Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

This tip (yesterday’s) is curiously timed. My son Ben and I were shopping on Saturday for a Middle Eastern feast — falafel, Persian salad, and tabbouleh. I asked Ben to get a couple of cucumbers, and he asked how many. I said two, a couple. Ben pointed out that couple might mean “a few,” “several,” not necessarily two. I offered what I thought was a case-closing example: “When you say ‘They’re a nice-looking couple,’ how many people do you mean?”

But here comes Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, one of two thus far for couple:

As a noun, ‘couple’ has traditionally denoted a pair. (As a verb, it always denotes the joining of two things.) But in some uses, the precise number is vague. Essentially, it’s equivalent to “a few” or “several.” In informal contexts this usage is quite common and unexceptionable — e.g.:

“Those most anxious should practice at least once in front of a couple of people to be comfortable with an audience.” Molly Williamson, “Unlocking the Power of Public Speaking,” Milwaukee J. Sentinel, 15 Sept. 2002, at L12.

“This slick, cozy shop, which underwent a makeover a couple of years back, is a hybrid of takeout and restaurant.” A.C. Stevens, “Why Cook Tonight?” Boston Herald, 15 Sept. 2002, Food §, at 65.

So Ben has Bryan Garner in his corner. It’s several against one!

And then there’s a couple three, which I call an “Illinoism.”

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site (though I prefer to type out numbers up to ninety-nine).

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Need worked (An Illinoism)

Bryan Garner on snoot

“The corresponding abstract noun is ‘snootitude’”: Bryan Garner glosses David Foster Wallace’s snoot .

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Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Thank you, Bryan Garner

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on “thank you” and responses to it:

“Thank you” remains the best, most serviceable phrase, despite various attempts to embellish it or truncate it: “thanking you in advance” (presumptuous and possibly insulting), “thank you very much” (with a trailer of surplusage), “thanks” (useful on informal occasions), “many thanks” (informal but emphatic), *“much thanks” (archaic and increasingly unidiomatic), *“thanks much” (confusing the noun with the verb), and *“thanx” (unacceptably cutesy).

I prefer “thank you.” My favorite embellishment, for use on the telephone when appropriate: “Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.” More:

The traditional response to “Thank you” is “You’re welcome.” Somehow, though, in the 1980s, “You’re welcome” came to feel a little stiff and formal, perhaps even condescending (as if the speaker were saying, “Yes, I really did do you a favor, didn’t I?”). As a result, two other responses started displacing “You’re welcome”: (1) “No problem” (as if the speaker were saying, “Don’t worry, you didn’t inconvenience me too much”); and (2) “No, thank you” (as if the person doing the favor really considered the other person to have done the favor). The currency of “You’re welcome” seems to diminish little by little, but steadily. Old-fashioned speakers continue to use it, but its future doesn’t look bright.

Suddenly I am an old-fashioned speaker.

What do you say when someone says “thank you”?

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. The Garner asterisk marks an “invariably inferior form.”]

Bryan Garner leaves the party

I’ve always called myself Republican. I keep my Twitter feed generally apolitical & will continue to do so. Generally. But as of today, I’m switching parties. Over impeachment. The Republican positions aren’t consonant with intellectual honesty. As of today, I’m an Independent.

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) December 14, 2019

Bryan A. Garner: as in Garner’s Modern American Usage and Garner’s Modern English Usage. Grammar-wise and usage-wise, Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. His name appears often in these pages. Links to OCA posts appear in three Garner tweets.

Two ways to gauge the significance of Garner’s announcement: 1. Garner collaborated on two books with Antonin Scalia, and the two men developed a deep friendship. 2. A Garner-edited volume on judicial precedent has Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as two of its twelve contributors.

Thusly

Something I learned from an interview with Bryan Garner about Garner’s Modern English Usage : thusly is a word one might want to avoid. Garner calls it a nonword, and places it in the company of irregardless , muchly , and two dozen other dubious characters. He gives this explanation in GMEU :

Thus itself being an adverb, it needs no -ly . Although the nonword *thusly has appeared in otherwise respectable writing since it emerged in the late 19th century, it remains a lapse.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives a fuller explanation:

The adverb thusly was created in the 1800s as an alternative for thus in sentences such as Hold it thus or He put it thus . It appears to have been first used by humorists, who may have been imitating the speech of poorly educated people straining to sound stylish. The word has subsequently gained some currency in educated usage, but it has long been deplored by usage commentators as a “nonword.” A large majority of the Usage Panel found it unacceptable in 1966, and this sentiment was echoed nearly forty years later in our 2002 survey, in which 86 percent of the Panel disapproved of the sentence His letter to the editor ended thusly: “It is time to stop fooling ourselves.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has a first citation that indeed suggests mockery: “It happened, as J. Billings would say, ‘thusly.’” (Harper’s, December 1865).

