The Anticapitalist Conspiracy
Morris, Edmund
Edmund Morris THE ANTICAPITALIST CONSPIRACY A warning. T here's a plot abroad, folks, to radicalize the language of Milton and Macaulay. I first became aware of it in 1982, when I got a letter...
...The Coming Propaedeutical Backlash I close with a solemn warning to all stylistic revisionists, whether pinkos or populists: if they keep trampling on our footnotes and bawling banalities like "The key to successful communications is using the right language," we scholars are going to shout back, in the language that suits us best...
...Imagine his byline in a contemporary issue of Mathematical Monographs: "Al Einstein is one of the guys at that think-tank in Princeton...
...I first became aware of it in 1982, when I got a letter inviting me to become a "fellow" at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars...
...Antiobscuration and Academic Alliteration Another worrying thing is the prejudice of modern stylebooks against obscure expression...
...My bestloved (sic) little Queen...
...I had to conduct a special search before I tracked it down in a secured room at the Library of Congress...
...Multiple Ps and...
...Let me tell you, when I came to the end of the Handbook, I couldn't move for shock...
...Vietnam...
...The effect of such compounds en masse (a phrase, by the way, we're not supposed to italicize any more, since people don't like to be reminded that they can't speak French) combines with anticapitalization to cast a totalitarian grayness across the page, depriving it of white space and texture, until it looks like an Albanian xerox...
...I hereby present my findings...
...Excellent word that, sic...
...The Edmund Morris is the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for biography in 1980...
...Actually, I never learned the exact meaning of ibid...
...I must admit, though, that at least one MLA reform is welcome...
...MCDXLVXXXVII of this and DCIIIVLX of that, only to discover that I dropped an L somewhere in copying the citation...
...Was it confined solely to a few leftist saboteurs in Chicago...
...No wonder the poor slobs felt unappreciated, and resigned...
...I say it's egalitarianism, and I say the Hell with it...
...There is one subtlety of didactic style so far unvulgarized by the manuals: Academic Alliteration...
...dazzled and defiant, we dreamed of defense and depended upon deity...
...it extends to what the Modern Language Association calls the "social connotations" of literary expression...
...Maybe the enemy in our midst is the computer, with its brute desire to process all words into digits...
...So drily disdainful, so expressive of professorial nausea...
...I demanded an explanation, and found that my correspondent was only trying to be nice...
...Well, goodbye scholarship...
...barebreasted" is not...
...Cs are still much admired...
...Talking of caps, I notice that the Washington Post stylebook makes Cap Weinberger "secretary of defense," while James Baker is "secretary of the Treasury...
...Real virtuosos use Academic Alliteration for hortatory effect, as in this moving passage from a history of U.S...
...I sat staring bleakly into space, at visions of long-haired radicals with signs reading I.E...
...Admittedly the Dean shouldn't have been preaching libri sex to undergraduates, but there was real outrage in his . . . crassissima inscitia, & correctorum, quos quam potuerunt minimo (quamvis nimium magno) conduxerunt Typographi, immanis negligentia & auaOia etc...
...Well, I accepted the Wilson Center "fellowship," because frankly, I need-ed the stipend...
...The revisionism goes far beyond the mere look of print...
...Browsing freely in section Z253.U, I discovered that yes, there has been a systematic attempt, over the last two or three decades, to make style less stylish, to smooth out differences, irregularities, and nuance—to create, in short, a prose for the proletariat...
...One sighs for the verbal necklaces of the Romantic poets: Full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn Hedge-crickets sing...
...Any moment now we're going to read something about anteater experts getting together for an intraaardvark conference...
...Pickwick, "you're another...
...If Fellows are to become fellows, then we may as well start drinking chablis (it's cheaper than the real thing) and electing guv'nors...
...He is now writing the official biography of Ronald Reagan...
...Neither man gets any recognition for public office, but the department that soaks us is rated superior to that which safeguards us...
...How lower-case can you get...
