Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [106]
My complaint is not that 3 is all-inclusive—that is, unabridged—but that pedantry is not a synonym of scholarship. I have no objection to the inclusion of such pomposities, mostly direct translations from the Latin, as viridity (greenness), presbyopic (farsighted because of old age), vellication (twitching), pudency (modesty), and vulnerary (wound-healing). These are necessary if only so that one can read James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, in which they all occur, along with many siblings. And in my rambles through these 2,662 pages I have come across many a splendid word that has not enjoyed the popularity it deserves. I think my favorites are pilpul, from the Hebrew to search, which means “critical analysis and hairsplitting; casuistic argumentation”; dysphemism, which is the antonym of euphemism as, axle grease for butter or old woman for wife; subfusc, from the Latin subfuscus, meaning brownish, which is illustrated with a beautiful citation from Osbert Sitwell (“the moment when the word Austerity was to take to itself a new subfusc and squalid twist of meaning”)—cf., the more familiar subacid, also well illustrated with “a little subacid kind of...impatience,” from Laurence Sterne; nanism, which is the antonym of gigantism; mesocracy, which is the form of government we increasingly have in this country; and lib-lab, which means a Liberal who sympathizes with Labor—I wish the lexicographers had not restored the hyphen I deleted when I imported it from England twenty years ago. One might say, and in fact I will say, that H.L. Mencken, whose prose was dysphemistic but never subfusc, eschewed pilpul in expressing his nanitic esteem for lib-lab mesocracy. Unfortunately, 3 omits 2’s thob (“to think according to one’s wishes”), which someone made up from think-opinion-believe, or else I could also have noted Mencken’s distaste for thobbery.[1]
Dr. Gove met the problem of ain’t head on in the best traditions of Structural Linguistics, labeling it—reluctantly, one imagines—substandard for have not and has not, but giving it, unlabeled, as a contraction of am not, are not, and is not, adding “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain’t I.” Once the matter of education and culture is raised, we are right back at the nonscientific business of deciding what is correct—standard is the modern euphemism—and this is more a matter of a feeling for language (what the trade calls Sprachgefühl) than of the statistics on which Dr. Gove and his colleagues seem to have chiefly relied. For what Geiger counter will decide who is in fact educated or cultivated? And what adding machine will discriminate between ain’t used because the speaker thinks it is standard English and ain’t used because he wants to get a special effect? “Survival must have quality, or it ain’t worth a bean,” Thornton Wilder recently observed. It doesn’t take much Sprachgefühl to recognize that Mr. Wilder is here being a mite folksy and that his effect would be lost if ain’t were indeed “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers.” Though I regret that the nineteenth-century schoolteachers without justification deprived us of ain’t for am not, the deed was done, and I think the Dial. or Illit. with which 2 labels all uses of the word comes closer to linguistic fact today.
The pejorative labels in 2 are forthright: colloquial, erroneous, incorrect, illiterate. 3 replaces these self-explanatory terms with two that are both fuzzier and more scientific-sounding: substandard and nonstandard. The first “indicates status conforming to a pattern of linguistic usage that exists throughout the American language community