Rules Against the Spirit of the Age

Quillette has an article today about a quest begun in 1977 by an underground academic journal to fight against misuses of the language.
The Underground Grammarian is an unauthorised journal devoted to the protection of the Mother Tongue at Glassboro State College. Our language can be written and even spoken correctly, even beautifully. We do not demand beauty, but bad English cannot be excused or tolerated in a college. The Underground Grammarian will expose and even ridicule examples of jargon, faulty syntax, redundancy, needless neologism, and any other kind of outrage against English.

Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education. We are neither peddlers nor politicians that we should prosper by that use of language which carries the least meaning. We cannot honorably accept the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as we darken counsel by words without understanding.
The effect of these corrections was, the article claims, to teach attentive readers to distinguish 'between reason and rubbish.'

It reminds me of the long-defunct Texas Mercury, from which I adopted Grim's Hall's house rules for debate.
As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.
I later added a persistent identity requirement, i.e., not that you had to use your real name, but that you had to pick a name and stick to it. Arguments against anonymity are mostly addressed by persisting identities, which end up carrying honor and being subject to shame in a sufficient way to cut down on the bad behavior associated with true anonymity. In return, the ability to use a persisting pseudonym enables the freedom of debate that our "cancel culture" seems designed to destroy -- and that culture was already sufficiently in sight in 2003, when I started this blog, that I chose to do it pseudononymously.

These old ideas have been underground for a long time. Be clear in your thinking, precise in your language; be polite to people, but ruthless to ideas. It's no wonder such things are suppressed. All of those concepts are deadly dangerous to powers that be who oughtn't to be so powerful as they are.

8 comments:

Tom said...

Looks like a secret treasure trove ...

The Underground Grammarian website

Tom said...

Indeed, the 15 annual newsletters are available there, as well as big chunks (or all?) of Mitchell's books, "The Great Booklets," and some articles on education (and miseducation) by Mortimer J. Adler and Walter Karp ... and probably more.

Grim said...

It's suitably brutal. Here's a quote from 1986:

"For the purpose of systematizing public administration theory and producing a science of public administration traditional psychology does not easily resolve the democratic metaphor. However, the democratic metaphor comes into clear focus by the use of solipsistic instrumentalism, which is a deterministic, modern thought modality in the form of a transpersonal pragmatism that finds truth to be a function of evolutionary purpose. Solipsistic instrumentalism synergizes with a pragmatic modification of Freudian psychology, which also deterministically references to the autonomous psychoevolutionary machine whose substance is the biosphere.

"Bruce K. Pollard, Ph. D."

ymarsakar said...

Don't worry. Even if I used a different name, it would become pretty obvious soon enough who I was.

Although people still don't understand the what, or they think they do but it is slightly misguided or off.

People react negatively to their cherished pet theories and ideas being thrashed and trashed. That's a human nature deficiency. Not something the rules can adjust for.

ymarsakar said...

It's not that Americans don't understand this concept of a cognomen. They allow writers to use it for something as unremarkable as marketing purposes. A K is better than a S, Z, or A name, since it puts you neither first nor last on retail book shelves.

Why do writers have 3, 6, 9 pen names depending on the number of publishers? Marketing issues.

Why do people need different identification? Facebook, IRS, you know, the usual reasons.

Every time people pick out the correct or even incorrect matches for captcha, they are helping the world wide quantum AI figure out how to visually match objects with data base names. All the better to create High Value Target lists for termination or surveillance.

Texan99 said...

'I began to notice the worm in the brain during my everyday interactions with friends and colleagues at the university, especially the English professors. It often took the form of a label which created an image in the brain that prevented thought. One such professor, smart and engaging, returned a paper analyzing a passage in the U.S. Constitution. She gave the paper an A, but added, “I can’t help but feel that your argument is wrong, although I can’t explain why. I showed it to my husband, and he thought that it was a conservative argument.”'

Texan99 said...

The Underground Grammarian is a delight.

"GLASSBORO STATE COLLEGE has vice-presidents the way the Romans had Huns and Visigoths. Where do they all come from? How many are there? How much will we have to pay them to leave us alone? Will they ever develop a written form of language?"

douglas said...

Indeed, a goldmine. Thanks, Grim.