Taking Prepositions Seriously

Jeffrey G. Sherman* "My mind's made up; don't confuse me with a lot of facts." -Groucho Marx The contemporary assault on nouns and adjectives continues apace, leaving users of the language little time to survey the damage. When did apocalypse lose its specific character as a synonym for revelation and become a voguish substitute for Armageddon? (Is Francis Ford Coppola to blame?) When did an internecine struggle cease to conjure up bloody battlefields with the dead of both sides littering the landscape and instead refer to nothing more violent than an intramural tenure controversy? And when did redolent lose its sense of smell? The assault on nouns sometimes takes the form of verbing them. The use of the noun impact as a verb meaning affect, once the exclusive affectation of the bogus and the self-important, has spread to the entire population. As a consequence, a new test is now needed for identifying the bogus and the self-important. Noting those who use wellness instead of health is a test that commends itself. In our justifiable eagerness to purge our language of a misnomer for the descendants of the first residents of this continent, we have confounded native with aboriginal so that, though I remain a native American, I am no longer a Native American. Since it is an established fact that sloppy word-choice among the young leads inexorably to increases in drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births, and acne, I am, as indeed every person who cares about America's future ought to be, concerned. It was therefore with inexpressible pleasure that I discovered two distinguished scholars rushing to the defense of language. Sensing perhaps how deeply the rot has penetrated, they have returned to fundamentals, circling their wagons not around nouns, adjectives, or verbs,1 but around the lowly preposition. In a world where the delicate but necessary distinctions between susceptible to and susceptible of and between consists in and consists of have been all but annihilated, and oblivious to and enamored with have crowded out oblivious of and enamored of, this defense of the preposition is all to the good. Prepositions are weighty things. As a 1960s survivor, how can I forget the frisson of horror that chilled me whenever I heard the jingle assuring me that "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should"?2 The causus belli on this occasion is the preposition "in." What preposition ought to precede "evidence" in the locution "admitted evidence": "in" or "into"? Peter Murray of Harvard insists on "in,"3 while Steven Lubet of Northwestern plumps for "into."4 Before exploring the issue as to which they disagree, however, I must point out that they implicitly agree on an issue that, to me, is of overriding importance: their very disagreement presupposes that there is a right answer. That this shared stance should be controversial is cause for gloom. Sadly, some of today's liveliest commentators on the subject of language have repudiated the whole notion of expert "authority" in deciding questions of usage, arguing that only prevailing practice is determinative: lingua populi, lingua Dei. But Professor Lubet, for example, cheerfully cites authority in support of his position: Moses.5 "When a Prophet speaks, is deconstruction necessary?" he asks, not without confidence.6 Unfortunately, the Prophet in question spoke in Hebrew, and King James's translators7 were at work before the modern rules of preposition usage were established.8 Still, Professor Lubet is to be commended for his unapologetic declaration that on such issues as usage, authority must be found and consulted. All right, then. If not Moses, who? Who are these authorities? Follett's MODERN AMERICAN USAGE, though it does not name them, at least limns their contours: A linguistic pattern is dead, not when there is a large amount of deviation from it . . . but when it has ceased to make a clear and uniform impression upon those who attend to words. …