SNOOT-genetics — Avril the grammar-fanatic and the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts

echoes

From: Authority and American Usage

Early text: SNOOT defined as "this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic" [fn 5]; "we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd."; the SNOOT's "missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults." [body]; the title's own asterisked footnote: "(or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT)" [title fn] [e-text]
IJ echo: Avril Incandenza — "a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world" (Hal's self-description scene), driven to co-found the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts (IJ n.51 via digest), whose fullest portrait is the p. 288 run: "the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax", which "held marathon multireadings of e.g. Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language,’" with its "Avril-chaired Tactical Phalanx (MGM’s)" suing the Gentle administration over library closures; plus the Pinker–Avril prescriptive-grammar debate at the M.G.M. convention "credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots" (JOI filmography, n.24 via digest). The essay is the discursive portrait of exactly Avril's type: the elitist, missionary, despairing usage-zealot; the Militant Grammarians are the SNOOT converted into a political cell — the essay's "Usage Wars" made an IJ institution.
Weight: shared-preoccupation (retro-illumination — the essay postdates IJ)