You’ll search in vain for thusly in Orange Crate Art: I have already searched and have zapped its three appearances.

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*

12:06 p.m.: But wait; there’s more. And it’s more complicated: More thusly.

[Garner’s Modern English Usage is the renamed fourth edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage . The new book makes use of Google ngrams to show the frequency of words and phrases. For thus and *thusly, the frequency is 1,016:1. The Garner asterisk marks an “invariably inferior form.” Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]

From an interview with Bryan Garner

From Oxford University Press: Sarah Butcher interviews Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around.” She asks how it happened that the teenaged Garner fell in love with books of English usage:

You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.

Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.

It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.

I will mention again something I’ve mentioned only twice in these pages: I was a member of the panel of critical readers for the recently published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage.

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-wise, usagewise

Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day today addresses the suffix -wise. That suffix was an occasion of cultural angst in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The suffix even showed up in comic form in Leave It To Beaver. In real life, I heard it used not long ago in a startling way.

Garner recommends avoiding -wise generally, though he points to taxwise as a recent, plausible word of choice. And he adds that “some writers use the suffix playfully” — as did Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (The Apartment), as did the writers of Leave It to Beaver. And as did I, when I asked a friend, now our houseguest, what we should have on hand foodwise and drinkwise.

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[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. You can subscribe to Usage Tip of the Day at Bryan Garner’s LawProse. Scroll down and look to the right.]

Bryan Garner on “The fallacy of intelligibility”

Bryan Garner, from “The fallacy of intelligibility,” a short piece about the idea that it doesn’t matter how you write it as long as they understand what you mean:

Nonstandard, ungrammatical language irks educated readers. It distracts them and makes them less likely, even unwilling, to align themselves with you. Wrong words are like wrong notes in music: they spoil the tune. And wrong words make readers stop thinking about your message and start pondering your educational deficits.

If anyone tells you otherwise (that is, if someone says it don’t make no never-mind), don’t believe it.

Who would tell you otherwise? Well, there is the familiar construction, beloved of some teachers of writing, “This is not a grammar class.” But teaching writing without attention to grammar is like teaching painting without attention to color and form, or teaching music without attention to playing or singing in tune. Things come out wrong.

What Bryan Garner says about writing is plainly true. Teachers who encourage their students to think otherwise are cheating them.

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Garner’s modern American music

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on rock ’n’ roll , rock-’n’-roll , rock’n’roll , rock and roll , rock-and-roll , and rock & roll :

Each of these is listed in at least one major American dictionary.

“Rock ’n’ roll” is probably the most common; appropriately, it has a relaxed and colloquial look.

“Rock and roll” and “rock-and-roll” are somewhat more formal than the others and therefore not very fitting with the music itself. The others are variant spellings — except that “rock-’n’-roll,” with the hyphens, is certainly preferable when the term is used as a phrasal adjective [the rock-’n’-roll culture of the 1960s].

Fortunately, the editorial puzzle presented by these variations has largely been solved: almost everyone today refers to “rock music” or simply “rock.” Increasingly, “rock ’n’ roll” carries overtones of early rock — the 1950s-style music such as “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and the Comets.

Garner must have had fun writing this entry.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

“Is Your Grammar Holding You Back?”

A quiz by Bryan Garner: “Is Your Grammar Holding You Back?” (Harvard Business Review ).

One of the quiz’s ten sentences (I’ll leave it for the reader to figure out which one) is troublesome: the quiz says the sentence is grammatically incorrect, but Garner’s Modern American Usage marks the idiom in question as Stage 5, “Fully accepted.” I’m scoring myself ten of ten.

*

1:31 p.m.: The sentence that tripped me up is no. 7. I e-mailed Bryan Garner about it, and he changed the scoring. (Is he a diligent guy, or what?) The answer for no. 7 now begins: “This sentence is grammatically correct, but you’ll get a point for either response,” with an explanation following. So ten for ten!

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Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

It’s no more than coincidence that on Proust’s birthday, Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day concerns sentence length. An excerpt:

What is the correlation between sentence length and readability? No one knows precisely. Rhetoricians and readability specialists have long suggested aiming for sentences of varying lengths, but with an average of about 20 to 25 words. And empirical evidence seems to bear out this rough guideline.

In 1985, three authors calculated figures for several publications, using extensive samples. Average sentence length ranges from about 20 (Reader’s Digest ) to 24 (Time ) to 27 (Wall Street Journal ). They arrived at a provocative conclusion: “Varying your sentence length is much more important than varying your sentence pattern if you want to produce clear, interesting, readable prose.” (Gary A. Olson, James DeGeorge & Richard Ray, Style and Readability in Business Writing 102 (1985)). If you’re aiming for an average sentence length of 20 to 25 words, some sentences probably ought to be 30 or 40 words, and others ought to be 3 or 4. Variety is important, but you must concern yourself with the overall average.

Ted Berrigan once said in an interview that a little man in the back of a poet’s head manages rhyme and meter. I think that the little man’s little brother manages sentence length in prose. In other words, I find it difficult to imagine variety in sentence length as the product of conscious effort.

The averages that Garner cites made me curious enough to look at sentences of my own. In a review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King that I wrote last year (for World Literature Today, a print publication), the sentences average 28.1 words. The longest sentence: 47 words. The shortest: 12. The little man’s little brother was hard at work: the shortest sentence comes right after the longest. In a review of Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style that I wrote as a blog post last month, the sentences average 28.6 words. The longest sentence: 74 words. The shortest: 4. And in a post last week on Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope , the sentences average 18 words. Once again, the longest sentence (33) and the shortest (9) appear one next to the other.

Student writers are often wary of long sentences, sometimes because of uncertainty about punctuation (any longish sentence must be a “run-on”), sometimes because of poor teaching. And short sentences seem even more dangerous (because short must equal “dumb”). But variety in sentence length is of course a good thing. Even Proust has short sentences. One of them begins Du côté de chez Swann: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site. The first sentence of Swann's Way in Lydia Davis’s 2002 translation: “For a long time, I went to bed early.” The free Mac app TextWrangler made the work of counting sentences and words no work at all.]

Garner covers 2012

Bryan Garner collects some news of the year in language and writing. A sample:

A Brooklyn resident contested a parking ticket based on the meaning of the preposition to. According to the New York Times, Mark Vincent parked under a sign that read: “No standing April to October.” He decided that to meant that parking was prohibited until the month of October began. Because it was October 2, he reasoned that he was within the law. Supported by Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, he argued that to means “up to but not including,” while through means “to and including.” Although he did not win his appeal, the new sign reads: “No standing April 1–Sept. 30.”

I wish that Garner’s compendium came with links: they’d make for hours of happy (and sometimes dismaying) browsing. If you were reading Orange Crate Art in April, you saw a a post with a link to the Times article on to v. through.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Dr. Watson’s prose, however

[The Hound of the Baskervilles (dir. Sidney Lanfield, 1939).]

Doctor John H. Watson is writing to Sherlock Holmes:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. However, his charming step-sister has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) on however :

It seems everyone has heard that sentences should not begin with this word — not, that is, when a contrast is intended. But doing so isn’t a grammatical error; it’s merely a stylistic lapse, the word But or Yet ordinarily being much preferable. . . . The reason is that However — three syllables followed by a comma — is a ponderous way of introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences.

Garner cites varied authorities on the wisdom of not leading with however . Better to begin with but or place however later in a sentence. A beautiful explanation from Sheridan Baker: “But is for the quick turn; the inlaid however for the more elegant sweep.” In a recent tweet Garner says that a sentence starting with however

shows something useful: you’re reading someone of only middling skill. It’s a shortcut litmus test. Truly.

Middling skill: that seems to describe Watson, or at least the Watson who appears in this film. The stuffiness of however suits him. Place the word later in the sentence and the difference is slight:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. His charming step-sister, however, has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

And because an inlaid however adds emphasis to whatever precedes it, Watson’s sentence may now carry an unintended implication: I don't like Stapleton, but his step-sister, wow. I will go to dinner because she will be there.

Change however to but  and the difference is sharp:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. But his charming step-sister has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

And now Watson’s meaning is once again clear: I don’t like this man, but duty and all that. I must go.

Dropping however at the start of sentences (and after semicolons) was, for me, a big step away from the ponderous habits of academic prose. Been there, did that. Done.

