Excerpt
Quoth the Maven
INTRODUCTION
This is a book that draws together some seventy-five columns that appear under the heading “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine, enlivened with emendations, corrections and objections from members of a far-flung group of language lovers called the Lexicographic Irregulars. Before presenting this book to the reader, the author must ask himself: “What am I?”
Not “Who am I?”—a sense of self is not a problem with me—but “What am I?” What is my role in this writer-reader communications symbiosis, and how do I properly explain my calling in an instant, without going into a labored job description?
The language has developed a way to signal a person’s position. It has been hailed as a time-saving device and derogated as “bogus titling.” Let us, at the outset, examine this shorthand identifier and reach a conclusion about its use, thereby illustrating the approach to language throughout this book.
Ready? The language maven William Safire is about to take a stand in the controversy over bogus titling.
Why does the previous sentence begin with the word the? Because if it started with the words language maven, that would be construed as a title, and the style arbiters of the best publications have long said it’s bad form to throw false titles around.
But if I had dared to write Language Maven William Safire, without the the, would I have been trying to give myself airs? Of course not; if I wanted to assume a title, I’d have tried Lord Safire, which sounds grander than anything we have in the language dodge.
The purpose of the noun phrase used attributively before the name is not to confer rank but to help the reader recognize the subject. The controversy centers on this: Should the identification of the subject be placed after the name, to be in gentle apposition, or before the name, to be fused tightly to it?
Apposition uses two nouns in succession to refer to the same thing. Bill Clinton, the President is an example; the second noun repeats the meaning of the first. However, when you adopt the loyal apposition, you seem to be saying something else as well: “Not Bill Clinton, the haberdasher down the street who objects to being confused with the famous Bill Clinton.” With a famous person, the repetition in apposition is unnecessary.
Just to avoid the problem of bogus titling, the stylebooks create the problem of conferring too much renown. The can be a powerful isolator, especially in print, where no emphasis in pronunciation is shown: Safire, the language maven suggests that I am the one and only language maven, and the legions of the Gotcha! Gang are ready to hoot at that thought. On the other hand, a is a relentless equalizer: Safire, a language maven is a put-down, suggesting that I am an anonymous crank and nobody at all knows my attempts to free mankind from the clutches of obsolete stylebooks.
When the is too singular and a or an is too general, you’ve run out of articles; the vocabulary bin is empty. What to do? Our resilient language scrambles around for a way out, and as always, the lingo will prevail.
The answer of usage: Take that appositive identifier following the name and stick it up front without any article at all. Voilà: Language maven Safire. Neither a big shot nor a pipsqueak; just right.
Because this encapsulation of reputation was pioneered by journalists, my fellow grammarians have sniffed at it as “journalese”—a sorry trade of inelegance for the sake of compression. But we are not merely saving three spaces on a tight line or, in Garrick Utley’s case of “the beating of motorist Rodney King,” a whole second; consider the differentiation value of the front-end identifier in the case of three people.
James Jones wrote From Here to Eternity (a title taken from “The Whiffenpoof Song”). Another James Jones, known better as Jim, led a cult to mass suicide. And James Earl Jones is the actor who was the voice of Darth Vader and who announces the station breaks of CNN.
Not only does the author James Jones sound stilted, but that restrictiveness may also make him seem like the only author. James Jones, a cult leader suggests that the reader has already forgotten who he was. James Earl Jones, an actor or the actor slights his genuine renown. How much clearer and less judgmental are author James Jones, cult leader James Jones, actor James Earl Jones.
Editors recognize this difference, and are sensitive to distortions of meaning by copy editors on the front lines, who try to play by the book. When I referred to a colleague as reporter R. W. Apple—better to my eye than Apple, the reporter (we have a few others) or Apple, a reporter (he’d kill me)—an editor trying to squeeze me onto the team changed it to the reporter R. W. Apple.
This addition created nonsense, according to the pooh-bah of style at my newspaper, Allan M. Siegal. “The ‘the’ form can be used only where we’re discussing someone of at least modest renown: ‘the soprano Emma Kirkby,’ for example,” he advised. “With lesser mortals—including my friend Apple—some form of apposition has to be used: ‘… told a reporter, Joe Doakes,’ or ‘told Joe Doakes, a reporter.’ In brief, writing should read like the work of a writer, not an editor.”
I’m for that. Henceforth, on first mention, full frontal identification will be my style. In deference to traditionalists now staring decisively at me, I will eschew cliché bogus titles like consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and will refrain from capitalizing the attributive noun phrase, thus making it seem less like an official title. When it does not appear that way in the paper, and you see instead the language maven Safire, it is only because I do not own the paper. Be patient; the stylebooks will come around.
Having zigged to conform to linguistic reality, let us now zag to avert compresspeak. Beware the Chinese hamster syndrome.
In a recent polemic, I referred to George Bush’s “1,400-word, hastily slapped together and ill-rehearsed speech in the guise of a statement to a news conference.” David J. Jacobs of Stephentown, New York, who coaches sportswriters at the Springfield Union-News in Massachusetts, refers to this space-saving habit as noun-clustering; he fears that it has spread, “like the blob from an outer-space horror movie thing,” from sports pages to pristine Op-Ed pages.
Sportswriting coach Jacobs (better than Jacobs, the sportswriting coach) cites such recent usages as “mobster-turned-informant Jack Johns” and “reputed Mafia underboss William P. ‘The Wild Guy’ Grasso” in the Union-News. He also cites “the 6,718-yard, par-70 Oakland Hills Country Club course,” on which Ben Hogan won with “a remarkable five-under-par 65,” phrases that appeared in The Times and are topped only by this newspaper’s “after his two-walk, six-strikeout, 14-fly-ball-outs of dominance.”
Out-of-hand noun-clustering leads to crammed prose. Put that sentence less tightly: The clustering of nouns, when it gets out of hand, jam-packs five pounds of words into a two-pound bag.
The newsletter of the New England Medical Writers Association cites the classic clustering of nouns: “The Chinese Hamster ovary/hypoxanthine guanine … mammalian cell forward gene mutation assay was used to evaluate uforia.” The words in italics all modify the noun assay.
Taking a deep breath, Mr. Jacobs calls this “the ‘from single nouns as adjectives, to the occupational and false titles, to the strings of attributive nouns called noun clusters or stacked modifiers, to the whereinhell is this thing going’ locution.”
Like the modern person, modern prose needs a little space. Titular encapsulation, within reason, saith language maven Safire, is useful; however, the acceptance of rampant sentence-compressing clustering could suck us all into the black hole of terminological implosion. (“Noun clusters that compress sentences beyond comprehensibility” is more easily understood than “sentence-compressing clustering.”) Today’s message: Loosen up. Take all the the’s saved from apposition and sprinkle ’em around.
