Tell Do Do

It would be nice if I could find the take-down of William Safire's and Edwin Newman's language meter-maid bullshit that Jim Sleeper wrote sometime in the 80s or 90s,  exposing the fraud of pseudo-grammarians and stylists that arose in that fecund pile of horseshit that generates such bullshit to impress the mid-brow and slightly higher and lower who are too lazy to actually learn about grammar and writing, the NYC area media.  

But the paper copy of The Nation that appeared in is long gone into the recycling stream and they don't appear to care to share their long archive with the non-paying public.  Unlike the "paper of record" (they really do call it that) the Nation probably really can't afford it.   

As I recall he quoted Safire and one of his old-fogy media figure admirers whooping it up over someone using the word "moot" as a verb.  Sleeper looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary and found, if memory serves, it was first used as a verb in English well back into the medieval period, proving only one thing, you can write shit in the august Great Gray Drab, the NY Times without the minimal amount of fact checking.  As I recall, and my recall is usually rather accurate, Sleeper noted that Safire of the New York Times may have gained the record by declaring "to moot" a distasteful neologism, when it may have been the oldest word to be declared one in the history of such popular  amateur pedantic language scolding. 

It would also be nice if I could track down where the idiotic practice of declaring that any common locution you choose on any occasion is "a tell," the indefinite term then being used to mean whatever the stylish liar chooses it to mean.  I've had "I believe," "I suspect,"  "I would guess,"  and many other common locutions declared to expose a number of uncomplimentary things about me by an avid follower of the Safire style of pseudo-authority as read in that shit-rag he wrote for and other such venues of New Yorkian pseudo-lazy-assed erudition.  Perhaps (one of the words declared to be such a "tell") I may get around to looking it up and seeing if I can figure out the source of that load of horseshit.  It is a sure bet that it came from one of those phonies inspired by the like of Strunk-White, probably the origin of most of the current crop of such frauds.  I don't think that Strunk-White being a book of few pages and words being today's such oracle of mid-brow authority is unrelated to it being an easy read and an even easier skim.  Ours is not an age of careful scholarship on that level of popularity, though out best scholars are, actually, probably some of the best and most careful in history. 

If it were not too hot to bother and too thankless a task,  I'd go search the archive of Power-Pop the blog the idiot maintains or that of his host Duncan Black to find out what such terms declared to be "tells" that they have used.   I'm sure they've used some of them.   While it might be hard to figure out what kind of deception they might occur in - it's a safe bet that much of what Simps says is dishonest, as that is pretty much his only consistent stylistic inclination. If Duncan has used them it's probably out of his typical laziness.  Duncan isn't dishonest, he's lazy.  Simps is.

*  I don't remember but I think Sleeper also wrote the hilarious review of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.  I recall after posting a long passage in which what I assume was supposed to be the female lead waxes hysterical in a sort of combination Henry Miller-Anias Nin way about anal sex for a whole paragraph the reviewer said, "Molly Bloom she ain't."  It was one of the few times I laughed out loud for a sustained period while reading a book review.