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[As Garner points out, however at the start of a sentence is fine when it means “in whatever way” or “to whatever extent.”]

A Bryan Garner story

Bryan Garner says that this piece is based on a true story: How polish and attention to detail can win the motion (ABA Journal). Good advice for addressing any audience in writing. I like the dowdy dialogue:

“Jim, good usage isn’t nearly as fluid as you’re suggesting. Besides, I’m talking about current editorial standards. Have you ever heard of Theodore Bernstein or H.W. Fowler?”

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[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]

“My children were raised”

My children were raised, you know they suddenly rise
They started slow long ago, head to toe
Healthy, wise, and wise

From “Heroes and Villains” (music by Brian Wilson, words by Van Dyke Parks)

I am happy to learn that the verb raised in this, one of my favorite songs, is okay by Bryan Garner. From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on raise and rear:

The old rule, still sometimes observed, is that crops and livestock are “raised” and children are “reared.” But today the phrase “born and raised” is about eight times as common in print as “born and reared.” And “raise” is now standard as a synonym for “rear” — e.g.: “My mother raised me to be polite.” Mary Newton Brudner, The Grammar Lady 57 (2000). Indeed, “born and reared” is likely to sound affected in American English.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly (and VDP-friendly) site.

My favorite Parks interpretation of “Heroes and Villains” comes from a 2010 NPR appearance. The introduction to the song starts at 26:57: Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons at the World Café.

From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

How many times did I hear, as an undergraduate, someone say “Man qua man” and mean it? Too many times. From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

Qua (= in the capacity of; as; in the role of), is often misused and is little needed in English. “The real occasion for the use of qua,” wrote H.W. Fowler, “occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects” (Modern English Usage [1st ed.] at 477). Here is Fowler's example of a justifiable use: “Qua lover he must be condemned for doing what qua citizen he would be condemned for not doing.” But as would surely work better in that sentence; and in any event, this use of qua is especially rare in American English.

One is hard-pressed to divine any purpose but rhetorical ostentation or idiosyncrasy in the following examples:

“Such developments . . . do not explain why students qua students have played such an important role in stimulating protest.” Seymour Martin Lipset, “Why Youth Revolt,” N.Y. Times, 24 May 1989, at A31.

“The proposal that a physician qua physician (or a medical ethic as such) is the necessary or best authority for the existential decision of rational suicide misrepresents medical knowledge and skills.” Steven H. Miles, "Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Profession's Gyrocompass," Hastings Ctr. Rep., May 1995, at 17.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.

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The word of the day: quaquaversal

Me, reading

The perspicacious Michael Leddy of Charleston, Illinois, was on my Panel of Critical Readers for this book. I’m told that he has been in this position for hours, with rapt (not *wrapt) attention. He brings relentless perspicacity to the reading. #GMEU5 pic.twitter.com/ywlPoDSrIB

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) December 15, 2022

Bryan Garner asked panel members to send photographs of themselves reading entries they commented on for the now-published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage. So here, or there, I am. The photograph is by Elaine Fine.

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Review: Wallace and Garner, Quack This Way

David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner. Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing. Dallas: RosePen Books, 2013. 137 pages. $24.95 hardcover. $18.95 paper.

When it comes to language and usage and writing, there are two kinds of people: those who care, and those who could care less.

Yes, could care less is an infelicity. And here, a joke. As Bryan A. Garner explains in Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), couldn’t care less is “the correct and logical phrasing.” Garner’s entry for this phrase gives an example of could care less in print (from George Will), addresses the dubious claim that the infelicity is a matter of purposeful sarcasm, and cites two scholarly articles in support of a likelier explanation: that the two dentals of couldn’t have blurred into the one of could.¹ That kind of patient, thoughtful attention to language is evident on every page of GMAU. Garner, you see, is the first kind of person. So was David Foster Wallace. This book is for their kind.

