Judge Strikes a Blow for Careful Writing

I hereby nominate as our person of the week (actually for last week) a once-obscure district-court judge in Philly named Jacob Hart. In a story that quickly spread around the globe (including this piece in a Taiwanese paper), the judge spoke up on behalf of the English language and admonished a lawyer for his clumsy legalese as well as his even sloppier typos (including one in the judge's name!). Judge Hart lashed out at what he called a lawyer's "vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, verbose and repetitive" prose. He later told NPR that "even for trial lawyers, 90% of your work is going to occur outside a courtroom. So most of your reputation rests on what you write. Unfortunately, people think they can just hit spell-check and that takes care of it all." A hearty round of applause for the judge. Next, we suggest he turn his attention to the similarly obfuscatory strain of writing known as academese. Much of that rises above the level of misdemeanors and well into the felony range...

He'll Put Up With a Lot for the First Amendment. The British literary pub Granta occasionally rises to heights of excellence while also tending toward the highbrow obscure (it also gave us New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford, no small patrimony). I like their current package of takes on America, which allows writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have a go at the subject. But what really stood out for me was a comment by the quite elderly American writer Paul Fussell, who despite his age (around 80, I believe) still wields a savage pen that at times summons comparisons to the uniquely bracing prose of the late H.L. Mencken. He observes: "...I cannot avoid saying that my experience of abroad has in the long run deepened my fondness for America, with its nice toilets and showers and its precious First Amendment, encouraging writers to praise and damn without fear of arrest. For that, I'm willing to bear any amount of national ignorance and stupidity." Amen...The only other real competitor for the mantle of our contemporary Mencken is Chris Hitchens, but I would suggest that, while still an astonishing prose stylist and an interesting thinker (much of the time), he also seems to be coming a bit unhinged more than occasionally, as he furiously attacks once-sacred cows (Mother Theresa, Lady Di and lots of others) and tries his best to explain his own move from one-time Marxist agitator to apologist for Bush and his cronies. And his growing hostility to all forms of faith (as evidenced in this dyspeptic piece, in which he refers to Catholicism as a "cult") leaves him completely unequipped, I'm afraid, to really understand much of the world around him, which is a form of death (I almost wrote 'spiritual death') for any writer. A pity...

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Those Car Talk Bros Rule! I've somehow never gotten around to tipping the Working With Words cap at those Brilliant Boston Brothers who each week brighten our Saturday mornings with NPR's Car Talk show. It's one-part contemporary Boston Borscht Belt and one part killer car advice from a pair of MIT-trained mechanics, with some of the best pure humor anywhere in America (check out this tongue-in-cheek list of staff creditsfor the show). I'm not sure I've gotten more belly laughs over the years from any other source in any other medium--no radio or TV program, no comedian, no written pub has given me more laughs and enjoyment (with the possible exception of Seinfeld). But this last Saturday, the effervescent brothers topped even themselves with a hilarious riff they called "Tech Support." Not sure I've ever heard a segment by that name before, but so what? The beauty of the show is its complete originality. Anyway, the segment went like this: the brothers read a letter from a female listener who purported to ask for advice on her marriage after she upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0. She complained that, to her surprise, the new version came with some newly installed programs such as NFL 6.3 and MLB (for Major League Baseball) 1.0, which prevented other applications such as Flowers 3.0 and Chocolates 2.0 from working flawlessly, as they once did. Their advice: first, remember that that old boyfriend version "was an entertainment package," while the new husband version "is an operating system." And they cautioned her against overreacting by installing Mother-in-Law 2.0 or New Boyfriend 1.0, "because that will cause the system to crash." Keep it coming, Click & Clack...