Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers

Language is both a natural phenomenon and a science.  It evolves from earlier forms, and it's rules are descriptive rather than proscriptive, like physics.  But unlike physics, the rules change. More like biology, then, especially ostriches and bats.  The point is language rules never apply 100% of the time.  And there may be a time when a rule ceases to exist altogether.  Will/shall usage used to be a big deal grammatically, but when was the last time you used shall except for a conscious effect?

Ambrose Bierce, of The Devil's Dictionary fame, was a usage critic on top of being a journalist and satirist.  In his 'blacklist', Write It Right, he lists his grammatical pet peeves.  Last year, Jan Freeman, a modern usage critic, "appraised and annotated" Bierce's famous list.  I stumbled on this book in Barnes and Noble and jumped for joy that my favorite cynic had another volume to add to my library that I hadn't previously heard of.  I didn't expect my entire view of how language evolves to be shaped by this book, but I am now an aspiring usage maven.

Most of Bierce's entries are, for various reasons, now obsolete. Bierce resists slang, particularly anything commercial (paying your dues) or American, which was seen as less refined than British English by American scholars of his day.  And many of his peeves appear to be unique to him and have no basis in traditional grammar rules.  Bierce spends most of his time trying to pin a single exact meaning for each term and to expurgate all other meanings under the banner of clarity. (See first example.)  Each entry lists the word Bierce is banning, usually as a substitute for another word—wet for wetted (Bierce believes in regular past tense forms ending in -ed.) Next he provides an example in quotes (which sometimes illustrates something entirely different).  And if he felt it necessary, a diatribe on what is wrong with the example.  I have listed Bierce's entry in bold following the style of the book.  Following each entry, Freeman describes the history of the usage Bierce condemns—what etymological dictionaries say, usage by creditable authors, and how the argument stands today. Frequently she analyzes Bierce's reasoning and makes fun of him. A very few entries—Authoress and Former—get wholesale agreement from Freeman. Here are my favorite examples, illustrating Bierce's whim and Freeman's wit and wisdom:

Space for Period. "A long space of time." Space is so different a thing from time that the two do not go well together.
If Bierce had been reading physics, instead of news of the war in Mexico, he might have heard of "the space-time manifold of relativity" before he disappeared around the end of 1913. If he had lived another few years, the OED would have published the S volume, showing that space had meant "duration, period" even before it meant "extent, area," and that both senses were current in the 14th century. Bierce being Bierce, he would probably have concluded that the 14th century needed a good editor; but "space of time" is so natural that even Bierce, not surprisingly, used expressions like "a moment's space" in his published work.

Over for About, In, or Concerning. "Don't cry over spilt milk." "He rejoiced over his acquittal."
Over had been used in this way since Old English, but what was good enough for King Alfred, William Caxton, Shakespeare, and Hardy was apparently too imprecise for Ambrose G. Bierce.

Finally, some vocab you'll run across in this book that made this non-maven's head spin:

solecism— a nonstandard or ungrammatical usage
neologism— a new word, meaning, usage or phrase
maven— a person who has special knowledge or experience, an expert
pleonasm— the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy
shibboleth— a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth
lexicography— the writing, editing, or compiling of dictionaries
etymon— an earlier form of a word in the same language or an ancestor language

Definitions

I feel a little bad about my previous sentiment on LitCrit.  There is one notable aspect that I actually love: the origins of the stories we tell.  Folklore, fairy tales, fables (and to a lesser extent myth) fascinate me in that we still use these same stories in our bestsellers and blockbusters.  I love finding out how old our 'modren' concepts really are.  Similarly, I took a year of college Latin primarily because of my love for etymology.  I gave my mother a bit of a shock when an Amazon order of mine was delivered to my parents house rather than my school address.  She called me concerned, "Did you intend to order a dictionary?"  Yes, I had, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable  to be exact.  As Terry Pratchett puts it in the intro,"Brewer's is ostensibly a reference book, and an indispensible one. But it is also an idiosyncratic adventure, pulling you in and saying: 'This is, in fact, not what you're looking for; but it's much more interesting.' And, of course it usually is."  This book and others like it are resources for common English idiom and popular and literary allusion.  I keep a list in the back of phrases I try to look up but aren't included... yet.  I own the 17th edition, but the 18th has already been published.

I have a few standard dictionaries (Webster, Spanish to English, Latin), but the internet is rapidly making them obsolete.  Dictionary.com is my friend when I write, particularly its thesaurus.  Also in my collection is Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, which I picked up for a dollar somewhere or other.  It is notably the only dictionary I read for pleasure, although I'm only to "I".  Definitions on this blog will be regularly supplemented with entries from The Devil's Dictionary.  I also have a passion for books of miscellany, but will relegate these to another post.

 The root of dictionary is diction— style of speaking or writing as dependent on choice of words and -ary a suffix denoting objects, esp. receptacles or places.  Therefore, a dictionary is a word receptacle.*

Literature has roots in the latin 'literatus'— learned, scholarly, which comes from 'lettre'— alphabetic character. 'Litterature' means grammar.  So, only written, grammatical, scholarly works count as literature. Sorry, internet.

And for the record: criticism— the act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything. Critic comes from a Greek word meaning "skilled in judging".*  I rest my case.


* From The Devil's Dictionary (henceforth FDD):
dictionary- a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
critic- a person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.