DFW on genteelisms and puff words — LawProse clip (Bryan A. Garner interview footage)

source

TL;DR

A two-minute filmed answer on usage: asked what is wrong with genteelisms like prior to and subsequent to, Wallace rejects the charitable label and calls them puff words — utilize for use, individual for person, at this time for now — extra syllables that puff the speaker up, with the pedantic kicker that anyone committed to prior to should logically say posterior to, which nobody would. The exchange ends on the two-sided cost of caring: once you start noticing, other people's puffery bugs you forever, but your own writing gets more careful and attentive. The archive already holds this exact exchange under a different label — the same two minutes circulate on YouTube attributed to the 2003 German-television session and were digested there (video-zdf-2003-pretentious-language) — so this note's contribution is not new content but the provenance question: the clip is published by Garner's own firm as part of his interview with Wallace, and the evidence below favors that attribution. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation.

Key claims

Genteelism is, to Wallace, an overly charitable name for the category; to him they are puff words [00:00:00].
The exhibits: utilize instead of use (in 99 cases out of 100 just stupid), individual for person, prior to for before — more syllables, just puffed up; before is fewer words and everybody knows what it means [00:00:00].
The Latin-roots gotcha: given the roots, a prior to / subsequent to user is committing, at a rarefied level, a grammatical error — the logical partner form is posterior to, which nobody would ever want to say [00:00:00–00:00:59].
The downside of attention: you start noticing everyone who says at this time rather than now, and begrudging the extra third of a second of parsing; you get permanently bugged [00:00:59].
The upside, and the clip's closing turn: your own writing grows more careful, more attentive — putting you on the side of light and goodness, not the evil all around [00:00:59].

Attribution and dating

The recording circulates under two irreconcilable labels, recorded here as written, neither silently corrected:

As held here: the audio was taken from LawProse — Bryan Garner's own firm — which publishes it on its David Foster Wallace interview pages; the acquisition trail carries a 1999 date with recording date marked unknown.
As it circulates on YouTube: the identical two minutes are posted as a clip from Wallace's 2003 German-television session, and the archive's earlier note digested it under that label. That note itself flags that the exchange appears nowhere in the full unedited upload of the German session.

Three legs favor the Garner attribution and a 2006 date:

The interviewer's question uses genteelism — a term of art from Garner's own usage dictionaries — and the publisher of the footage is Garner's firm, presenting it as his interview with Wallace.
The 1999 date is untenable if Garner is the interviewer: on WBUR's The Connection in March 2001, Wallace and Garner both confirm on air that they had never met and were speaking for the first time (wbur-usage-wars-2001).
Garner's one filmed conversation with Wallace is the February 3, 2006 Los Angeles session later published in print as Quack This Way (2013), from which LawProse has posted excerpt clips; a usage-item question of exactly this shape fits that session's format.

The frontmatter date therefore carries the 2006 session date, marked approximate. SETTLED 2026-07-17: the print Quack This Way is now held and digested (garner-quack-this-way) — the attribution is confirmed and that note is the quotable layer for this exchange. NB the "10 Items or Less" less-vs-fewer material sits in an EARLIER print section ("Crummy, turgid, verbose…"), not the puff-words close — keep the two exchanges distinct when citing.

Theories & evidence

The source advances no theory about any Infinite Jest crux — the novel is never mentioned; the clip is pure usage material. Its interpretive value is biographical context for the novel's language-obsessed household material, already carried by the archive's other usage sources.

Themes

Language and usage (the SNOOT persona in miniature); attention as an ethic applied to prose — the same care-versus-crankiness trade he describes at essay length in Authority and American Usage.

Cross-references

video-zdf-2003-pretentious-language — the same two minutes under the competing attribution; that note carries the exchange's content in the archive's earlier register.
wbur-usage-wars-2001 — the live Garner-Wallace hour whose first-time-speaking confirmation anchors the dating argument above; the puff-word taxonomy there is this clip's error class at hour length.
ctl-authority-usage — the essay-length version of the puff-word argument.
city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the 2004 companion on usage rules in the classroom.