The Usage Wars — Bryan A. Garner + DFW, The Connection (WBUR, host Judy Swallow, March 30, 2001)

source

TL;DR

A 48-minute call-in hour on WBUR's The Connection, pegged to Wallace's just-published Harper's essay reviewing Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage — and, by both men's on-air confirmation, the first time Wallace and Garner ever spoke [01:43]. This is the only live document of the Tense Present material in the archive: the SNOOT family acronym, the prescriptivist/descriptivist battle lines, skunked terms, hopefully, and the standard-written-English-as-one-dialect argument all get performed in real time, with a British host and five callers (one of whom catches Wallace committing different than twice on air). Infinite Jest is never mentioned; the yield is language-and-class testimony, the genetic-family-snootitude autobiography that stands behind Avril's Militant Grammarians, Wallace's live remark that Black English is rule-governed dialect, his corporate-media dialect-flattening critique, and the first-meeting dynamics of the future Quack This Way pair (Wallace repeatedly praising the dictionary while teasing that Garner is far snootier out loud than in print). ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation.

Key claims

Occasion and provenance on tape. Swallow introduces Wallace from a studio in Normal, Illinois, and Garner on the line from Dallas [01:19]; the peg is Wallace's article in this month's Harper's, a review of Garner's usage dictionary [01:31] (the essay is Tense Present; its title is never spoken on air). Both men confirm they have never met and that this is their first time speaking [01:43]. Bush is referred to as the sitting president with campaign audio from last fall [14:29], fixing the broadcast after January 2001; the manifest date of 2001-03-30 fits the this-month's-Harper's peg (the essay ran in the April 2001 issue, on stands late March).
The SNOOT apparatus, live. Asked to define the term he coined in print, Wallace runs the family material: there are many names for such people (language police, usage warriors); most snoots inherit their snootitude genetically; and SNOOT is his parents' in-house acronym gag, with one expansion for the sympathetic reading and a second for those who find snootishness silly [01:53–02:28]. He credits the gag to his parents, not himself [02:28]. The essay's aside that snoot children get wedgied comes up and stumps Garner, who has never heard the word; Wallace explains it as a regional term, also known as a snuggie [02:31–02:50]. (Both acronym expansions are ASR-garbled in the transcript)
Pet peeves. Wallace has little love for either impact the verb or proactive [04:00]. Later he identifies his true nails-in-palms error class: the Bush type — reaching for the big impressive word and getting it wrong while trying to sound authoritative [14:41–15:14].
The dictionary endorsement, twice. Wallace calls Garner disingenuously modest: the dictionary avoids priggishness and pedantry in a way a good deal of published twentieth-century snootitude has not, and the essay's whole burden is that the dictionary more or less rescues snootitude's public image from the sour-mouthed grammarian in bow tie and spectacles [04:05–04:39]. He closes the hour by volunteering, unpaid and unprompted, that Garner's book is the best guide going, by a wide margin, to speaking and writing the standard dialect not just correctly but prettily [46:34–46:51].
Garner's battle map. Most people bring prescriptive expectations to the language; extreme descriptivists hold that a native speaker cannot by definition make a mistake, which most people know is false; better writers seek guidance; and what people actually want when they ask for a grammar book is the little-known genre of the usage dictionary — an alphabetical discussion of the language's problem points [04:57–06:35].
Wallace's mechanism of change. Language is organic and changes via error: today's egregious error (personal as adverb) may be fully acceptable in a hundred years [06:41–07:55]. What the two camps fight over are skunked terms — vogue usages or errors that, like the Volstead Act becoming untenable, get ratified by a weird plebiscite of usage and are then codified by dictionaries after the fact; right and wrong are either the wrong terms entirely or highly time-specific [07:55–08:26].
The hopefully case study. Confronted with American Heritage panel statistics (acceptance falling from 44% to 27%), Wallace answers that the appearance of elitism is partly a function of the intro writers not being very good writers; he sits on the panel but does not write the intros; the people who wrangle over these decisions are simply the people who care, as in most specialties. In his view hopefully is a fine sentence adverb, somewhat skunked only for really conservative people educated before 1960; 99% of educated, SWE-fluent speakers have no problem with it [08:38–10:06]. Garner agrees it is inevitably becoming standard but is not quite willing to admit it yet into the best written American English [11:00–11:14]; his own ratified-error exhibit is self-deprecating displacing the older self-depreciating [10:33].
Standard written English is one dialect. Wallace presses the essay's core sociolinguistic point: SWE is only one dialect among many — professional or public English — and very little of the usage debate countenances that fact. He is affecting it on air right now, he says, to communicate his education and congeniality to the audience's values, and will drop it on the street back home in a rural Midwestern state [11:23–12:44]. Everyone makes these dialectal adjustments constantly, below the level of awareness [13:07]; the nerdy little kids who have only the one dialect their teachers love pay heavily for it in the social and playground realms — the wedgie point turned serious [13:14–13:29].
Judging by articulateness. Asked whether we are right to equate correct grammar with intelligence, Wallace answers that SWE performance is self-presentation — education, sensitivity to the rules — and that we do judge it in business, politics, and academia; the twist being that in everyday life we appraise one another every bit as much by fluency in slang and argot — we just never make that judging itself the object of discourse [15:38–16:23].
Garner's three reasons to care: credibility with hearers and readers; clear thinking (good language promotes it — the mental tone of the community); and linguistic continuity with past generations [17:26–18:47]. His error exhibits: in lieu of used for in light of [17:51]; a wreck-based misspelling of reckless driving in close to a thousand published instances [18:04]; heart rendering for heart rending reaching newspapers [18:19]. Swallow teases that he has now openly declared himself a card-carrying snoot [18:55].
Garner's origin story. Snootitude ran through his grandfather and father and was magnified about a hundred times in him; his father must have corrected me-and-Brad-are-going-to-play-golf a thousand times; the me-and-John construction is a developmental stage Texas kids grow out of — at which point Wallace interjects the reframe: what actually happens is that the child grows fluent in a second dialect [21:38–22:43].
