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In the beginning was the word, but by the time the second word was added to it, there was trouble. For with it came syntax, the thing that tripped up so many people. And they're tripping up more than ever today. ("Authors Without Fear or Shame")
Of all the books on the uses, abuses, and gradual, some might say inevitable, decline of the English language, this is one of my favorites. Paradigms Lost’s more than four decades vintage doesn’t lessen its impact and relevance: if anything it’s more on the money today than when it originally appeared (especially in present era when all of us – well, many of us, it seems – are more interested in looking at screens all day than interacting with fellow human beings in a civilized and intelligent manner).
In any case Paradigms Lost, a collection of previously published essays, touches on some of the major and minor abuses of the English tongue. The essays are arranged into broad subject area rather than chronologically, and as a result there’s some overlap of content. Covered are such topics as writers, linguists, movies, theater, philosophy, television, and more. Simon’s comments are brittle, incisive and always to-the-point. Few subjects are sacred and as a result few individuals are spared his rapier, often cruel, wit and (usually) wisdom. Indeed, a goodly amount of linguistic and other luminaries take their, in most cases deserved, lumps.
Let it be said straight away that Simon practices what he preaches: his command of English is undeniable, especially his sensitivity to pacing, flow and clarity. Thus Simon’s gentle – and sometimes not so gentle – admonitions are conveyed through elegant prose and invariable mots justes that are all the more remarkable when we consider that English isn’t his first language (or even his second, third or fourth). And whether one sides with or opposes Simon philosophically, it’s impossible not to enjoy his dismayingly erudite yet invariably entertaining combination of stylistic felicities and spot-on insights.
Admittedly not everything in Paradigms Lost has aged well. An unapologetic prescriptivist [1], Simon was out of touch with more liberal trends in language usage even a half century ago, and his take-no-prisoners traditionalism seems even more uncompromising today. And here and there in Paradigms’s otherwise enlightened ruminations, one might sniff a hint of misogyny. Likewise his snippety attitude toward ‘homosexuals’ and 'lunatic-fringe feminists.' And he takes a little too much glee in flaming other writers, especially critics. Nonetheless the delicious excoriating of fellow film critic Rex Reed is worth the price of the book itself.
As good as it is, Simon’s was hardly the first book to critically address the state of the language. There’s the venerable and perpetually in-print Elements of Style, which goes all the way back to 1918. But it’s the 1959 revision, in which E.B. White joined William Strunk, that we think of when we affectionately reference ‘Strunk and White.’ Even the great Orwell weighed in with his 1945 essay 'Politics and the English Language,' which covers much the same territory that Simon does in Paradigms. Also worth a mention are the howls of protest that accompanied the appearance in 1961 of the permissive Webster’s Third New Dictionary of the English Language. Various scholars, academics and other language purists objected vehemently to the dictionary’s more modern take on words: the collapse of civilization itself, or worse, was nigh, the inevitable consequence of such a cavalier approach to the sacred tradition of the English language.
Civilization survived, but something was in the air, and a grammar for the masses movement hit its stride a decade or so later, when a few volumes beat Simon to the punch, albeit by only a few years. These leaned toward a pop approach in contrast to Simon’s more intellectualized slant. One of the first out of the gate was Edwin Newman’s Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English, which appeared in 1974. Published at the height of Watergate, Newman’s book drew heavily on the obfuscations and pomposity of various politicos. While Newman’s book is a popular treatment one of its merits is that he shares some of Mr. Simon’s intolerance and tendency to pedantry.
Newman’s book was a surprise hit. Indeed, Strictly Speaking reached #1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, a feat incidentally that none of Simon’s books ever achieved. Predictably, per publishing’s cardinal rule that nothing-succeeds-like-the-same, his A Civil Tongue followed soon after. In 1975 the eminent scholar and historian Jacques Barzun weighed in with Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers [2], which covered much the same material as Strunk and White, but with a more academic slant. Soon after other publishers got the message and got into the act. Journalist, political commentator and language maven William Safire entered the mix a few years later with I Stand Corrected. Safire then proceeded to one-up Newman as he issued an entire series of language books while penning his own column for the New York Times, ‘On Language.’
In subsequent decades the publishing industry intuited that spiced-up titles might sell even more copies, thus in the Nineties and early 2000s we had books like Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed; Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose; and Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style. A recent book that covers much the same territory and has garnered critical accolades is: Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.
Still, Paradigms Lost remains one of the best cautionary tales on the decline and fall of good usage, and to his eternal credit Simon doesn’t try to dumb down the material. Indeed, the lazy-minded ‘democratization’ of language, among other things, was one of Simon’s particular bête noires. And as much as I’m a fan of Simon’s writings and Paradigms in particular I find it more easily digested in small portions – a chapter at a time perhaps (most of the chapters are of modest length) – than in one large gulp.
An inevitable question that arises is: what would Mr. Simon think, nearly a half century after Paradigms first appeared, of the general mangling and disrepair of the language today? We can only guess [3]. An obvious villain is the cyber world. Considering his anti-egalitarian bent, the unpoliced, free-for-all nature of the Internet wouldn’t be much to his liking. Quite apart from questions of taste, usage and style, he would probably be horrified at the amateurishness, small-mindedness, venality, unsupported opinions, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda that lards the information superhighway these days. (Indeed, in their utter viciousness and mean-spiritedness, online rants that appear with dismaying and increasing frequency make Simon’s critiques, however cutting, seem like models of civility and restraint). And what could he possibly make of those text shortcuts and Internet acronyms, the WTFs, OMGs and LOLs of this world (Indeed it would seem that cathedrals of knowledge are preferable to an ocean of information).
Simon’s passing is a great loss to those of us who prefer at least some level of manners, sophistication and good taste in our world. We miss his high standards, brittle wit and unyielding, magisterially elegant prose, and need more of his ilk in our increasingly aliterate, technology-obsessed, relentlessly commodified world. Happily we have the legacy of his books, articles and blog posts, all of which, for the moment, survive for posterity, and for that we are truly grateful.
[1] Prescriptivism is the philosophy that there are rules and standards, i.e. correct and wrong ways, in the practice of language. A prescriptivist wants the correct rules and usage to be followed. A descriptivist, as the word implies, simply describes the language used, including slang, colloquialisms and ‘mistakes,’ without any judgments about proper rules and usage. Thus a prescriptivist is concerned with the way language ought to be used, where a descriptivist simply describes how a language is used.
[2] Simple & Direct went through several revisions. The Fourth, and final, edition came out in 2001.
[3] It would be remiss not to mention that Mr. Simon passed on in October 2019 and was still writing up to the end. Moreover, as if to show he wasn’t totally a snob and averse to modern trends, he maintained a blog, appropriately titled Uncensored John Simon the last ten years of his life. He opines on a multitude of topics, chief among them cinema, authors, theater, and language, but also religion, philosophy, art, psychology, and not least of all, music.* (from all evidence, in addition to his other areas of expertise, Mr. Simon was a classical music buff as well).
* He wrote eloquently and poetically about great music and his favorite composers. Nonetheless, his tastes might be considered idiosyncratic, even eccentric. And by his own admission, Simon’s technical knowledge of music was limited. In any case it’s refreshing to know that there’s at least one art form that John Simon didn’t know backwards and forwards.
Review: James Chesher, “Simonize Your Language!” Reason, April 1981.
Further reading: Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011; David Skinner, The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, New York, Harper, 2012.