...Modern manuals are unanimous in saying that He has to be brought down to lower-case level...
...Read them, lovers of Gibbon, and weep...
...So I got a pair of ear plugs and went up to the Library of Congress (no joke—there's disco music in the stacks these days), and collected back editions of every stylebook I could find...
...Scholars must blench at this threat to our most basic constitutional freedom: the right to be incomprehensible...
...All is not lost, however...
...What I read made my flesh creep...
...I thought of the years I spent working to master the arcana of approved documentation for my first book—all wasted...
...colonial policy, by Garel Grunder and William Livezey: Desirous and determined, we declared for dollars and deferred to duty...
...We freelancers can safely make our own rules...
...Not even footnotes are sacrosanct: they've got to be incorporated right in the text—in parentheses, if you please...
...Watch that S shrink if a conservative ever takes up the gavel...
...The hyphen will always be with us as long as we want to give mother-of-pearl ashtrays to our in-laws...
...Thus, two recent works by Charles Q. Bergquist, On Paradigms and the Pursuit of the Practical (1978), and Coffee and Conflict in Colombia (1979...
...Personally, I think the MLA Handbook should be burned along with Huckleberry Finn...
...It's a wonder Marco ever made it to Shang-tu...
...As a result, Federal usage abounds with inconsistencies...
...Don't tell me it's all relative...
...The British pundit W. E. Johnson, in a manual rather irritably entitled If You Must Write, insists: "The aim of written words is to be read, and being read to be understood...
...Thank heaven—damn this software, Heaven—Albert Einstein is no longer with us...
...Now everything's got to be in the vernacular...
...This stylistic concept was refined by the bureaucrats of Bolshevism, who mandated big-letter respect for institutions (Politburo, Supreme Soviet) while denying it to the average comrade (or fellow...
...Needless to say, it all goes back to Karl Marx...
...Consider the uneasy pairing of a's in intraarterial...
...We Americans, in contrast, respectfully capitalized.our great until 1969, when hippies took over the Chicago Manual and decapitated practically every dignitary in the country...
...Tip O'Neill, for example, was always called "the Speaker...
...For myself, I'm going to hyphenate as often as I want, in the privacy of my own home...
...delightfully dauntless, we dared a date with destiny...
...As Bertie Wooster would say, he meant it to sting, by Jove...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 23...
...The Common Man, in contrast, is always capitalized, and even gets fanfares written for him by Aaron Copland...
...And old Yule didn't spare the sine locos, either...
...Those were the days when scholarship showed...
...cit.'s upon one another as totally to bury the original...
...Rules decreeing its use or non-use—nonuse?—have gotten so complicated' that even the GPO Manual admits they "cannot be applied inflexibly...
...is N.B.G...
...The hyphen, you see, is discriminatory...
...No, it's what R. 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 Emmett Tyrrell is going to do to this article, even though I've tried to polish it myself...
...Kapitalization One of Marx's revolutionary discoveries was the formula Kapital=Privileg...
...Remember what we got when JFK offered to p. any p. and b. any b...
...What cheek...
...and in piling so many op...
...No uniqueness of style or station impresses today's typographers...
...It's going to be a 'The king of all footnote fetishists was Sir Henry Yule (1820-1889), who published a translation of Marco Polo, so dense with documentation that the text frequently got squeezed up to a line or two...
...Once Harvard profs start writing English, it's the beginning of the end...
...As my technique developed, I took a Lisztian delight in strewing ffs and pps across my manuscript, in citing names backward (Lee of Fareham, '2nd Viscount Arthur, ed...
...Tupman, "you're a fellow...
...Oxford's spires are still shaking with the wrath of old Dean Owen, who in 1661 caught a revisionist bowdlerizing his Studio Verae Theologicae Libri Sex...
...A few prominent liberals were spared...
...I wanted to see if the propaganda had spread to other stylebooks, in what ways, and when...
...If I were Margaret Thatcher, I'd lock that seditionist in the Tower, before he puts all university presses out of business...
