[lit-ideas] Griceian Style
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- Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 08:20:15 -0400
Some running commentaries on the NYT's review of Pinker, "The sense of
style". Below.
Cheers,
Speranza
The reviewer writes:
"Steven Pinker, the Harvard linguist and psychologist, is one of that new
breed of top-flight scientists and teachers, like the physicist Brian Greene
and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who also write uncommonly
well."
As opposed to 'commonly well'. Paul Grice: "People don't really know how to
use the word 'common'. "Grice" is not a common name, but perhaps 'Paul'
is? Nonsense?
The reviewer goes on:
"To those of us who try to write for a living and couldn’t pass a science
course, let alone teach one, such people are a little annoying. And now,
not content with just poaching, Pin­ker has set himself up as a
gamekeeper of sorts; he’s bringing out a manual, telling the rest of us how
writing
ought to be done."
This 'ought', Walter O. might say, is "Kantian" in nature, where Palma
might object that 'in nature' is otiose.
The reviewer goes on:
"The title, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in
the 21st Century,” suggests it’s even meant to supplant that classic text
“The Elements of Style,” by Will Strunk and E. B. White."
Well, there are further implicatures.
"Sense" is a technical expression in Frege, so perhaps Pinker is going to
'go Fregeian [sic].
"Elements" is a different animal and should perhaps be restricted to
periodical table of such.
The reviewer goes on:
"Though still revered, “The Elements of Style,” to be honest, is a little
dated now,"
meaning 'passé'. 'Dated' strictly means 'with a date'. As in, tomorro's
date is important to me.
The reviewer goes on:
"and just plain wrong about some things."
As the author of "The elements of style" goes: "plainLY wrong".
The reviewer goes on:
"Strunk and White are famously clueless, for example, about what
constitutes the passive voice."
So isn't Geary: ""It is rained", while not usual, brings the extra
implicature that we are often in need of".
The reviewer goes on:
"Their book also has some of the hectoring, preachy tone that creeps into
so many discussions about writing, though it’s not as extreme as Lynne Truss’
s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” which declares that people who misuse
apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and
buried in
an unmarked grave.”"
This depends on who you mean by 'deserve'. Usually, it's best to use
explicitly 'deserve' in the passive voice.
E.g. Latona, Apollo's and Diana's mother, thought that Niobe's children
deserved to be struck by lightning, hacked on the spot and buried in an
unmarked grave."
Niobe's children thus deserved _according to Latona_: so there's an
implicit passive voice here: Latona's.
In old Greek, 'deserve' is a defective verb, i.e. one with active form,
'but passive meaning' (an expression that irritated Grice: "passive meaning? I
can understand 'passive' as applied to 'voice', not to something as
abstract as 'meaning'").
The reviewer goes on:
"Pinker is not as pithy as Strunk and White: There’s nothing in his book to
rival their succinct, often-quoted dictum “Omit needless words.”"
This is a rewrite of Grice's famous 'conversational maxim' (he borrowed
'maxim' from Kant):
"Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)".
Grice had, sadly, to explain, that he meant the formulation of the maxim as
'ironic': i.e. a self-contradiction.
His example is:
"In classical logic p→q is logically equivalent to ¬(p∧¬q) and by De
Morgan's Law logically equivalent to ¬p∨q."
But surely if I say,
"If my wife ain't in the garden, she's in the kitchen"
is BRIEFER than both:
"It is not the case that (my wife is in the garden and my wife is not in
the kitchen"
and
"My wife is not in the garden or my wife is in the kitchen".
"Things like this provoke me to use 'if', even against Strawson's advice"
(Strawson thinks "if" does not have a clear meaning -- "Introduction to
logical theory", since inferrability is an attached implicture that one needs
to get rid of in conversational exchanges).
(Another example of a self-contradictory Griceian conversational maxim is
"be perspicuous" for be 'clear' ("since 'perspicuity' requires some
background in Ciceronian terminology).
The reviewer goes on:
"But [Pinker's] book [The sense of style] is more contemporary and
comprehensive than “The Elements of Style,” illustrated with comic strips and
cartoons and lots of examples of comically bad writing."
The reviewer means that Pinker's book is thus illustrated, NOT "The
Elements of Style".
"[Pinker's] voice is calm, reasonable, benign, and you can easily see why
he’s one of Harvard’s most popular lecturers."
Where 'popular' is a misnomer, and should be restricted, in Harvard, to
[amateur] football players?
(Grice knew this when he was a popular lecturer of the prestigious "Logic
and Conversation" series there: "They don't really play cricket in Harvard,
from what I could see -- admittedly not much. We could perhaps safely say
that cricket is not popular in Harvard, or _as popular_ as it is in _my_
part of the world").
The reviewere goes on:
"[Pinker] means to take some of the anxiety out of writing, and when it
comes to questions of grammar and usage, he’s a liberal, much looser and more
easygoing than the copy editors at this newspaper, for example, whom he
would dismiss as “purists.”"
The word 'purist' is a good one. Strictly, what is 'pure' is difficult to
assess. Derivately, it is perhaps more difficult to assess what a 'purist'
thinks should be 'pure' (According to Geary, 'when in doubt, say that the
Virigin Mary was 'pure'").
The reviewer goes on:
"At several points in “The Sense of Style,” Eleanor Gould, the legendary
grammarian at The New Yorker, would have written in the margin, as she used
to on proofs that particularly exasperated her, “Have we completely lost
our mind?”"
Where 'our' is majestic (cfr. "We are not amused") (Eleanor explains in the
"Memoirs": "I wrote "Have we completely lost our mind?" as a polite
euphemism for "You haven't, have you").
The reviewer goes on:
"Pinker doesn’t object to dangling modifiers on principle, but only when
they lead to confusion or ambiguity;"
Because he is abiding by Grice's conversational maxim,
'avoid ambiguity, if you can'
The reviewer goes on
"doesn’t see much distinction between “like” and “as”"
except perhaps in the prose of Witters:
"That fork look like a fork"
surely triggers the odd implicature that perhaps
"That forks look as a flower"
doesn't.
The reviewer goes on:
"; and says that “between you and I” is “not a heinous error.”"
-- where the weighty implicature is on "error" --, as per the famous
adage-cum-tautology: an error is an error is an error: never mind heinous.
The reviewer goes on:
"He’d just as soon not allow “disinterested” to mean uninterested, but he
doesn’t mind “presently” used to mean now, not soon, or “hopefully” in
the sense of “I hope.”"
Hopefully, I hope it'll rain.
does sound repetitious.
The reviewer goes on:
"In general he takes the view that if a phrase or construction sounds O.K.,
it probably is,"
-- only if perhaps 'O.K. for Eleanor Gould (only she would rather be seen
dead than using the acronym) may not be 'O.K. for', say, 'H. Paul G.'.
The reviewer goes on:
"and that many of the mistakes the purists get so worked up over — using “
like” with a clause, for example — have been made for hundreds of years by
writers like Shakespeare."
Or "as Shakespeare", if you mustn't. -- And I would add, what's perhaps
worst: his girlfriend, Anne Hattaway, who was NOT a 'professional writer'.
"Oddly, the one thing that really sets him off is the American custom of
putting commas and periods inside quotation marks, which he says is
illogical."
-- even if Quine allows the practice in "Methods in logic" (vide "American
logic").
The reviewer goes on:
"That the alternative just looks sloppy doesn’t seem to bother him. The
book’s easygoingness"
or easy-going-ness if you mustn't.
"extends even to the question of whether there is now more bad writing than
there used to be"
or rather whether we should treat as a motto,
Bad writing ain't wot it used t'be.
The reviewer goes on:
"People have been saying this for centuries, he points out. In 1490, the
printer William Caxton wrote: “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth
ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.”"
Only that Caxton baby possibly did not UNDERSTAND language as she was spoke
"when I was borne", so the opinion seems biased. (It's different to _READ_
it).
The reviewer goes on:
"There are even some ancient Sumerian clay tablets complaining that the
young don’t write as well as they used to."
And the odd thing as there are typos (or melting) in those clay tablets,
too (Vide: Geary, "Typos in Sumerican clay tablets from the Collection of
Lord Hope in Houghton Hall).
"The cause of most bad writing, Pinker thinks, is not laziness or
sloppiness or overexposure to the Internet and video games, but what he calls
the
curse of knowledge: the writer’s inability to put himself in the reader’s
shoes or to imagine that the reader might not know all that the writer knows —
the jargon, the shorthand, the slang, the received wisdom."
And also that the reader may be barefoot as he reads the prose ("so it's
best not to put yourself in his shoes": implicature: he's not wearing any --
"or sneakers").
The reviewer goes on:
"He may underestimate a little how much deliberately bad writing there is,
writing meant to confuse and obfuscate."
This is what Grice calls an inverse (or 'obverse', strictly) implicature,
as when we flout a conversational maxim (like 'avoid unnecessary prolixity')
to aim at a figure of speech. His example: "Methinks the lady doth protest
too much").
