The SNOOT household and the SNOOTlet — Avril's family regime and the Incandenza prodigies
echoes
From: Authority and American Usage
- Early text: "A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly,
precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs)."
[body]; fn 8 — "SNOOTitude runs in families."; "In my own case, my mom is a
Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most
rabid and intractable sort."; the family-supper correcting game — "if one of
us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit
that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant
error and corrected it."; and the retrospective judgment — "it seems a bit
excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by
speaking incorrectly." [fn 8, incl. its INTERPOLATION: the "Blunderdog"
family car-song "that Mom and we little SNOOTlets would sing"] [e-text]
- IJ echo: The Incandenza household — Avril the grammarian mother raising
verbally prodigious children. Hal is the SNOOTlet par excellence: the
ten-year-old "tennis and lexical prodigy" reading the condensed O.E.D.
(digest; Mario later hauls him "his first copies of the unabridged O.E.D." — digest p. 317). The essay's SNOOT-family regime — correction as love,
precocious SWE fluency as the family currency — is the domestic machine that
produces Hal's freakish verbal gift, and Wallace explicitly grounds it in
his own mother, the composition teacher.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation