from louis menand's pen

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Tue Oct 7 22:40:30 UTC 2003


as for louis menand and the PAP, i have done the obvious thing and
pulled out my copy of his book The Metaphysical Club and started
looking for violations of the PAP.  menand seems to be much given to
this useful construction, despite labeling it a "solecism" in his New
Yorker review.  here are the first six examples i found; they take us
through page 38 of this book of 445 pages of text (many of which have
extended quotations from the people he's writing about; i didn't look
at these).

all these examples have subject or object pronouns (set off by
understrokes).  examples with possessive pronouns are *everywhere*, but
many handbooks exempt them from the PAP, so i ignored them.

1,  an example of a type i hadn't considered before, with a reflexive
pronoun rather than a plain definite pronoun.  but i can't see why the
PAP shouldn't cover these in the same way as the others.

   p. 7: ...in a phrase that became the city's name for _itself_...

2.  p. 7: Dr. Holmes's views on political issues therefore tended to be
reflexive: _he_ took his cues from his own instincts...

3.  p. 25: Emerson's reaction, when Holmes showed _him_ the essay, is
choice...

4.  p. 28: Brown's apotheosis marked the final stage in the
radicalization of Northern opinion.  _He_  became, for many
Americans,...

5.  p. 31: Wendell Holmes's riot control skills were not tested.  Still
_he_ had, at the highest point of prewar contention...

6.  p. 38: Holmes's account of his first wound was written, probably
two years after the battle in which it occurred, in a diary _he_ kept
during the war.

there's really no point in pursuing this further.  there are probably
close to a hundred examples in the book.



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