Pinker on Roberts; Iannone on Pinker (and Auster on Pinker)

Speaking of individuals who undeservedly enjoy prominent and influential positions in media and the academy, the unrelentingly reductionist atheist Steven Pinker, writing in today’s New York Times, offers an unbelievably off-base and tendentious theory of why Chief Justice Roberts mangled the presidential oath of office. Carol Iannone at the Phi Beta Cons blog gives Pinker the send-up he deserves. (In case it doesn’t stay online at the Times, the Pinker column is copied below.)

Added January 23, 10:42 p.m; revised January 24, 9:30 a.m.

I would add this to Carol Iannone’s observations. What drove Pinker to make the ridiculous assertion that, in addition to the (increasingly and ruinously disregarded) rule against the split infinitive, there is a rule against “split auxiliaries,” which says that you must not interpose an adverb between an auxiliary verb, such as “will,” and its main verb, such as “execute,” and that this was what made Roberts move the adverb “faithfully” away from its proper place in the presidential oath? (Pinker says the rule comes from the Texas Law Review Manual on Style, but Eugene Volokh’s ten year old article on the subject speaks only about the Manual’s rule against “split verbs,” by which he and it evidently meant the rule against split infinitives, not a rule against split auxiliaries, which I’ve never heard of.) The answer is provided by the knee-jerk liberal mindset Pinker displays in his column. He describes people who disapprove of the split infinite as “insecure” and dependent on authority, “brainwashed by the split-verb myth,” and controlled by “fetish” and “superstition.” All this contempt and condescension is directed at nothing more than the standard grammatical rule that prohibits the split infinitive—a rule, by the way, that good writers generally follow, even today (I myself follow it unswervingly, but don’t require others to be that strict). Pinker doesn’t just disagree with the rule against the split infinitive; he looks at people who agree with it the same way an aggressive atheist looks at religious believers, or the way Sixties sexual revolutionaries looked at their parents, or the way Theodore Adorno looked at the middle class—as neurotic, authoritarian, fascist personality types.

That’s the leftist paradigm though which Pinker views grammatical conservatives, and, by implication, conservatives in general, or the people he imagines to be conservatives. Well, how could he apply this paradigm to his analysis of Roberts’s odd behavior during the swearing-in? There was no question of a split infinitive in the oath of office. So Pinker fantasized a non-existent rule against split auxiliary verbs, which says that you can’t put “faithfully” between “will” and “execute,” and argued that Roberts—that repressed, insecure, fetish-controlled conservative—was so hung up by the split auxiliary verb, “will faithfully execute,” that he unconsciously un-split it by moving “faithfully” to the end of the clause.

Thus Pinker, the supposed rational man of science, reveals himself as a pseudo-intellectual twit operating under the sway of the stupidest and meanest liberal prejudices about conservatives, to the point where he makes up a grammatical rule and a conservative belief about that rule that don’t exist. And The New York Times published this worthless drivel.

And, by the way, Roberts didn’t have any problem with the split auxiliary verb, “I do solemnly swear.”

Here’s a further example of Pinker’s prejudicial case against Roberts which he supports by ignorance. He writes:

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

Now Dylan may have said, “When you ain’t got nothin’,” in later live performances of “Like a Rolling Stone.” But in the original 1965 recording, Dylan shouts:

When you got nothin’
You got nothin’ to lose.

So if Roberts left out “ain’t” from that line, he was quoting it correctly. Once again, in portraying Roberts as driven by a neurotic, superstitious need to change texts, Pinker reveals that he himself is driven by liberal animus against conservatives to make up non-existent facts.

* * *

Oaf of Office
By STEVEN PINKER
January 21, 2009 IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between “man” and “mankind.” In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute,” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided,” adding, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.”

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.

Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and the chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2009 12:29 PM | Send