fiefoe | <"Democrat, English, and the Wars over Usage">, part 2

DFW quotes Steven Pinker --'Once introduced, a prescriptive rule... survive(s) by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations', but he himself is not slacker in slugging the other camp either. ('This is so stupid it practically drools.'; 'This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was,') {Both are mainly Pathetic Appeals, as we would learn later.} On balance, Mr. Languagehat got riled for pretty good reasons.

What the Ethical Appeal amounts to is a complex and sophisticated "Trust me." It's the boldest, most ambitious, and also most distinctively American of rhetorical Appeals, because it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience's own hopes and fears.
In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed--or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on "reason" alone.
Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is... a piece of Democratic rhetoric. Its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense.
In other words, Politically Correct English functions as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.
I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but as a grotesque debasement of Standard Written English, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherences of Presidential English... or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak.
Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous "I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift" in Ecclesiastes as "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account"
The founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate.

Good words, etc: ab ovo usque ad mala (from start to finish); Fort Sumter; Colonel Blimp's rage; Heraclitean; ayatolloid; 'the uptown phrase'; 'blushless imperiousness'; 'near-Himalayan condescension', 'Old Maids of both genders'.
swivet: extreme distress (inf.)
cancrine: of crabs

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