Crack for SNOOTs*

While teaching at Pomona College, David Foster Wallace presented his students with a grammar test entitled 'IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER'S PAID YOUR TUITION.'

The answers are linked. When you're finished with that, read Wallace's 2001 Harper's review of the Dictionary of Modern American English. It's a long article, but fascinating. In it, he introduces the Prescriptivists, who advocate strict adherence to correct English and bemoan the destruction of the language through misuse, and the Descriptivists, who say that language changes and that language as spoken is correct. He neatly refutes the Descriptivists and makes the case for Standard Written English (it prevents unintentional ambiguity, for one thing). But that's not the end of the story.

As it happens I'm reading Infinite Jest at the moment (given the amount of reading required for work, the MSc, and my Atlantic subscription, the moment could last a while) and thoroughly enjoying Wallace's use of language in it, so this was a special treat. Plus, I learned that I've been spelling 'meringue' incorrectly my whole life.

And although I thought I was pretty good, I only got 7 out of 10 on the test.


*SNOOT "(n) (highly colloq) is [Wallace's] nuclear family's nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire's column's prose itself. This reviewer's family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance" or "Syntax Nudniks of Our Time" depended on whether or not you were one."