The reviewer goes on:
"Just look at the fine print at the bottom of your next credit card bill or
listen to a politician in Washington reading a speech about the tax
code.And what about a passage like this, a deserving winner of the bad writing
contest that used to be run by the journal ­Philosophy and Literature: “
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject,
his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime
superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-­unreadable DNA’ of a
fast
deindustrializing Detroit, just as his RoboCop-like strategy of carceral
negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of
inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds
and others of the inner city.”This strikes me not as accidentally bad — the
byproduct of knowledge overload — but as willfully, preeningly bad, making
a show of how overloaded it is."
A flout to this or that conversational maxim. Grice's example:
"You're the cream in my coffee".
Surely, cream doesn't have ears, so the compliment cannot be taken
_literally_.
The reviewer goes on:
"There is more of this kind of prose now than you might guess from reading
Pinker — much of it, sadly, ventilating from English departments, which
used to be where the style manuals came from.Like a lot of style handbooks,
Pinker’s talks more about grammar and usage than about style itself, which is
harder to explain."
Because, as Grice says, 'style is the man' (he meant it in a non-sexist
manner, we hope).
The reviewer goes on:
"He devotes many more pages to drooping, willow-tree-like diagrams of how
the mind creates strings of words and phrases than he does to explaining
what makes good writing good. Pinker advocates something he calls “classic
style,” which he says, not very helpfully, offers “a window onto the world.”"
The Romans invented 'class' to mean 'first class', but dropped 'first' as
otiose. It later came to mean 'Graeco-Roman', although some people use
'classic', wrongly, to mean Pericleian.
The reviewer goes on:
"Fortunately (not fortuitously — even though he will let you have that,
too), he may be an even better reader than he is writer, and some examples he
provides, including excerpts from three terrific obituaries by The Times’s
own Margalit Fox, make it a little clearer what he has in mind: Classic
style is direct, conversational, unfussy — more E. B. White, say, than
Vladimir Nabokov"
or, since we are talking conversational, more Paul Grice than Peter
Strawson ("Robbing Peter to pay Paul").
The reviewer goes on:
"Like White, Pinker is after clarity above all".
But cfr. Grice's caveat: "Clarity is NOT enough".
The reviewer goes on:
"But he also acknowledges that the transparency of classic style — the
window part — is a bit of an illusion. Words aren’t the same thing as the
objects or feelings they describe. They’re intractable sometimes, and only
loosely approximate the thoughts we want them to convey."
This might evoke a Wittgensteinian reflection in McEvoy. Oddly, for Gilbert
Ryle, 'thinking' is a ghost in a machine.
The reviewer goes on:
"When you first learn how to do it, writing is hard, and for some of us it
never gets any easier. Writing is hard because thinking is hard. Calm,
judicious, reassuring, Pinker doesn’t dwell on the difficulty. He prefers to
think of writing as something that can be pleasurably mastered, like cooking
or photography. (He is no doubt ridiculously proficient at those, too.)"
Where 'ridiculously' should be taken figurative, as it did _not_
necessarily make everyone laugh.
The reviewer goes on:
"It’s possible that he doesn’t want to scare his readers off by coming on
like one of those old-fashioned literary drill sergeants — Henry Watson
Fowler, say, the author of the cranky and at times harebrained “Dictionary of
Modern English Usage.” Or it may be that for Pinker, writing really isn’t
a chore, which is why he can, maddeningly and seemingly without effort,
turn out a smart, mostly sensible book about something that isn’t even his
field".
The Elysean fields? Fields* is usually used metaphorically, but perhaps it
shouldn't?
* The Elysian Fields (Ancient Greek: Ἠλύσιον πεδίον, Ēlýsion pedíon)
is a conception of the afterlife that developed over time and was
maintained by certain Graeco-Roman religious and philosophical sects and
cults.
Initially separate from the realm of Hades or Inferno, admission was reserved
for mortals related to the gods and other heroes. Later, it expanded to
include those chosen by the gods, the righteous, and the heroic, where they
would remain after death, to live a blessed and happy life, and indulging in
whatever employment they had enjoyed in life. The Elysian Fields were,
according to Homer, located on the western edge of the Earth by the stream of
Okeanos. In the time of the Greek oral poet Hesiod, Elysium would also be
known as the Fortunate Isles or the Isles (or Islands) of the Blessed,
located in the western ocean at the end of the earth. The Isles of the Blessed
would be reduced to a single island by the Thebean poet Pindar, describing it
as having shady parks, with residents indulging their athletic and musical
pastimes. The ruler of Elysium varies from author to author: Pindar and
Hesiod name Cronus as the ruler,[9] while the poet Homer in the Odyssey
describes fair-haired Rhadamanthus dwelling there.By the time of
Chateaubriand,
the Elysian fields were in Paris.
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