On Language – Bierce’s Bugbears

And after all, why would we? We still read Conrad, Austen and Swift, a century or three later, without much difficulty; it’s reasonable to assume that the usage nits of their times were more or less the ones we’re still picking today.

Reasonable but not true, as Ambrose Bierce recently taught me. Bierce, the American journalist, satirist and Civil War memoirist, is as readable today as he was when he published “The Devil’s Dictionary” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” But his advice on English usage — published in 1909 as “Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults” — is often mysterious, perverse and bizarre.

Why was run a business “vulgar — hardly better than slang,” and dirt (for earth) “disagreeable,” and expectorate “offensive,” and electrocution “disgusting”? For a 100th-anniversary edition of the book, I set out to track down (as far as possible) the reasons behind the rules that seemed so important in 1909. Many of those rules are still in circulation, but a surprising number will probably be unfamiliar even to veteran sticklers.

Amusing stuff. Language is, and will always be, a fluid concept.

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