Poor Mojo's Newswire

That the father of American environmentalism could have been the scourge of the Concord Woods may seem too ironic to be true. Yet, not only did this unlikely event actually occur, but it seems quite possible that, given Thoreau's general lack of direction at the time, as well as his growing interest in pursuing a career as a civil engineer, America's first great naturalist might not have undertaken his Walden experiment at all, had it not been for the forest fire he sparked a year earlier. The fire happened at a time when Thoreau seemed desperately in need of some catalyst to convert his thoughts into action.

It’s a serious problem. A couple of years ago, I wrote a scene into an early part of a novel wherein the protagonist is faced with a group of middle-aged men who get together to have exotic sex with ostriches. That is, opposed to plain old vanilla sex with ostriches. It only took a few years before Swedish authorities found a group of middle-aged men who got together to have sex with a variety of animals. Wonderfully, when confronted, one of the zoophiles said the dog had forced him into it. Sometimes I suspect the real function of communications technology is to illustrate, frostily and nakedly, just how frightening the details of life on Earth are. There was a time when it would have been hard for a writer to discover that, in New York, 129 paramedics have been implicated in investigations of sexual assault inside ambulances, with side dishes of child porn. In fact, the easiest way for a writer to find that out in the past would have been to stand on a Manhattan street corner, fake a seizure and wait. With legs firmly crossed. Correctly tuned, the internet brings a staggering volume of detail about every moment on the planet right to my desk.

For someone who earns a living through consideration of outbreaks of The Future, it’s all useful information, but that’s all it is. For the parsing and condensation of that information into knowledge, it seems we still need the structure of print publishing, a form that insists on time to think, digest and present.

The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.