A John McWhorter page-ninety test

Spur of the moment: I thought to try the page-ninety test with John McWhorter’s Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever (New York: Avery, 2021). Here’s what I found:

The metaphorical meaning closest to the root connotation of feces is that of the unwelcome, given the noxious nature of the substance. Hence the idea of haranguing someone as giving them shit. When I was in college, one of the managers in the dining hall I worked in was a brilliantined fellow with a pencil mustache (a look that was already obsolete by the 1980s) and a keening, petulant voice, given to complaining, “Everybody shits on me!” But the man is relevant to us in that the expression he was so fond of embodied this metaphorical usage of shit as a burden and insult.

It is not difficult to improve this paragraph:

The primary metaphorical meaning of shit is that of what’s noxious or unwelcome. Hence the idea of haranguing someone as “giving them shit.” As an undergraduate I worked in a university dining hall with a manager who was given to complaining, “Everybody shits on me!” His pet expression embodied this metaphorical meaning.

Granted, this kind of revision might make a much shorter book. But I think I’ve made a better paragraph.

~ “Root connotation”: I have no idea what a “root connotation” is. You won’t find an explanation elsewhere in the book, as this passage marks its only appearance. As for the root of feces, it’s the Latin faeces, “dregs,” which McWhorter does mention earlier. But he characterizes the Latin word as “euphemistic,” which doesn’t jibe with an emphasis on noxiousness.

~ I removed the awkward phrase that ends the first sentence.

~ It may be that I’ve drained some color from this paragraph. But if your point is to illustrate the use of shit as a metaphor, the description of a dining-hall manager is beside it. And this description of a brilliantined, mustached man with a keening, petulant voice smacks too much of some sort of ethnic and/or sexual stereotype.

~ “But the man is relevant to us”: I hate condescension.

~ I’ve changed the final sentence to echo “metaphorical meaning.” And I’ve removed “burden and insult” to let the idea of what’s noxious or unwelcome carry the meaning here. Giving someone a homework assignment might burden them, but it’s not necessarily giving them shit.

And now it occurs to me that I’ve written another “How to improve writing” post. This one is no. 95.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard) : John McWhorter’s me

[Benjamin Dreyer and Steven Pinker have both blurbed this book. And Bill Maher has praised it. Yikes, yikes, and yikes again.]