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Anything GoesProse for the peopleReview by Rachel Hadas

The SenSe of STyleThe Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century By Steven PinkerViking, 359 pp., $27.95

“You can write with clarity and with flair, too,” writes Steven Pinker in his useful and delight-ful new book, The Sense of Style. Pinker should know. His clarity and flair illuminate every page of what the publisher calls “this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book.” The book isn’t notably short; when the index is added (I’ve been reading uncorrected proofs), it will be longer by a very welcome 21 pages. One silver lining: the

lack of an index has prevented me from quot-ing all the especially helpful or funny passages I kept dog-earing. Also, the presence of the index, when it’s added, should help to bear out that “eminently practical.”

Cheerful The Sense of Style certainly is, and not only because it’s full of funny and apposite quotations from grammar experts ranging from Groucho Marx to Dave Barry to Boris and Nata-sha, as well as well-chosen cartoons. Pinker’s style, or maybe I should say tone, is cheerful in itself: brisk without bullying, sensible with-out pedantry, authoritative without pomposity. You sense what a wonderful teacher he must be: brimming over with information, generous with examples, disarmingly amusing.

Indeed, a recurrent theme of The Sense of Style is that the rigidity and pedantry of many style manuals and of the people who wrote them no longer serve us well, to put it mildly:

Strunk [of William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s Elements of Style] was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who devel-oped his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cogni-tive science, before the wave of informaliza-tion that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

Pinker gives us permission to push back against prescriptive rules, many of which “originated for screwball reasons, impede clear and graceful prose, and have been flouted by the best writers for centuries. … Experts on usage (not to be confused with the purists, who are often ignoramuses) call these phony rules fetishes, folklore, hobgoblins, superstitions, shibboleths, or (my favorite) bubbe meises, Yiddish for ‘grandmothers’ tales.’ ”

Later in the chapter titled “Telling Right from Wrong,” in which he mentions bubbe meises, Pinker presents an extremely useful table whose categories are “Word,” “Only Sense Allowed by Purists,” “Sense Commonly Used,” and “Comment”: “With the back-

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark. The latest of her many books of poetry is  The Golden Road; a prose collection, “Talking to the Dead,” will be published next year.

that Krist recounts. And here and there it can feel like a disjointed but overlapping lecture by a beloved professor fond of storytelling. Yet bit by bit, when viewed from a sufficient height, the mosaic of events, attitudes, and people forms a larger and more informative picture.

What keeps it going are well-crafted vignettes and deftly rendered character profiles, in which reformers aren’t necessarily holy, and their tar-gets are often possessed of considerable charm.

When famed ax-wielding prohibitionist Car-rie Nation came to town in 1907, she marched into one of Tom Anderson’s saloons, where she found him awaiting her in his elegant evening clothes. Undeterred, she smote some whiskey glasses on the bar with her ax and then asked, “Want to make some thing of it?”

Anderson bowed, and replied, “Mrs. Nation, the pleasure is all mine.”

Book Reviews

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ing of data from the AHD Usage Panel, historical analyses from several dictionaries, and a pinch of my own judgment, I will review a few fussbudget decrees you can safely ignore before turning to liv-ing distinctions you’d be wise to respect.”

Pinker isn’t shy about his own credentials; he tells us that he is “chair of the Usage Panel of the famously prescriptive American Heritage Dictionary (AHD).” But he’s also unafraid of the purists. “When I asked the editor of the diction-ary how he and his colleagues decide what goes into it, he replied, ‘We pay attention to the way people use language.’ That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.”

I was interested to learn from the above-mentioned table that “aggravate” has been used to mean “annoy” since the 17th century and that this usage is accepted by 83 percent of the AHDlanguage panel. When he comes to tabulate the “living distinctions” that he recommends we respect, Pinker crows: “And now the moment I’ve been waiting for: I get to be a purist!” I was happy to read that “bemused” does not mean amused, or “appraise” apprise. There’s no space to quote, but Pinker (not Dave Barry or Woody Allen) supplies general rules “for avoiding mala-props.” He’s always able to explain the princi-ples behind grammar and usage, in contrast to many style manuals, which in addition to being joyless, prissy, and censorious, are unhelpful because the rules they promulgate “often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect … [a]nd the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time.”

