garner’s noisome stew of howlers. More to the point, would anyone—even the most die-hard linguistic descriptivist—refrain from sending it back to the chef?