Vocabula bound (review)

The Vocabula Review is a monthly online journal dealing with English grammar and usage. According to information given in the foreword and repeated on the back cover, it ‘battles nonstandard, careless English and embraces clear, expressive English’. This volume, far too prescriptivist in orientation for a sophisticated linguistic audience, consists of twenty-five essays and twenty-five poems originally published in the periodical. My remarks deal with none of the poetry and but fourteen of the essays, chosen in accordance with my background and interests. The remaining essays and their authors are listed at the end.

Kelly Cannon’s ‘Lawyers vs. language’ (13–15) addresses the ‘linguistic renaissance’ (15) needed to correct sentences written by many an attorney, such as ‘While riding her bicycle, two dogs attacked my client’ (13). One also learns that Microsoft Word’s spell checker corrects the legal ‘tortious’ (related to tort) to ‘tortuous’ (13). Steve Cook’s ‘Writing down to readers’ (16–19) offers praise to linguistic pundits and mavens, such as William F. Buckley and William Safire. Further, Cook cautions, ‘the writer who practices puffery will blunder’ (19). David Isaacson’s ‘Kvetching about literary criticism’ (23–30) kvetches about the kvetchers, asserting: ‘The same professors who try to teach students how to write clear expository prose themselves write a clotted mush unfit for human consumption’ (23–24). Marylaine Block’s ‘Grammar matters’ (51–54) is an overstated diatribe against the passive voice: ‘euphemism and the passive voice have helped give Holocaust denial an aura of intellectual respectability’ (53).

Tim Buck’s ‘The art of conversation’ (55–60) is, like the preceding sad diatribe, a complaint against speakers whose ‘syntax [is not] supple, [and whose] vocabulary [is not] conditioned to acts of creation’ (57). Can or should one make every shopping list sound like the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address? Joseph Epstein, in ‘Upsizing’ (61–63), seems to feel an urgency to create an antonym to downsizing—upsizing. David R. Williams’s ‘Snobs and slobs’ (64–66) is a muddled and fuzzy essay about prescriptive and descriptive linguistics, preaching prescriptivism, while Ken Bresler, ‘Playing the synonym game’ (67–71), argues against repeating the same word or phrase in the same paragraph by referring to Sir Winston Churchill’s House of Commons Speech on Dunkirk in 1940 in which he said ‘We shall fight’ seven times in a brief paragraph!

Tina Bennett-Kastor’s ‘Our democratic language’ (83–88) praises the use of you for one as democratic, yet laments putting janitors (sanitation engineers) on a linguistic par with aerospace engineers, calling this the ‘dark side’ of democracy (87). Mark Halpern’s ‘Why linguists are not to be trusted on language usage, with some afterthoughts’ (89–118) disagrees with Geoffrey Nunberg, Steven Pinker, and especially Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and asserts that Eskimo languages have more words than English for snow and ice.

In ‘Obscene words’ (133–37), Julian Burnside fantasizes when he predicts that the f-word may ‘eventually be accepted in polite use’ (137).

Peter Corey’s ‘How linguistics killed grammar’ (138–90) contains many interesting observations on the history of modern linguistics with quotes from Frederick Newmeyer, Roger Lass, Geoffrey Samp-son, and the late James D. McCawley’s summation of minimalism in a 1998 New York Times article labeling it ‘completely unintelligible’ (188). Jjoan Ttaber’s ‘Singular they: The pronoun that came in from the cold’ (210–28) refers to ‘a courageous editor of The Chicago Manual of Style (14th edn.) who recommended the REVIVAL—emphasis mine [ASK] of the singular use of they and their’ (225). I agree with the author’s conclusion endorsing singular they (which has been used in English for a thousand years).

The afterword contains thirty questions on grammar and usage...