July 09, 2002

Sometimes you read something that, because it states with beautiful clarity something you have always known but have never been able to properly express, makes you feel as if a great weight has been lifted and you can breathe again. So it was with me when I read a passage in Fowler's Modern English Usage.
      The passage, Fowler's entry for "Pedantic Humor," perfectly describes the priggish and smug style of humor found in The New Yorker, a magazine so hysterically irritating to me that I once felt compelled to write an essay on the topic, in the hope of calming myself down. Fowler covers much the same ground with greater economy and force:

PEDANTIC HUMOR. No essential distinction is intended between this & polysyllabic humor ; one or the other name is more appropriate to particular specimens, & the two headings are therefore useful for reference ; but they are manifestations of the same impulse, & the few remarks needed may be made here for both. A warning is necessary, because we have all of us, except the abnormally stupid, been pedantic humorists in our time. We spend much of our childhood picking up a vocabulary ; we like to air our latest finds ; we discover that our elders are tickled when we come out with a new name that they thought beyond us ; we devote some pains to tickling them further ; & there we are, pedants and polysyllabists all. The impulse is healthy for children, & nearly universal--which is just why warning is necessary ; for among so many there will always be some who who fail to realize that the clever habit applauded at home will make them insufferable abroad. Most of those who are capable of writing well enough to find readers do learn with more or less of delay that playful use of learned words is a one-sided game boring the reader more than it pleases the writer, that the impulse to do it is a danger signal--for there is must be something wrong with what they are saying if it needs recommending with such puerilities--, & that yielding to the impulse is a confession of failure. But now & then even an able writer will go on believing that the incongruity between simple things to be said & out-of-the-way words to say them in has a perennial charm ; it has, for the reader who never outgrows hobbledehoyhood ; but for the rest of us it is dreary indeed. It is possible that acquaintance with such labels as pedantic & polysyllabic humor may help to shorten the time it takes to cure a weakness incident to youth.