“Be clear.” “Omit needless words.” “Do not overwrite.” “Avoid fancy words.” “Use the active voice.” Who can argue with such common sense commandments, especially when they’re delivered with Voice-of-God authority? Certainly not the generations of students, secretaries, working writers, and wannabe Hemingways who’ve feared and revered Strunk and White’s Elements of Style as the Bible of “plain English style,” as E.B. White calls it in his introduction. (Since 1959, when White revised and substantially expanded the brief guide to prose style self-published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English literature at Cornell, Strunk & White, as most of us know it, has sold more than 10 million copies.)
Can it really be coincidence that, smack on the first page, in a note about exceptions to one of his Elementary Rules Of Usage (“Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s..., whatever the final consonant”), Strunk gives as an example, “Moses’ laws”? The Elements of Style, more than another book, has set in stone American ideas about proper usage and, more profoundly, good style. Professor Strunk wrote his little tract as a stout defense of “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated,” the red-flag word in that sentence being “violated.”
Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence. (Strunk published Elements in the last year of the Great War, a cataclysm that turned Europe into history’s goriest slaughter bench, fanned the flames of revolution in Russia, and shaped the cynical, disillusioned worldview of Hemingway and his “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein called them.) For usage purists, the decline of the language portends the fall of the republic. We’re only one misplaced comma away from the barbarians at the gates, my fellow Romans.
“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Why I Write.” “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” The opinion that the canon laws of usage, composition, and style—our unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes “good prose”—have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. Obviously, it’s easier for you to make out my meaning if the pane you’re peering through isn’t some Baroque fantasy in stained glass. But the Anglo-American article of faith that clarity can only be achieved through words of one syllable and sentences fit for a telegram is pure dogma. The Elements of Style is as ideological, in its bow-tied, wire-rimmed way, as any manifesto.
Strunkian style embraces the cultural logic of the Machine Age, which by 1918 was well underway. The head-whipping speedup of the 20th century, its throttle thrown wide open by faster modes of travel and accelerating social change, soon found poetic expression in the aerodynamic aesthetic known as streamlining: toasters with speedlines, teardrop-shaped prototype cars, cocktail shakers that looked like they could break the sound barrier. Anticipating streamlining, Strunk decrees, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Likewise, his golden rule, “omit needless words,” complements the “less is more” ethos of the Bauhaus school of design, another expression of Machine Age Modernism. Optimized for peak efficiency, Strunk’s is a prose for an age of standardized widgets and standardized workers, when the efficiency gospel of F.W. Taylor, father of “scientific management,” was percolating out of the workplace, into the culture at large. “Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of the masses,” wrote the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in 1936. Why not standardize the mass production of prose? “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” admonishes White, cautioning against “eccentricities in language” in the “Approach to Style” he appended to his 1959 revision. Strunk & White is a child of its times—the early Machine Age, when the Professor first published it, and the gray-flannel ‘50s, when White revised it—in other ways, too. There’s much talk of vigorous prose, “vigor” being a byword in Strunk’s day for cold-shower masculinity of the strenuous, Teddy Roosevelt sort. White juxtaposes the bicep-flexing “toughness” of good writing with the “unwholesome,” sometimes even “nauseating” ickiness of “rich, ornate prose.” “If the sickly sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression,” he counsels, “you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor.” The implication is obvious: if a lean, mean Modernist prose of “plainness, simplicity, orderliness, [and] sincerity” is manly, then a style that rejoices in ornament and complexity and sharpens its wit with the knowing insincerity of irony or camp is unmanly—feminine or, worse yet, sissified. (Pop quiz: Why do we call overwrought language “flowery”? Because flowers recall that unmentionable part of a lady’s anatomy, and the effeminization of language saps it of its potency. Why is purple prose purple? Because purple has been synonymous with foppish unmanliness ever since Oscar Wilde wore mauve gloves to the premiere of Lady Windemere’s Fan.)
Can it really be coincidence that, smack on the first page, in a note about exceptions to one of his Elementary Rules Of Usage (“Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s..., whatever the final consonant”), Strunk gives as an example, “Moses’ laws”? The Elements of Style, more than another book, has set in stone American ideas about proper usage and, more profoundly, good style. Professor Strunk wrote his little tract as a stout defense of “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated,” the red-flag word in that sentence being “violated.”Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence. (Strunk published Elements in the last year of the Great War, a cataclysm that turned Europe into history’s goriest slaughter bench, fanned the flames of revolution in Russia, and shaped the cynical, disillusioned worldview of Hemingway and his “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein called them.) For usage purists, the decline of the language portends the fall of the republic. We’re only one misplaced comma away from the barbarians at the gates, my fellow Romans.
“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Why I Write.” “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” The opinion that the canon laws of usage, composition, and style—our unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes “good prose”—have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. Obviously, it’s easier for you to make out my meaning if the pane you’re peering through isn’t some Baroque fantasy in stained glass. But the Anglo-American article of faith that clarity can only be achieved through words of one syllable and sentences fit for a telegram is pure dogma. The Elements of Style is as ideological, in its bow-tied, wire-rimmed way, as any manifesto.
Strunkian style embraces the cultural logic of the Machine Age, which by 1918 was well underway. The head-whipping speedup of the 20th century, its throttle thrown wide open by faster modes of travel and accelerating social change, soon found poetic expression in the aerodynamic aesthetic known as streamlining: toasters with speedlines, teardrop-shaped prototype cars, cocktail shakers that looked like they could break the sound barrier. Anticipating streamlining, Strunk decrees, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Likewise, his golden rule, “omit needless words,” complements the “less is more” ethos of the Bauhaus school of design, another expression of Machine Age Modernism. Optimized for peak efficiency, Strunk’s is a prose for an age of standardized widgets and standardized workers, when the efficiency gospel of F.W. Taylor, father of “scientific management,” was percolating out of the workplace, into the culture at large. “Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of the masses,” wrote the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in 1936. Why not standardize the mass production of prose? “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” admonishes White, cautioning against “eccentricities in language” in the “Approach to Style” he appended to his 1959 revision. Strunk & White is a child of its times—the early Machine Age, when the Professor first published it, and the gray-flannel ‘50s, when White revised it—in other ways, too. There’s much talk of vigorous prose, “vigor” being a byword in Strunk’s day for cold-shower masculinity of the strenuous, Teddy Roosevelt sort. White juxtaposes the bicep-flexing “toughness” of good writing with the “unwholesome,” sometimes even “nauseating” ickiness of “rich, ornate prose.” “If the sickly sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression,” he counsels, “you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor.” The implication is obvious: if a lean, mean Modernist prose of “plainness, simplicity, orderliness, [and] sincerity” is manly, then a style that rejoices in ornament and complexity and sharpens its wit with the knowing insincerity of irony or camp is unmanly—feminine or, worse yet, sissified. (Pop quiz: Why do we call overwrought language “flowery”? Because flowers recall that unmentionable part of a lady’s anatomy, and the effeminization of language saps it of its potency. Why is purple prose purple? Because purple has been synonymous with foppish unmanliness ever since Oscar Wilde wore mauve gloves to the premiere of Lady Windemere’s Fan.)
by Mark Dery, Daily Beast | Read more:
Image: New York Times Co./Getty Images