Two chapters in The Sense of Style, “The Web, the Tree, and the String” and “Telling Right from Wrong,” are so packed with information that each might stand alone as a succinct text on grammar and usage respectively. That Pinker knows more than he can easily unpack into a single book—such that no matter how graceful the sentences and debonair the tone, the book as a whole comes to

feel a bit overloaded—is a feeling I had in his How the Mind Works and Words and Rules, though not in The Language Instinct, which I found riveting from the fi rst page to the last. This isn’t to sug-gest that The Sense of Style is too long or too full of information or hard to follow; it just covers a lot of ground, and sometimes the going is a bit denser than at other times. But it’s wonderful to have a book that contains so much and off ers its contents with such energy.

I especially enjoyed a chapter called “The Curse of Knowledge,” which tackles the contemporary (and not only contemporary) problem of opaque prose in a refreshingly new way (although not wholly new; Pinker rightly credits Helen Sword’s excellent 2012 book Stylish Academic Writing with some of the same insights). Scholars don’t write in murky jargon because they believe opacity is a requirement for tenure; rather, their fundamental diffi culty is “imagining what it is like for someone

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minding ouR mindS

Summer 2014

www.hedgehogReview.comwww.iaSc-culTuRe.oRg

Matthew Crawford how we lost our attention

Mark Edmundson the purpose of

a focused mind

Thomas Pfau toward an art and ethics of attention

Malcolm McCullough regulating the

information environment

Matthew Crawford how we lost our attention

Mark Edmundson the purpose of

a focused mind

Thomas Pfau toward an art and ethics of attention

Malcolm McCullough regulating the

information environment

Summer 2014Summer 2014

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Solar ComplexusWe may be alone after allReview by Owen Gingerich

The CoPerniCuS ComPlexour Cosmic Significance in a universe of Planets and ProbabilitiesBy Caleb ScharfScientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 278 pp., $26

As a fan of Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who “stopped the sun and moved the Earth,” I am always suspicious of any popular book with Copernicus in its title. Mythmaking is rife in the secondary literature. In contemporary science, much is made of the “Copernican principle,” which holds that Coper-nicus took away Earth’s centrality and made it merely one of many planets. Consequently, fol-lowing in the path of Copernicus, we should not think of life on Earth as something unique, or our-selves as very special. But there is no evidence that Copernicus ever thought he was demoting Earth.

The insinuation that this was Copernicus’s prin-cipal achievement is a 20th-century invention.

Hence I picked up Caleb Scharf’s Copernicus Complex with considerable apprehension. Would this be another mythmaker? Would Scharf, director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center, lead us astray?

What I encountered was, in the first instance, a brilliantly written and engaging account of mod-ern astronomy. Open the book almost at random and there will be a fresh phrase.

On page 82: “But lest you think that these planets are all smug giants sitting in their chairs close to the roaring fire, consider that some of them are doomed to die.”

On page 114: “The more young worlds are packed around a new star, the more likely it is that they’ll find themselves heading for chaos as their gravitational pull tugs at their siblings.”

On page 43: “The great Sol, our churning sphere of fearsome nuclear energy, is itself an imperious 865,000 miles across. But between the Sun and the outermost major planet, Neptune, is a staggering gulf of about 2.8 bil-lion miles, on average. … Thus, what to us are entire worlds are barely more than specks to the cosmos—mere crumbs whizzing around a modest stellar candle in a cavern of space.”

Churning, fearsome, imperious, staggering—col-orful, attention-grabbing descriptions that guide the reader through the history of our five-billion-year-old solar system and the intricate origins of life on Earth. There is some history as well, telling us about an idea that took root after Copernicus conjectured that we weren’t at the center of the universe after all, that we occupy an unimpor-tant, mediocre, and unprivileged position in the cosmos. But here, early in the book, Scharf hoists a red flag that is easily overlooked. This way of think-ing, encapsulated in the Copernican principle and firmly embedded in our modern scientific method, he says, “creates some confusing situations.”

A leading corollary to the Copernican principle

Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

else not to know something that you know.” As a cognitive scientist, Pinker has a lot to say about this, all of it engaging, but in general he steers laudably clear of what he calls academic narcis-sism—the assumption by scholars in any given field that everyone else will find the ins and outs of that field, its history and development, its cliques and infighting and consensuses, thrilling.

I haven’t done justice to The Sense of Style. I haven’t even quoted the Dave Barry passage that made me laugh out loud. I’ve quoted enough Pinker, however, to persuade you (or so I hope) to buy this entertaining, instructive, and useful book.