I picked this up again for the essay on Authority and American Usage. The essays on Tracy Austen - why sports starts shouldn't write books and Consider the Lobster - why boiling lobsters might be bad were also good.

Authoriy was my focus. It's a 62 page essay with footnotes obstensibly about Brian Garner's book - Modern American Usage, but it's really about role of authority in our language. Should we follow basic usage rules or let everything go. Who knew dictionairs could be so fun?

When it comes to usage, English, grammar, etc. there exists two main schools - the prescriptivists (what proper English SHOULD BE) and descriptivists (what English IS). Both schools have members that take things to the extreme. The extreme prescriptive is the pedantic grammarian. The pedantic grammarian objects to sentences that end in prepositions and the like. The extreme descriptive is anything goes and would require volumes of dictionaries to capture the way everyone uses the language, even every sub-sub dialect would require reams of paper.

These two camps DFW points out are closer to religious or political zealots. Of prescriptives he writes: "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. Plus a dash of the elitism of, say, Billy Zane in Titanic".

While sticking to the Prescriptivie camp DFW offers more of a middle ground:

"Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories."

The most convincing argument DFW makes is that standard written English is one type of English. By acknowledging the validity and importance of other types of English, Ebonics for example, he seems more reasonable. It's the English of the publishing world. If you want to get published, SWE is the way. It's the type of English of the prescriptive. Other worlds have bastardized standard written English - the academic, business, and political, but again it's necessary to start with SWE in order to be accepted into those worlds.

I would make another argument for the prescriptivist. The reader's argument. I don't have the patience to piece together poor writing. Simple standard written English is the best reading. The New Yorker goes to far often and their self-conscious grammar gets in the way of the writing, so it is possible to over do it, however, learning the rules and mostly following them except where it would be distracting is best approach. This is the most considerate approach for the reader.

This was a fascinating essay it took me several days to read through it because DFW offers alot to digest.