Authority and American Usage

source

TL;DR

Wallace's 1999 essay-review of Garner's usage dictionary — nominally about the descriptivist-vs-prescriptivist "Usage Wars," actually a treatise on language, democracy, and identity. It is the primary text for the archive's Avril character-genetics: Wallace coins and defines the term SNOOT — "this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic" — and describes the SNOOT household (a mom who "is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort." — and who plays a correcting game at family suppers), plus the SNOOTlet, "a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs)." This is the Avril–Hal machine — the grammarian eminence of IJ's Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts raising a lexical prodigy — and it is drawn explicitly from Wallace's own mother (a composition teacher). The essay says nothing about IJ (a 1999 review, three years after the novel), but it retro-illuminates Avril's genetics more directly than any other DFW text, and it supplies the "Democratic Spirit" rhetoric — "A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others." — that keys DFW's whole language-politics.

Key claims

SNOOT defined. "SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic" — "the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column"; the acronym joke: "whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one" [fn 5].
The SNOOT as elitist and despairing. "we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd."; "We combine a 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."; a fellow SNOOT likes to say that "listening to most people’s public English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails."
The SNOOT household and the SNOOTlet. SNOOTitude is inherited — 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." Family suppers involved a 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." The body defines the product: "A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs)."
The Democratic Spirit. Usage questions are "at root political" and can be addressed only in what the article terms a Democratic Spirit: "A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others."
Language as everything. The stakes: "language is everything and everywhere; it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another" [body].

Theories & evidence

None advancing a claim about IJ (a 1999 review; it never names the novel). Its IJ-bearing signal is character-genetics and language-politics, carried in the CONNECTION blocks below. Locator: no print pagination in this edition; body cited by essay-position descriptor, footnotes by DFW's own footnote number as [fn N].

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

Crux: proposed avril-snoot-genetics (no existing slug covers Avril's grammarian/SNOOT identity)
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)
Notes: The most direct character-genetics feeder outside IJ itself. The essay does not name Avril; the mapping is type-identity. Audit-found: the essay's title-asterisk footnote invokes Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" — the same essay IJ's Militant Grammarians hold "marathon multireadings" of (digest p. 288): a direct textual filament between the SNOOT essay and Avril's PAC. IJ-side quotes above are routed through the print-paginated digest (the language-grammar theme batches; MOTIFS conventions), not the essay raw.

CONNECTION: The SNOOT household and the SNOOTlet — Avril's family regime and the Incandenza prodigies

Crux: proposed avril-snoot-genetics (also touches hal-dfw-surrogate, ij-autobiographical)
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
Notes: The Sally-Foster-Wallace → Avril biographical taproot sits here. Routes primarily to avril-snoot-genetics (proposed); brushes hal-dfw-surrogate (Hal's verbal gift as DFW's own SNOOTlet self) and ij-autobiographical. Keep distinct from avril-devouring-mother / avril-dosed-hal — this is the language/grammar strand of Avril, not the maternal-menace or dosing strands (collision-checked). Note the tonal overlap the essay itself supplies: the coughing-fit game is "all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive" — correction-as-love shading toward suffocation, the exact ambivalence the devouring-mother strand runs on; logged as adjacency, not merged.

CONNECTION: The Democratic Spirit — rigor-plus-humility as DFW's language-politics ethic

Crux: eup-connection (light; the sincerity/anti-dogmatism ethic)
Early text: usage issues are "at root political" and addressable only in what the article "hereby terms" a Democratic Spirit — "A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others." [body, THESIS STATEMENT FOR WHOLE ARTICLE section] [e-text]
IJ echo: DFW's recurring ethic of held-together conviction and humility — the anti-ironic, anti-dogmatic sincerity IJ works toward (the AA program's epistemic humility; the novel's suspicion of both cynical relativism and rigid zealotry). The "Democratic Spirit" is the rhetorical-ethics version of the same sincerity program EUP and the McCaffery interview state.
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Light / thematic. Routes to eup-connection (the sincerity-ethic axis); not a character-genetics claim.

Themes

SNOOT / usage-fanaticism (the elitist, missionary, despairing grammar-zealot) · the SNOOT household and the SNOOTlet (grammar as family currency; correction as love) · the biographical taproot (DFW's Comp-teacher mother → Avril) · the Militant-Grammarians strand of Avril's character · descriptivism vs. prescriptivism (the Usage Wars) · language as politics and identity · the Democratic Spirit (rigor + humility; sincerity as rhetorical ethic).

Cross-references

IJ's Avril material — the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts (digest p. 288 portrait; n.51 co-founding; n.24 Pinker-debate filmography entry); Avril as academic grammarian and mother of verbal prodigies — for which this essay is the closest nonfiction genetic source.
e-unibus-pluram and mccaffery-1993-interview — the sincerity / anti-dogmatism ethic the "Democratic Spirit" restates.
Hal-as-lexical-prodigy material (the O.E.D.; the Mnemonic Verbal Inventory — digest pp. 30s / 317) — the SNOOTlet the essay describes.
The existing Avril slugs (avril-afr, avril-orin, avril-devouring-mother, avril-dosed-hal) — none of which cover the grammarian/SNOOT strand this note proposes; kept distinct.

Notable passages

Body cited by essay-position; footnotes as [fn N]. All [e-text].

"SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic" [fn 5]
"the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column" [fn 5, continuing the above]
"Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance" / "Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time" [fn 5, the acronym joke]
"we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd." [body]
"We combine a 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]
"listening to most people’s public English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails." [body, "a fellow SNOOT I know likes to say"]
"A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs)." [body]
"SNOOTitude runs in families." [fn 8]
"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." [fn 8]
"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." [fn 8]
"A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others." [body]
"language is everything and everywhere; it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another" [body]