This is your father's Strunk & White
By Jan Freeman
First the good news: After 20 years, a revised edition of ``The Elements of Style,' William Strunk and E. B. White's classic guide to writing, has just been published.
Now the bad news: Someone forgot to revise it.
The fourth edition has been a pretty big deal, as usage books go. The buzz was sufficient to prompt a New York Times essay, even before publication, and a sniffy Wall Street Journal editorial deprecating (of course) the book's baby steps toward ``gender correctness.' But for better or worse, not much in the new model is new.
And this book was past due for an overhaul; the third edition was the same age last year as the college freshmen using it. The section on ``Words and Expressions Commonly Misused' was especially creaky, with its advice to get up a letterhead rather than personalize your stationery, its futile resistance to the verb contact, its hand-wringing over misspellings of memento.
But the ``commonly misused' list has changed very little in the '99 edition, and some of its sillier edicts remain intact. Offputting and ongoing are still derided as ``inexact and clumsy,' not to mention ``newfound' - but if they were ``newfound' in 1979, they can hardly be ``newfound' all over again in 1999.
We're told to avoid ``six people' - a construction used by Chaucer - on the grounds that you can't call an individual ``one people'; why not outlaw ``six geese' because there's no such thing as ``one geese'?
And we learn that clever ``means one thing when applied to people, another when applied to horses' - nice to know in 1918, when Strunk's first handbook appeared, but a mere historical footnote in the era of smart cars.
Other sections of the 1979 edition - on grammar, composition and form - remain sound and useful in 1999. Strunk's main flaw, as many writers have noted, was his obsession with conciseness, a hobbyhorse he whipped into a lather.
(White recalls, with affectionate irony, that Strunk's college lectures were so stripped-down he had to fill out the hour with repetition: ``Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!')
White's own chapter, ``An Approach to Style' - always the best writing in the book - also holds up well. But the editors do White no favor by trying to recycle his predictions about slang.
In the last edition, he said uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibes, cop-out and funky were about to become ``the words of yesteryear.' The new book changes the list of the doomed to psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek and funky.
But hey, dudes - didn't anyone notice how many of those 1979 guesses had missed the mark? If ripoff and funky were dying in 1979, how come they're not dead yet?
If White were still around (he would have turned 100 last month), I like to think he would have revised more energetically - ditching, perhaps, his cutesy, disingenuous judgment on finalize: ``One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know, either, and doesn't want to know.' (I'm no fan of finalize, but obscurity is not its problem.)
He might have explained the difference between sex and gender to the Journal editors, and taken aim at newer clich‚s (say, ``First, the bad news') rather than ``She headquarters in Newark' and ``It obsoletes all other ranges' - usages never very robust and now all but extinct.
Roger Angell, White's stepson, contributed the preface to the new edition, but he sounds barely lukewarm toward the enterprise.
I couldn't help wondering whether he was flouting one of the usagists' favorite strictures on purpose, just to be mischievous, when he wrote about White: ``I sometimes saw him reading his `Comment' piece over to himself, with only a slightly different expression than the one he'd worn on the day it went off.'
Different than, of course, is firmly vetoed on Page 44 of Strunk & White. (And isn't that ``to himself' redundant?)
Can an ``Elements' packed with anachronisms remain vital, or will it become a treasured fossil, stashed on the bookshelf next to early editions of Fowler?
While the editors fiddled, other writers have been burning up the track, hoping to overtake Strunk & White in the 21st-century sweepstakes.
In the meantime, Gentle Readers, information, please: Who's buying all the usage books, aside from college students?
If you have a favorite, let me know what it is and why you chose it - and whether you're rooting for it to beat the current champs.
Boston Globe columnist Jan Freeman can be reached at The Globe, Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378 or via e-mail (at freeman@globe.com). Please include a hometown. |
