Friday, April 20, 2007

The Economist speaks

Everyone up for a little Friday-afternoon scolding? Good. I thought so.

The Economist has published a little style and usage guide online, surely not the magazine's entire style guide but a taste of English discrimination, so to speak.

I happen to be a great grammar and usage afficionado. I'm a great fan of Bryan Garner's near-definitive and highly prescriptive reference work "Garner's Modern American Usage," which dismisses the language's "needless variants" and gives examples of errors by major publications in just about every entry. How to win friends.

I also hooted with jollity at Louis Menand's cruel review of Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" (not online), in which he nailed her on numerous grammatical mistakes: ""Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?"

The Economist says, among other things, that "Alternate, as an adjective, means every other," which puts the kibosh on feeling as if one is in "an alternate reality." Alternative's what you mean, says the English authority.

Some of the guidelines (or shall we say rules?) are pretty fuddy-duddy, but I'm very pleased with this one, as en ex-philosophy major:

Beg the question means neither raise the question, invite the question nor evade the answer. To beg the question is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce.

Q.E.D.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:03 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss