from louis menand's pen

[Beverly Flanigan]

Arnold, please send your findings to Menand!  I suspect he and others,
despite their p.c. prating about this "rule," have never really thought it
through.  In fact, his way too long article on the Chicago Manual of Style
was just the typical New Yorkerish pedantry--the Manual is 900+ pages and
still not complete enough to satisfy writers' needs?!  Give me a break!

At 03:40 PM 10/7/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>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.