On Grammar

After 40 years in Israel, instead of being bi-lingual, I am slowly but surely becoming semi-literate.

I am forgetting my English vocabulary and my grammar has been, well, just ask the person who criticizes it. And Hebrew, while very good, is still dominated by ann Anglo accent.

So, in reading On Language today - and we are all mourning Bill Safire's demise - I was quite happy to read this:-

For instance, I have occasionally been informed that my use of the word stupider, as opposed to the somewhat ungainly phrase more stupid, makes me sound . . . plus stupide. I used to cringe in shame and embarrassment when this was pointed out to me, until I discovered that Ezra Pound also used the word stupider, in a letter that he wrote to William Carlos Williams in 1920: “If you weren’t stupider than a mud-duck you would know that every kick to bad writing is by that much a help for the good.” And so now, rather than feel like an uneducated boor when someone calls me out for my use of this word, I can tell my antagonist that I am referencing Pound.

and this there:-

Clifton Fadiman wrote that “correctness, of course, is a schoolmarm’s hallucination; there are more double negatives in Shakespeare and Chaucer than on New York’s 10th Avenue” (and this was written back in the early 1950s, when 10th Avenue had more double negatives than bistros). In the event that a corrector corners you and attacks your use of a word or phrase for which you do not have a historical precedent that you can draw to mind, do not despair — you can always claim that Shakespeare used it thusly. If you are lucky your nemesis will believe you, but even if he has doubts, he will now be more concerned with looking for this mistake in his unabridged collection of the Bard’s work than in tormenting you.