@David Pennock, I was relieved to see that “Bugs in Writing” vindicates my take on quotation marks. But I had mixed feelings about it as I noticed that it also includes laughable proscriptions of terminal prepositions and split infinitives (with especially laughable rationalizations thereof).

@Shirley, excellent use of scare quotes around “always”. In fact, US and British conventions differ on this point. I prefer the British style as it’s a little more logical and less ambiguous (and even the US style allows for exceptions in the case of real ambiguity, like “Did he say ‘I rule’?”). Or maybe it’s because I’m a computer scientist. In a computer program, sticking punctuation inside a quoted string is out of the question. Like splitting infinitives in Latin! (Look what I’m turning into. (Look at that into which I’m turning?)) But seriously, this is too much nitpickery even for me. Pick a convention that makes sense to you and stick with it.

Speaking of terminal prepositions, there was once a little boy who called down to his mother to bring up a book for a bedtime story. She arrived with a book about Australia, something of little interest to the child. So he asked, scornfully,
“What did you bring me that book I didn’t want to be read
to out of about Down Under up for?”

More here: http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/up-from-out-of-in-under-for/

At first “I” thought you defined a “tautology” freeing me to scarequote “anything”, “but”…

…now I see: to mean something nonliterally does not mean to not mean something literally.

Wonderful essay.

See also Chapter 41 of “Bugs in Writing”

While I’m deeply skeptical of prescriptivism, I find it impossible to abandon completely. That we need some rules in order to communicate with each other is trivially true, otherwise orchid tesseractsly buffalo buffalo. A pure discriptivist position just doesn’t work.

The mistake strong prescriptivists make, though, is that they want their rules of usage to apply always and everywhere. This is understandable: if grammar laws were universal and immutable, there would be one clear right answer in every situation. The laws of grammar would be clear and beautiful. As Newton arguing for a law of universal gravitation, so the strong prescriptivist arguing for a law of universal grammar.

The problem, of course, is that language doesn’t work this way. For example, the injunction against split infinitives makes sense in French (or any romance language, or in Latin) where infinitives are one word. In English, where an infinitive is two words, things get more complicated and “if it’s good enough for Latin it’s good enough for English” is not a compelling rationale for prohibition. Then there more egregious examples like the rules about restrictive versus nonrestrictive pronouns, which as far as I can tell come from grammarians speaking ex cathedra.

So what’s a well-intentioned writer to do? I use the following heuristic: when I’m writing with the goal of communicating something and I’m presented with multiple ways to do it, I pick the way that minimizes ambiguity.

For completeness, it’s important to mention that not every piece of writing is about communicating one particular meaning clearly. When writing poetry, for example, ambiguity is just another artistic technique. A really good example of this the word “Meister” in Felstiner translation of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: its multiple connotations (slave owner, orchestra director, teacher, expert artisan, etc.) reinforce each other. This makes the poem more affective for me.

Most pieces of writing, though, are about communicating one particular meaning clearly. In this case, eliminating ambiguity is essential if you want you want to communicate with your readers without loss or distortion.

In that case, this heuristic becomes a really good way to decide between approaches. Serial commas? Use them, because “I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God” can accidentally leave some readers thinking you have a very interesting family tree while “I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand, and God” doesn’t run that risk.

The downside, though, is that not everything will be equivalently clear to every audience. I’m pretty sure I could use the abbreviations “i.e.” and “e.g.” here without confusion. With a general audience, though, there’s no way for me to be sure, so I’ll tend to say “that is” and “for example” instead.

Prescriptivists would prefer one rule in all situations. This doesn’t work, because not all audiences are the same. So grammar — like punctuation, level of diction, and orthography — needs to be audience-specific for a particular piece of writing to be maximally effective.

I think there is (at least) one more acceptable case: when the style guide for the publication you’re in mandates it. I might think The New Yorker’s spelling choices and diaereses are unbearably twee, but if they’re publishing me I’m likely to overlook their odd focusses and coöperate.

Why? Same reason you should adapt your coding style to what’s around you when you’re making a change to an existing file: consistency is sometimes more important than “correctness”.

@Sat, that essay by David Foster Wallace is delightful!

@Jeff, thanks! I really like your characterization of scare quotes as “translucent usage”.

Scare quotes are a case of translucent usage because they do both at once. With scare quotes I am using the word as some people use it, but also calling attention to it as a possibly defective word. In other words, I am reminding the reader that it is a word. A fact which, however obvious, is at once devilishly and fortunately easy to forget.

So if I don’t believe in referents, and have grave doubts about the advisability of thinking about language in this way, and I use scare quotes (as in the first paragraph above) to indicate my distrust of the concept of referent and hence of the word ‘referent’, you may think I am improperly using quotes to introduce terminology but actually I am saying that I am a post-foundationalist and I think the very notion of referents is bogus.

What I am getting at is that I think an argument can be made for using single quotes as markers of tainted language, in the way some programming languages tag text derived from user input as _tainted_. (No italics in comments!) In written language, we can use punctuation as a tagging mechanism, just as we use punctuation to indicate quoting.

This is not ‘acceptable usage’ (I am at once quoting you and indicating my reservations about the conceptual framework in which the term is mobilized) but it is arguably something just as good: innovation. And since it appears to be possible to tell the uses apart by inspection, this overloading of the quote operator is unambiguous. (I am tempted to put that last word ‘unambiguous’ in scare quotes because there is no unambiguous use of language.)

Language does change and so does punctuation. The danger in writing a normative essay is that one is on the side of the dinosaurs. Which may be better than being on the side of the Vandals.

I enjoyed the essay.