Arbitrary rules, conceded and defended. Yes, the split-infinitive rule is a Latin inheritance, but it is hard to name a social custom that is not arbitrary in that sense; at any given political-and-linguistic moment, people read one another through semi-conscious cues, and SWE fluency is one [22:43–23:29]. Then the counterexample he raises against his own side: Bush's election casts doubt on the whole credibility argument — a man who beyond-mangled educated English, making precisely the most annoying errors (the impressive big word gotten wrong), and nobody cared; possibly genetic, he jokes, given the elder Bush's syntax [23:29–24:06]. Garner counters with bipartisan balance: the Rhodes-Scholar predecessor repeatedly said a-vote-for-Al-Gore-and-I [26:57–27:17].
Lawyers. Against a caller's faith in TV-lawyer grammar, Garner (who trains lawyers) declares them the planet's leading producers of gobbledygook [26:44]; degrees from Yale or Harvard guarantee nothing — fluency takes deliberate lifelong study that most people never undertake [27:17–27:40].
Names. Wallace asks to be called Dave — too many syllables otherwise — and jokes that the Foster is just a nom de plume; the host answers with a three-name-assassin crack (rendered in the transcript as a bare Lee Harvey Oswald) [27:42–27:51].
Media and the speed of change. Wallace notes he keeps ending up the descriptivist voice in the room, and that Garner is far snootier out loud than in his masterful dictionary — they need to exchange letters about it [27:58–28:23]. His actual media diagnosis: the modes of linguistic dissemination have changed, so one announcer's slip under time pressure now reaches a million or two million people at once, and errors drive street-level change far faster than street-level change used to happen — which grates on those who have cathected the usage rules they grew up with [28:04–29:06].
The dialect-flattening complaint. What bothers him about radio is not mangled syntax but erasure: a bland media accent audible from near El Paso to Presque Isle, Maine, vacuuming out the dialectal and regional differences that make English delightful [29:32–30:18]. And the mechanism bothers him most of all: media speech is homogenized not by unconscious herd instinct but by demographic and economic studies showing dialect alienates listeners — language change driven by corporate and economic imperatives troubles him more than change driven by dialectal or educational difference [30:20–30:57].
The Anglo-American front (Garner). Linguistic gravity shifted to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly as a product of political power; Lord Conesford's 1957 Saturday Evening Post piece accusing Americans of murdering the language, and the long British complaint about Americanisms (bamboozle, gate-crashing, highbrow, rubbernecking — Swallow adds get-go), mark the older order; the most colorful developments in English are now happening in America [31:17–32:00].
The Spanglish segment. Ilan Stavans (Amherst; ASR garbles the surname twice), compiling a Spanglish dictionary, places himself in muddy waters between the camps: he grew up in Spanish, Hebrew, and Yiddish and feels no territorial claim on English [33:09–33:47]. His case: 35–40 million U.S. Latinos; Spanglish attested over 150 years (a 1920s Miami word for thief, since replaced); Spain's royal academy — federally funded, he notes twice — treats it as barbarism [33:54–35:30]; but numbers plus access to media power decide these things, and a Spanglish word for sock will eventually displace the Castilian one in serious dictionaries [35:41–36:28].
Wallace on Spanglish. You cannot treat all tomes as equivalent: a dialectal compendium of a forty-million-speaker blend is important work that ought to be done descriptively, and a different thing entirely from a usage dictionary that draws lines; he loves Safire's column (ASR renders the name as a gemstone) and the Joys-of-Yiddish genre, and finds Spanglish kind of delightful — though he allows that if Spanish were his main language he might feel differently [36:38–37:31]. Garner concurs: descriptive lexicography and the usage dictionary are different media doing different jobs, and cites Swift's dictum that style is a matter of the best words set in the best places [39:39–40:34].
Caught on air. Caller Molly reports hearing different than on the show — and it turns out to be Wallace, twice [37:54–38:23]. Garner comes to his defense (different from would have been genuinely awkward in those sentences); Wallace pleads infection by his native dialect and argues awkwardness is in the ear of the beholder [38:23–38:50]. Garner's synthesis: the descriptivists are right that language will change, but we can slow it down; speech deserves more latitude than writing; the goal is to be relaxed but not lax [38:50–39:19]. Wallace later adds that his spoken fudge carried tone quotes — it was a single linguistic unit [42:27].
Spoken vs. written. Pressed by caller Artie's point that knowing the canon of standard English lets you bend and break rules to expand your expressive palette (Wallace: bingo), and that slang runs the same credibility-judging and rule-bending economy — old-school rap reviving fresh, the cycling of cool [40:45–41:36] — Wallace lands his considered distinction: what he rails at his students about is writing, where intellectual and linguistic credibility matter far more; mangling public English is upsetting, but spoken language deserves latitude [42:24–43:08]. Garner: prose English has to sit at a higher, more finished register, yet the best writers are relaxed rather than hyper-formal and stilted — and he offers Wallace's Harper's article as a model of avoiding the stilted register [43:08–43:35].
The fused participle and Black English. Caller Sarah raises the possessive-with-gerund rule; Garner names the fused participle, says polished writing typically takes the possessive, and notes his dictionary entry allows exceptions where the possessive would be awkward [43:48–44:45]. Wallace inserts a pointed aside: by the internal rules of certain dialects — several forms of Black English among them — the fused participle is perfectly fine [44:45–44:51].
Rules as superstition (Garner). Rules change gradually and often imperceptibly, and some so-called rules are simply misinformation: the most harmful superstition in the popular mind is that a sentence cannot begin with and or but, when studies show close to 9% of sentences by first-rate twentieth-century writers begin with conjunctions — any page of Harper's or the Atlantic shows several — and avoiding them makes people write worse [45:05–45:53].
Does he want his students to be snoots? No. Snoothood, he says, makes for a lonely, stressful existence — like having a big red button that gets pushed all the time — and he would honestly prefer to be less snooty than he is. What he wants is for students to be able to produce gorgeous, concise standard English when it counts — in writing, job interviews, professional venues — for the credibility and education it communicates [46:08–46:46].
Sign-off. Swallow tags Wallace as writer, professor, and amateur snoot, Garner as the professional snoot [47:05]; the outro music is the My Fair Lady number about why the English can't teach their children how to speak — verbal class distinction as exit theme [47:30].

The questions asked

Recorded for the interview-questions compilation; each entry paraphrases one substantive question put on air.

Swallow's questions to Wallace:

You identify yourself in the Harper's article as a snoot — so let's settle it at the top: what is a snoot, exactly? [01:53]
What is your real pet peeve — what can you absolutely not abide hearing? [03:52]
Does English have genuine rights and wrongs? Last night television produced takes-things-a-little-too-personal within thirty seconds — is that definitely wrong? [06:48]
The American Heritage panel now accepts hopefully at 27%, down from 44% in 1969 — so hopefully is absolutely wrong? Why? And aren't you on that panel? [08:29–09:20]
Standard written English — you make the point it is one of many dialects? [11:10]
So when you leave the studio you'll stop having verbal intercourse and start rapping with the guys? [12:52]
How long before the Bush coinage subliminable makes it into a dictionary? [14:39]
That was a slip-up — yet we do size people up by how articulately they speak, don't we? And is it fair to treat correct grammar as a proxy for intelligence? [15:24–15:38]
Aren't many of these rules just arbitrary — you note yourself that the split-infinitive rule arises from Latin? [22:43]
Who are the worst offenders — who really wrecked the language, the lawyers? [27:52]
Hasn't the media changed language of necessity — radio is spoken, you cannot reread the previous sentence, so sentences get mangled for understanding? [29:14]
Isn't the media accent part of a herd instinct — adjusting your speech so as to belong? [30:22]
What do you make of what Stavans said — a living language changing on the street, with the tome-writers obliged to adjust? [36:33]
Last question: are snoots what you hope your students become? [46:08]

Swallow's questions to Garner:

Are you a snoot? [02:58]
Define the battle lines of the prescriptive-versus-descriptive debate [05:05]
Who gets to decide a dictionary's contents, or a usage book's — who decides what is right? [10:06]
Is there a middle way — a compassionate prescriptivism? [16:29]
Where does this obsession of yours come from? [21:38]
Are lawyers a special case (you have a vested interest here)? [26:28]
Is the U.S. now the driving force in world English? [31:17]
What do you think of Spanglish? (deferred at [37:41], answered at [39:39])
How quickly are rules changed? I was taught possessive-with-gerund years ago [45:05]

Swallow's questions to Stavans:

Where do you fit in the descriptivist-prescriptivist debate? [33:19]
Why scrunch the two languages together — isn't tiempo-is-money bastardized jargon? [34:08]
You draw fire from both camps, don't you — the Spanish purists and the English ones alike? [35:02]
Is yours the winning side — is Spanglish unstoppable when whole governments are fighting the invasion of English? [35:41]

Guest-to-guest:

Garner to Wallace — the only direct Garner question of the hour: what on earth does wedgied mean? [02:37]
Wallace to Garner (invited relays): he would be interested to know what Garner thinks about judging people by articulateness [15:38]; and he asks the host to extract Garner's view of Spanglish [37:41]

Callers:

Linda (trained in descriptive linguistics): the self-abuse phenomenon — reflexive myself replacing plain pronouns (Bob-and-myself-were-going-to-the-store), which she reads as English-teacher terror of Bob-and-me; is she a descriptivist turned prescriptive snoot (the host's question back to her at [20:27])? [19:06–20:44] (Garner's answering pun on the old euphemism draws a keep-it-clean from the host [21:11–21:28])
Jerry (Lexington, South Carolina): don't the two of you agree that the errors that set teeth on edge are the media's — TV-drama lawyers from Harvard or Yale saying is-this-done-correct on Law & Order? [24:50–25:42]
Molly: somebody on this program said different than, when it should have been different from [37:54]
Artie: two points, not questions — knowing a canon of standard English lets you bend and break rules to expand your expressive palette; and slang runs the same credibility-and-rule-bending economy (the revival of fresh, the cycling of cool) [40:40–41:36]
Sarah (Louisville, Kentucky): her English-teacher mother taught the possessive with the gerund (I appreciate his discussing the topic) — where does that rule stand? [43:48]

Theories & evidence

The source advances no theory about any Infinite Jest crux — the novel is never named on air. The signal is preoccupation and biography, carried as CONNECTION blocks.

CONNECTION: The snoot family autobiography told live — parents' acronym gag, genetically inherited snootitude — the real-life substrate of Avril's Militant Grammarians household

Crux: incandenza-autobiography
Early text: [scene] Wallace, asked to define the snoot, testifies that most snoots inherit their snootitude genetically and that SNOOT is his family's joke — his parents' gag, with paired acronym expansions for the sympathetic and the mocking reading [01:53–02:31]; Garner later quotes the genetic claim back approvingly and matches it with his own three-generation correction-at-the-dinner-table upbringing [21:40–22:14]
IJ echo: Avril Incandenza, prescriptivist and co-founder of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts (endnote 51 gives the founding; the M.G.M. supermarket-sign patrols and Avril's prescriptive-linguistics books appear in Orin's account); the Incandenza household as a family organized around language correction, with Hal the lexical prodigy reciting OED entries
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Directionality: the interview postdates IJ by five years, so the wire is documentation of the life material behind the book, not prefiguration — and it is offered on air as autobiography-behind-the-essay, never as IJ commentary (IJ goes unmentioned the whole hour). Companion evidence to the grammar-correspondences-with-his-mother material in general online discussion, which anchors this crux in the theory record. In-source qualification: Wallace attributes the acronym to his parents and jokes about it rather than analyzing the family dynamic; the smothering-mother valence that matters to the IJ reading is entirely absent here.

