User:Wordwright

I am a philosopher by training. I am sixty-two, so I came up at a time when mothers and fathers insisted, as soon as was reasonable, that their children begin speaking like adults, which was for some things (what to say to adults when you're lost or somebody needs help), and for other things about six or seven (how to tell a story straight about things of which your interlocutors have no knowledge); when there was nothing odd in a ten-year-old's choosing, without adult prompting, to spend a whole Saturday afternoon sitting under a tree reading a book like The Deerslayer, which he chose because it looked interesting, and not because it was assigned, or for the same ten-year-old to look up words he didn't know in a good two-volume dictionary, and then to read the brief discussion of the difference between synonyms; when Stan Lee and Marvel in general developed characters like the Beast, Thor, Prince Namor, Galactus, and the Watcher who used uncommon lexical registers artfully (you'd never find a title like "This Man, This Monster" in any of DC's comics); when children who watched the "Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" may have missed much of the satire and full meaning of William Conrad's dazzling lexical antic acrobatics but still absorbed the vocabulary; when children who watched the Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, and Star Trek put their minds into the hands of men (and sometimes women) who knew how to handle the poetic registers of English; when people routinely read poetry by poets like Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few others; when filmmakers could justly presume—not assume, mind you, but presume—that everybody, even youngsters, would be able to follow Shakespeare's language when they watched Olivier's Hamlet or Brando's Julius Caesar; when adults did not adopt teenagers' slang, or use informal English or slang in the public sphere except for a special effect; when nearly everybody had books in their homes about improving your vocabulary and becoming a better public speaker, when you'd find ads for such improving and becoming on the inner top cover of books of matches; when everybody would insist that their children spell words properly, that they not misuse words that sounded similar, and so on; and when people really cherished their Fowler, Groucho Marx, and Dorothy Kilgallen of the killer linguistic instinct—you won't find livelier company or a more acute lexical sensibility than Fowler (he's alive only in the 1926 and 1965 editions, and the 1986 and 87 reprints of the 1965 edition; stay away from the 2004 edition); Groucho is unmatched in combining lexical acuity with zany associations; and if you take the time to watch a couple of years of What's My Line?, you'll see the change in Miss Kilgallen's manner when she's circling in for the kill, and you'll watch in awe.

As a teacher, I have seen so many students suffer because they could perceive all sorts of rational patterns in their experience, but they did not have mastery of the basic principles of grammar and syntax, and lacked either the vocabulary or the Sprachgefühl, to do justice to their thoughts.

I have written all this not to promote myself as an expert, but because I'd like to help any Wikipedians who, God knows why, should have a reason to read this profile, might read it and, forgetting about me, say to themselves that they would enjoy looking at some familiar things in a new way, and begin some adventure in poetry or nineteenth-century novels.

I stress enjoyment because nobody can really enjoy working in an editorial commons like this if one is just as likely to quarrel oneself into impasses and editing wars than in reaching, through satisfying because disciplined dialectical reflections, some creditable concord. I often read heated exchanges on the talk pages in which I can tell that the discussants haven't made the points of perplexity and contention clear to one another. The worst thing is not that they don't know they haven't, but they haven't the least inkling that it takes real work to unperplex perplexities, and that no one can do such work without a shared understanding of the pertinent criteria. Things go wrong because everybody thinks they're right when none of them shares any principles of critical explication with others. They talk at cross-purposes with one another, and no one is happy because they cannot reason with one another. I love the English language, and I love lexical and logical analysis and discussion, and I think we Americans would be a stronger people if we recovered the attitudes that reigned when I was coming up. Wordwright (talk) 20:05, 11 April 2020 (UTC)