Quack This Way is the transcript of a sixty-seven-minute interview recorded in a Los Angeles hotel room in February 2006, the last lengthy interview that Wallace gave. Garner and Wallace might best be described as friends in the art of writing: they met in person just twice (the first meeting followed Wallace’s 2001 Harper’s essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage”); they appeared together as guests on a Boston radio show, phoning in from separate locations; they kept in touch through the mail, e- and real, before Wallace slipped into silence.²

We now know that at the time of this interview, Wallace was in difficulty with The Pale King: as he says here, without further explanation, “I have no idea what to do. Most of what I want to do seems to me like I’ve done it before. It seems stupid.” It is easy to sense his inveterate unease with the prospect of an interview, as he deprecates his responses and checks for Garner’s approval (“Is that an example of what you want?”). Garner strikes just the right note, responding with enthusiasm (“That’s great,” “I love this”) feeding question after question, and (mostly) hanging back. And it works, as Wallace becomes increasingly expansive and animated. By my estimate, he speaks four-fifths of the words in these pages.

And what words. The model of good writing that Wallace expounds is founded on clarity and concision: “the fewest words, each of which is the smallest and plainest possible.”³ Such writing calls for attention, to one’s habits of language and to the person on “the end of the line”: writing as communication, not self-expression; an act of regard for another, for whom the content of the writer’s mind is not just given. Anyone who has read Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address will hear its overtones in this interview.

Along the way, there are glimpses of Wallace’s snoot childhood (“Mom’s brainwashing”), remarks on the advantages of writing by hand, a description of work habits (“time and drafts and noodling”), and good-natured dissings of airport language, ungainly nominalizations, and “crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose.” Wallace casts in homely and appealing terms his advice for becoming a better writer:

[W]e’re training the same part of us that knows how to swing a golf club or shift a standard transmission, things we want to be able to do automatically. So we have to pay attention and learn how to do them so we can quit thinking about them and just do them automatically.

Improvement, on Wallace’s terms, is a matter not so much of intellect or verbal skill as of spirit:

And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.

What I didn’t expect to find in Quack This Way: so many exchanges relevant to academic life and teaching. Wallace suggests why so many academics write badly (because they are preoccupied with showing that they know the ways of a professional community), and he diagnoses a problem endemic to writing classrooms: responses to a text that leave the text behind for a reader’s autobiographical revery. (How exasperated he must have become in such circumstances.) Wallace offers a clear-eyed but compassionate appraisal of teachers who enforce unfounded rules of writing, and he gives good advice about writing for an academic audience: write well and trust that the reader will recognize and appreciate good writing, even if he or she is unable to produce it.

Garner’s introduction is an affectionate account of a friendship that never had the chance to flourish. The book’s unlikely index — slang, snoot, snuff-dipping, social climbing — would no doubt have delighted Wallace. It too is a fitting memorial to a friend. All royalties from Quack This Way go to the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) to aid in the preservation and further collection of Wallace’s work.

¹ Steven Pinker offers the sarcasm hypothesis about could care less (without evidence) in The Language Instinct (1994): “The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite.” A dental is a consonant “pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the upper front teeth (as th) or the alveolar ridge (as n, d, t)” (New Oxford American Dictionary).

² The essay, a review of Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998), is available online from Harper’s. The essay appears in much longer form as “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2006). Wallace praises Garner for recognizing that in our time a work on usage can no longer be assumed to carry authority. Such a work must be persuasive, attaining authority by establishing its author’s credibility.

³ Wallace describes this model as a default. It certainly doesn’t fit the semantic and syntactic extravagances of his fiction. And what would a review of a Wallace book be without a few footnotes? HTML codes limit me to three.

An excerpt from the taped interview
Wallace on prior to

[Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.]

On retronyms

On retronyms, from Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day:

When roller skates were invented in the 19th century, it became necessary to refer to the kind used on ice — originally just “skates” — as “ice skates.” When cars began appearing on turn-of-the-century roads, old-style carriages came to be called “horse-drawn carriages” to distinguish them from the new “horseless carriages.” In the 1910s, when sound first came to be synchronized with motion pictures (in “talking movies” or “talkies”), the original type of movie came to be known as the “silent movie.” That is, nobody ever referred to “silent movies” until sound was added to the newer type.

And speaking of silent films: I was very happy to see the Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist do so well at last night’s Academy Awards. I love everything about The Artist but its typography.

Wikipedia has a list of retronyms.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

SFW on the shelf

Take a look at this tweeted photograph of Bryan Garner’s bookshelves. Can you spot the book by Sally Foster Wallace, David’s mother?

This 2013 post, a review of Quack This Way, a transcribed conversation between Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace, has links about the Garner–Wallace connection. This 2020 post has some sample sentences from SFW’s book.

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[The book is Practically Painless English (Prentice-Hall, 1980), above the three blue volumes, lower right.]