...How is the Almighty fallen...
...All right, maybe it wasn't Alger Hiss who took the hyphen out of absent-minded, which used so exquisitely to suggest the detachment of consciousness from reality...
...God knows how many miles of library shelves I've prowled looking for Vol...
...It was hidden beneath a pile of Gutenbergs, and I was allowed to consult it only after surrendering my passport and shoes...
...and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft .. . Let's not get too depressed...
...What does he think I am, a chicken...
...It's anti-culture, that's what it is...
...Saillike is not a Japanese delicacy, but an adjective to do with canvas...
...While purporting to link apposite units of thought, it in fact acts as a delicate barrier between them, intolerable to liberal percept...
...I became a footnote fetishist, taking sly peeps it fra and supra, and breathing heavily whenever I chanced upon a virgin Ms.' I perfected the placement of reference numbers and sic in purple passages, so that nobody would think it was my own bad style: As he clasped her to his feverish64 bosom, and felt a "happy convullsion" (sic) tear his frame, he sobbed aloud, "My Darling...
...He did not realize that his word processor had been infiltrated by anticapitalist agents working for The Chicago Manual of Style...
...the former always sounded vaguely Freudian, and the latter suggested Yoga...
...They've been brainwashed by the Manual...
...Brown, 1704)—doesn't merit a capital F anymore...
...Every scholar in the District of Columbia, it appears, wants to get his hands on this bible of academese...
...or loc...
...At best the result will be embarrassing...
...Time was when that epithet could bring gentlemen to blows: "Sir," said Mr...
...Those populists have decided to ban the use of Latin citations...
...God Himself, these days, gets no more respect than Rodney Dangerfield...
...By 1959 a strap-hanger was a straphanger, no matter where he stood on the bus...
...Today it barely survives to remind us of a more structured past, when words knew their places and characters didn't have to sit side by side if they didn't want to...
...Sir," said Mr...
...lot easier in future to locate past Playmates of the Year...
...Hyphenation Successive editions of The Government Printing Office Style Manual indicate that forced integration of separate but equal words began about the same time as Brown v. Board of Education...
...I got a letter the other day from someone in our apartment building suggesting we turn it into a coop...
...Well, considering the size of some of the ladies I've seen down at HUD, perhaps that's just as well...
...Barefoot" is the approved style for government workers...
...Even The Harvard Guide to American History has slapped a moratorium on "long, involved sentences that one has to read two or three times in order to grasp the meaning...
...But I salved my conscience by launching a private investigation of this whole business of stylistic revisionism...
...at worst, dangerous...
...While purporting to link apposite units of thought, it in fact acts as a delicate barrier between them, intolerable to liberal percept...
...And he didn't mean finance kapital, he meant das kind of kapital vot typographically elevates one mensch above another...
...Richard Nixon became just "the president" and "commander in chief," Abe Fortas, "associate justice...
...The hyphen, you see, is discriminatory...
...Would-be imitators should realize that such sublime cadences are not easily captured, as Barbra Streisand discovered when she tried to sing Schubert...
...latest edition of this all-powerful rulebook says that "Fellow'L---an ancient title of academic distinction (Nothing is so Impervious . . . as a Fellow of a Colledge upon his own Dunghill—T...
...Sorry, that's what the source says—makes you want to throw up, doesn't it...
...But I knew when to use these abbreviations, along with passim, q.v., ff, and other pedantic symbols...
...At all costs, these days, writers must try to sound like television talkers, and scholars must hide their erudition...
...Perhaps I'm being politically paranoid...
...They've dispensed with those ghastly Latin numerals that used to make serial publications unfindable...
...Reedit: some sort of squeaky waterfowl...
...Documentation The hottest new book in the Library of Congress is not, as one might expect, Video Guide to X-Rated Movies, but the Modern Language Association's Handbook for Writers of Research Papers...
...Neither do hundreds of other honorable titles...
...and PASSIM BYE...
Vol. 20 • February 1987 • No. 2
