Halpern vs. David Foster Wallace and Simon WInchester

[Grant Barrett]

The latest Vocabula Review has a piercing look at two articles
on language that appeared in the last year or so.

http://www.vocabula.com/VROCT01Halpern.htm

"By coincidence, our two leading upper-middlebrow journals,
Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, have almost
simultaneously run long pieces about language usage and books
that offer to guide us on it. In April 2001, Harper's published
Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage by
David Foster Wallace; in May, The Atlantic ran Word Imperfect by
Simon Winchester. It's reassuring to see that questions of usage
are still live ones, and that editors can be induced to publish
articles on them; it's dismaying to see how poor even educated
thinking on such matters is, and how little editors demand in
the way of quality in what they print on the subject.

"They are both, in very different ways, bad papers."

--

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at worldnewyork.org
Editor, World New York
http://www.worldnewyork.org/
New York Loves You Back