Marcial Arts and Letters

The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds us that April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Geoffrey K. Pullum will not be uncorking the champagne. He describes the style advice as “mostly harmless,” reserving his opprobrium for the grammar proscriptions and maxims. These, he concludes, range from “limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.” He laments that many have now entered our psyches without reservation or interpretation and have been (alas) taken up–like the injunction against use of the passive voice–even by Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. He notes further that the authors broke their own “rules,” as have writers of the caliber of Henry James and Oscar Wilde. He ends by saying, “English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”