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Death of a Word Man
An appreciation of the author of ‘Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English.’
A man named Robert Hartwell Fiske died last week, at age 68, of melanoma. Feel no embarrassment if you don’t know his name. Robert Hartwell Fiske was an unknown soldier in that most glorious and hopeless of wars, that against the ignorant and abusive use of language. He published five or six books on the subject, with such titles as “The Dictionary of Disagreeable English,” “The Dimwit’s Dictionary” and “Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English.” He also ran a website called Vocabula Review, which featured essays written by various hands, on occasion my own among them, discussing the vagaries and comedy of language.
PHOTO: ISTOCK
I never spoke with Robert (as I always addressed him in my emails), but gather that he ran his campaign for clear and elegant language out of his kitchen. He lived in a small house in Rockport, Mass. He had no other job. He subsisted on donations, small ones if my own of $100 a year be any guide, to his cause.
A brief Wikipedia entry about him is almost entirely negative. He is accused by a linguist of being “far too prescriptivist in orientation for a sophisticated linguistic audience.” Two reviews of the “Dictionary of Unendurable English” are cited: In one the book is said to be—no fainter praise is imaginable—“enjoyable for word snobs and copy editors”; in the other he is called “so passionate in the prescriptivist cause of smiting the lax and the uncaring that the book at times resembles a parody of itself.”
The “prescriptivist cause” means the assertion of correct and clear English, the insistence on a standard. One might have thought such an objective admirable, but in their sophistication contemporary linguists are keener on demotic than on elegant English. Besides, in the spirit of our day, when the chief function of authority is to serve as an object of attack, to set up as an authority is to risk—to expect, really—an onslaught of shaving-cream pies in the face.
No one among them ever thought himself a prescriptivist, but the prescriptivist honor roll is distinguished. On it are Jonathan Swift, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Wilson. My own favorite writer in this realm is H.W. Fowler, whose “Modern English Usage” was a best-seller in America when it was published in 1926. Immensely learned yet with nothing schoolmarmish about him, Fowler was able to lay down the law without seeming the least priggish. Although he knew all the rules, his general advice was to break any rule rather than be forced into writing something that sounds barbarous.
I’m not sure when, precisely, Robert Fiske signed on to fight the pollution of empty jargon, idiotic euphemism, self-serving imprecision, comic redundancy and nonsense generally. He had earlier worked as a copy editor for the Addison-Wesley publishing company and then as a freelance editor. A passion for correct English at some point must have turned into an obsession. Robert was apparently obsessive in other realms: He was a weightlifter and a man who went on 10-mile treks carrying 50 pounds of bricks in a backpack.
Perhaps it requires an obsessive to devote himself to linguistic delinquencies in any age, but especially in ours, the age of the emoticon. In his “Dimwit’s Dictionary,” Robert explains his reigning idea in the first paragraph of his first chapter, when he announces that “Dimwitticisms are worn-out words and phrases; they are expressions that dull our reason and dim our insight, formulas that we rely on when we are too lazy to express what we think or even to discover how we feel. The more we use them, the more we conform—in thought and feeling—to everyone else who uses them.”
In his various writings, Robert insisted on distinctions: between forcefully and forcibly, fortunately and fortuitously, tortured and tortuous, and many more. He could be death on academic locution and on the ungainly “in terms of,” the overused “scenario,” the misused “transpire,” the merely hideous “prioritize.”
Robert believed that “our knowledge of the world expands as our familiarity with words increases,” and that inattentiveness to the niceties of language “blunts our understanding and quashes our creativity.” I could say that he was the H.W. Fowler de nos jours, but Robert would have been pained by my unnecessary, and thereby pretentious, use of French.
As always with cancer, hope was from time to time resurgent in Robert, but he knew toward the end that he was going to die, and so he wrote his own obituary. In it he mentions that he will miss his regular readers mightily, and he wishes us all “an auspicious fate, a long-lived life. (Even though many people pronounce long-lived with a short i sound, the long i is correct. Long-lived derives from the word life, not the word live.)”
In monitoring contemporary language, Robert Hartwell Fiske was doing the Lord’s work. I only hope that, when he gets to the gates of heaven, St. Peter, in interviewing him, doesn’t split an infinitive or misuse the word “precipitous,” and Robert, feeling the need to correct him, blows everything.
Mr. Epstein’s “Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays” (Axios) and “Frozen in Time: Twenty Stories” (Taylor Trade) were published in April.
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Oops!
In my earlier post, the phrase "pitiful occupant in the dustbin of history to shame, decorum, and the like" should have read "pitiful occupant in the dustbin of history alongside shame, decorum, and the like."
That error only serves to emphasize how necessary folks like Robert Hartwell Fiske are to precise civil discourse!
Thank you, Joseph, for this sensitive appraisal of Fiske's unheralded, Sisyphean, efforts to preserve our language. Like so many vestiges of our formerly more civilized society, "proper" English is but a quaint curiosity rather than a praiseworthy aspiration, a pitiful occupant in the dustbin of history to shame, decorum, and the like, another victim of our descent to reach the common denominator. I was an email recipient of/contributor to Fiske's quirky mission, and a long-time resident of the Rockport area--a fitting venue, by the way, for a stubborn traditionalist--although we never met, and we all are diminished by his too-soon passing.
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