<"Democrat, English, and the Wars over Usage">, part 1

[fiefoe]

David Foster Wallace's fine-tuned, brassy self-awareness is a crucial part of his infant terrible persona in print. As such, he presents the Zeitgeist. Or as he puts it, 'we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation.'

• A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails. We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.
• And Hopefully at the beginning of a sentence, as a certain cheeky eighth-grader once pointed out to his everlasting social cost, actually functions not as a misplaced modal auxiliary or as a manner adverb like quickly or angrily but as a "sentence adverb" that indicates the speaker's attitude about the state of affairs described by the sentence (examples of perfectly OK sentence adverbs are Clearly, Basically, Luckily)...
• I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white...
  
• (2) Sorry about this phrase: I hate this phrase, too. This happens to be one of those very rare times when "historical context" is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn't even worse. (I actually tried "lexico-temporal backdrop" in one of the middle drafts, which I think you'll agree is not preferable.)
  
• If Derrida and the infamous Deconstructionists have done nothing else, they've debunked the idea that speech is language's primary instantiation. (18)(Q.v. "The Pharmakon" in Derrida's La dissemination--but you'd probably be better off just trusting me.)

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