CONNECTION: Black English named on air as rule-governed dialect — the conviction underneath the Wardine-voice debate, stated by the author in his own voice

Crux: wardine-voice
Early text: [scene] Interrupting Garner's fused-participle entry, Wallace inserts that by the internal rules of certain dialects — several forms of Black English among them — the fused participle is perfectly fine [44:45–44:51]; the frame it rests on runs through the hour: standard written English is one dialect among many, everyone shifts dialects below the level of awareness, and monodialectal speakers pay real social costs [11:23–13:29]
IJ echo: the Clenette section rendered in Black English, scene 008 (pp. 37–38), the center of the wardine-voice ledger
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Scope caution: nothing here mentions Wardine, IJ, or fiction-writing in dialect; the tape attests the author's live, unprompted conviction that Black English is internally rule-governed (the premise the ground-truth defense of the section presupposes, and the same position the Harper's essay under discussion elaborates in its Ebonics pages), not any claim about the section's execution. The theory record holds wardine-voice open across four stances; this is context evidence for that ledger, no stance taken.

CONNECTION: Dialect fluency as class destiny — the playground price of monodialectalism and standard English as the dialect of professional power

Crux: class-design
Early text: [scene] Wallace's testimony that he is affecting SWE on air to signal education and congeniality, and will drop it on the street in his rural Midwestern state [11:49–12:44]; that everyone makes dialect adjustments constantly below awareness [13:07]; that nerdy kids fluent only in teacher-pleasing English pay heavily in the social and playground realms [13:14–13:29]; and that street speech judges slang and argot fluency exactly as hard as boardrooms judge SWE — the judging just never becomes the object of discourse [15:38–16:23]
IJ echo: the novel's twin-institution class architecture (ETA's hyper-lexical children against Ennet House and the street registers — the yrstruly section, scene 040, pp. 128–135, and the Clenette section, scene 008, pp. 37–38, run entire narrations in the dialects at stake)
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: The archive previously held the class-design reading on one untapped secondary source alone; this is the first author-voice material in the archive putting dialect-and-class at the center of his language politics. Directionality: post-IJ continuity. The claim on tape is sociolinguistic, about America; the ETA/Ennet mapping is the archive's, not the tape's.

CONNECTION: Corporate-demographic homogenization of speech — the media accent that vacuums out regional difference, and errors broadcast to millions accelerating change

Crux: eup-connection
Early text: [scene] Wallace's diagnosis that modes of linguistic dissemination have changed — one announcer's slip now reaches a million or two million ears and drives street-level change faster than street change ever moved [28:04–29:06]; and his sharper complaint that the bland national media accent (audible from near El Paso to Presque Isle, Maine) is the product of demographic and economic studies showing dialect alienates listeners — language change driven by corporate and economic imperatives disturbs him more than change driven by dialect or education [29:22–30:57]
IJ echo: E Unibus Pluram's economics-of-attention argument carried into IJ's broadcast-and-entertainment culture; the flattened, market-tested national voice is the same adversary EUP names in the television essay
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Directionality: post-IJ continuity, the EUP media-economics critique restated in sociolinguistic key five years on. Filed here rather than at media-prescience deliberately: no technology prediction is at stake, only the corporate-imperative analysis. In the same passage he concedes the economics are presumably sound — the objection is aesthetic and civic, not conspiratorial.

No THEORY blocks. The hour takes no position on any IJ plot or interpretation crux: nothing on Hal, the Entertainment, the wraith, the ending, composition history, or even the book's existence. Honest thinness on IJ is the correct reading of this source; its unique value is the live Tense Present performance and the Garner first encounter.

Themes

Language and class (dialect as social currency; the playground cost; verbal class distinction as the literal exit music); articulateness and self-presentation (SWE as performance of education — the same axis IJ runs from Hal's lexical virtuosity to the street registers); entertainment and media economics (the demographic-study accent; error dissemination at broadcast scale); democratic vs. elitist language politics (usage change as plebiscite; the panel-statistics theater; Spanglish as numbers-plus-media-power); family (snootitude as inheritance, told as comedy).

Cross-references

wbur-connection-1996-lydon — the same program five years earlier, mid-IJ-tour; between them the show documents Wallace at the IJ launch and in the Tense Present spring.
general online discussion — the grammar-correspondences and Incandenza-family-autobiography material this tape's snoot-inheritance testimony corroborates from the author's side.
city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the 2004 companion on rules in the classroom: prescriptive rules as guidelines that improve student writing until they become a cage, and rule-flouting as character texture in fiction.
video-zdf-2003-pretentious-language — the SNOOT persona on camera five years later, in Wallace's one filmed conversation with Garner himself (long mislabeled a ZDF-2003 cut; re-attributed); that clip's puff-word material (prior-to for before) is this hour's Bush-error class in miniature.
kcrw-bookworm-2006-lobster — the Consider the Lobster tour stop, after the essay's book republication as Authority and American Usage.
e-unibus-pluram — the corporate-media homogenization complaint here is the television essay's economics restated for speech.