David Foster Wallace

Tropecei por acaso em David Foster Wallace, na Internet quero dizer, quando há uns tempos procurava um dicionário de uso de Inglês, e fui parar a um artigo publicado em 2001 no Harper’s Magazine, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, que com o pretexto duma “review” do A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner, tem sobretudo a ver com o interesse visceral de DFW pelas palavras, e pelo que elas significam na vida das pessoas.

Num próximo post voltarei a David Foster Wallace, para falar dos contos e romances do autor de Infinite Jest que nos deixou por vontade própria em Setembro do ano passado, mas hoje fica aqui um pequeno extracto do artigo daquele primeiro encontro, que embora usando palavras com mais letras do que estamos habituados em Inglês, particularmente na sua variante americana, e um grau de dificuldade um pouco acima do Inglês técnico da tal universidade, não é assim tão exigente como isso:

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

I submit, then, that it is indisputably easier to be dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding "correctness" in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be "worked out" instead of simply found.

E se isto lhe aguçou o interesse, ou a curiosidade, e mesmo que aquilo que menos lhe interessa seja mais um dicionário, ainda por cima de uso, que é um dicionário com menos palavras, dissecadas por vezes de forma um pouco para o pedante, então salte já a pés juntos: Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.