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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

66

Authority and American Usage

or, "Politics and the English Language" is Redundant

3
terms
1
notes

in praise of Bryan A. Gardner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage and his masterful blend of the prescriptivist and descriptivist. so good

Foster Wallace, D. (2007). Authority and American Usage. In Foster Wallace, D. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Abacus, pp. 66-127

a grammatical mistake in speech or writing

71

contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane

—p.71 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago

contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane

—p.71 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago

an excessive amount of something

88

a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks

silicon jest analogue - email quotations

—p.88 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago

a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks

silicon jest analogue - email quotations

—p.88 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago
117

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction, I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to . . . ?”

not sure why i thought this was worth saving tbh

—p.117 by David Foster Wallace 6 years, 8 months ago

If for any reason you happen to find yourself sharing this particular student’s perceptions and reaction, I would ask that you bracket your feelings just long enough to recognize that the PWM instructor’s very modern rhetorical dilemma in that office was not much different from the dilemma faced by any male who makes a Pro-Life argument, or any atheist who argues against creation science, or any caucasian who opposes Affirmative Action, or any African-American who decries racial profiling, or anyone over eighteen who tries to make a case for raising the legal driving age to eighteen, etc. The dilemma has nothing to do with whether the arguments themselves are plausible or right or even sane, because the debate rarely gets that far — any opponent with sufficiently strong feelings or a dogmatic bent can discredit the argument and pretty much foreclose all further discussion with a rejoinder we Americans have come to know well: “Of course you’d say that”; “Easy for you to say”; “What right do you have to . . . ?”

not sure why i thought this was worth saving tbh

—p.117 by David Foster Wallace 6 years, 8 months ago

(noun) a usually short sermon / (noun) a lecture or discourse on or of a moral theme / (noun) an inspirational catchphrase or platitude. homiletic: the art of preaching or writing sermons

121

Homiletically speaking, the only difference between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists is that the latter’s got a bigger choir.

—p.121 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago

Homiletically speaking, the only difference between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists is that the latter’s got a bigger choir.

—p.121 by David Foster Wallace
notable
6 years, 8 months ago