David Foster Wallace sometimes didn’t know what he was talking about

From a David Foster Wallace Fall 2002 class handout now online, Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work:

For a compound sentence to require a comma plus a conjunction, both its constituent clauses must be independent. An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought. In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

One mistake: the sentence “An independent clause (a) has both a subject and a main verb, and (b) expresses a complete thought” should not have a comma: it has only one clause.

A second mistake: “He ate all the food and went back for more” is a single independent clause, not two clauses. Notice that the sentence explaining an independent clause and the sample sentence follow the same pattern: subject-verb-and-verb. Neither sentence needs a comma.

But there’s more. Look carefully at the third sentence:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

That sentence needs a comma before because, for the very reason that Wallace explains later in the handout:

[B]ecause is a funny word, and sometimes you’ll need a comma before its appearance in the second clause in order to keep your sentence from giving the wrong impression.

Look again:

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and because the second clause isn’t independent.

In a sentence like “He ate all the food, and went back for more,” you don’t need both the comma and the and [,] because the second clause isn’t independent.

The first version misleads by suggesting that you don’t need both the comma and and for some other reason.

There’s a fourth mistake in passing: afterwards and backwards are not prepositions. And I suspect that Wallace’s observations about a sentence being “nonstandard in the abstract” would set linguists howling.

Pedantry is always tiresome, but it’s especially tiresome when the pedant doesn’t know what he is talking about. I’m reminded of the poet Ted Berrigan’s comment about another Dave, a friend:

“Dave knows just enough to get himself in trouble. . . . He says her name is pronounced Gertrude SCHTEIN because that’s the way German is pronounced. He also thinks that Byron’s poem is called DON WHAN, because he speaks Spanish and that’s the way the name is pronounced in Spanish. When I told him it’s JEWUN, he told me I was a moron.”

Ron Padgett, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993)

[“Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work.” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)
E. B. White on W3 (with DFW on Webster’s Third)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

The model 500

Object of the day: Henry Dreyfuss’s model 500 (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum).

A related post
Thrift-store telephone

TYPE LOUD

I am contending with the aftermath of an ear infection — and yes, that makes me feel about ten years old. It’s difficult to hear with my clogged left ear, so if you leave a comment today, please, TYPE LOUD. Thank you.

“WE DELIVER”

[From the Naked City episode “A Death of Princes,” first aired October 12, 1960.]

The choice to crop makes the image starker and stranger, doesn’t it? Ernesto Caparrós gets the credit for this episode’s cinematography. The telephone exchange CI? That’s CIrcle.

Forty episodes of Naked City are now available in a ten-DVD set ($24.99 from Amazon). Elaine and I have thirty-two episodes to go.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

[It is 9:37 in the Naked City.]

Ho Hum

Above, two pages from Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from The New Yorker (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), foreword by E. B. White, illustrations by O. Soglow. A newsbreak is a New Yorker specialty, a snippet of journalism containing “some error of typography or judgment,” as White puts it, used to fill extra space at a column’s end. White selected newsbreaks for many years. Mira Ptacin’s account of a visit to White’s Maine house includes a photograph of a list of newsbreak categories, still tacked to the wall of White’s writing shed.

By the way, the Billboard item must have been placed by a carnival geek. Billboard ran geek ads in its carnival section.

Related reading
All E. B. White posts (Pinboard)
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY” (Billboard ads)

[I still marvel at the generosity of libraries. If this book were mine, I wouldn’t let it out.]

More Wittgenstein

Michael P. Lynch replies to Paul Horwich: Of Flies and Philosophers: Wittgenstein and Philosophy (New York Times).

[Where I think Lynch diverges from Wittgenstein: Lynch speaks of truth as having not one nature or no nature but several natures; Wittgenstein would speak of “truth” as being a word with various uses. I think.]

Headlines quiz

These headlines are now nice and stale. Can you tell which ones are real?

“5 Tips on Avoiding a Nervous Breakdown”

“Gwyneth Paltrow Is Filled With Hate”

“Gwyneth Paltrow Makes Tacos”

“Growing Number Of Americans Distrust Census”

“Man Dislocates Jaw On Giant Sandwich At Restaurant Chain”

Answers in the comments.

Related reading
A previous headlines quiz

“Was Wittgenstein Right?”

The philosopher Paul Horwich on Ludwig Wittgenstein:

[T]he usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Was Wittgenstein Right? (New York Times)

[It must be a good thing I didn’t go to graduate school in philosophy: Wittgenstein is one of the key figures in the life of my mind.]

National Grammar Day

“There is so much to celebrate about our language. English may be a shifty whore, but she’s our shifty whore. Please, this National Grammar Day, don’t turn her into a bully, too”: A Plea for Sanity this National (US) Grammar Day.

No more homework

[From a found notebook.]

I spent four years in college without doing homework. Which is not to say I slacked: to the contrary. But the word homework played no part in my effort. What I “did” instead: I read, mostly books, and I wrote papers. I never had homework: I had reading, or a lot of reading, or a ton of reading. And papers, short and long. If one of my professors had ever announced that there was homework, I would have cringed. And I can say with some confidence that I never heard a fellow student use the word.

And as a college prof, I never speak of homework. But I hear the word often, spoken by students. Try a Twitter search for college and homework: they’re often found together. One college student tweets, in a lovely mixed metaphor, of being “shackled by piles of homework.” My case against the word has nothing to do with snobbery, nothing to do with an inflated sense of my dignity. Homework is not beneath me. But the word has, to my mind, little or nothing to do with college.

For one thing, homework suggests a world divided between school and family, a distinction not always in play in college, when many students are living away from home. There’s something incongruous about the idea of taking homework back to a dorm or an off-campus apartment. There’s something even more incongruous about the idea of a non-traditional (older) student doing homework. The word also suggests that there will be something to turn in, something for a teacher to “collect,” though the day-to-day work of reading and note-taking in a college class typically yields nothing for a second party to look at. And the word homework carries at least a suggestion of teacherly whims, particularly for children who might already be spending a good part of the school day plugging away at worksheets.¹ Will the teacher be piling it on tonight, or giving everyone a break? In a college class though, where a semester’s work is mapped out in advance, there will always already be something to do between class meetings — or at least there should be.

There are many other ways in which the experience of college can be improved—by requiring, for instance, significant reading and writing in classes. But it might be easier to regard such work as a norm (and not an anomaly) if one were to dispose of the word homework: not “I have forty pages of homework” but “I have forty pages of reading.” Traditional-aged college students are novice adults, men and women in the making. They—and their older fellow students—would do well to think of their coursework, whatever it might require, in terms beyond those of elementary and secondary education.

¹ The Oxford English Dictionary gives this earliest (1662) meaning of the word: “Work done at home, esp. as distinguished from work done in a factory.”

[About the notebook: a friend found it years ago, abandoned. Its pages were blank, except for the note above. I sometimes wonder what became of the writer.]