"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street"
About this Quote
English, for E. B. White, isn’t a chandelier you admire from a distance; it’s traffic you have to survive. By yoking “usage” to “getting across the street,” he punctures the genteel fantasy that good prose is simply the reward of refinement. Taste, judgment, education - the usual gatekeeping trio - are waved through, then promptly demoted. Sometimes you do everything right and still get clipped.
That’s the sly intent: to humble the language cop without excusing sloppy writing. White spent his life in the supposedly orderly precincts of American English, at The New Yorker and as the co-author of The Elements of Style, a book often misread as a rulebook for the righteous. This line functions as his corrective: usage isn’t a set of commandments so much as a negotiated, chaotic public space. The “rules” are real, but so are the drivers who ignore them.
The subtext is democratic and slightly grim. If correctness can hinge on luck, then linguistic status is less meritocracy than street hazard. You can be educated and still misstep because the crosswalk keeps moving: idioms shift, meanings drift, prestige dialects change their outfits. White’s joke also carries empathy for the anxious writer - the person trying to sound natural without sounding wrong, trying to arrive intact on the other side of a sentence.
It works because the metaphor is physical and immediate. Grammar becomes embodied risk, and the genteel debate over “proper usage” is revealed as a social contest with consequences, not a tea party of preferences.
That’s the sly intent: to humble the language cop without excusing sloppy writing. White spent his life in the supposedly orderly precincts of American English, at The New Yorker and as the co-author of The Elements of Style, a book often misread as a rulebook for the righteous. This line functions as his corrective: usage isn’t a set of commandments so much as a negotiated, chaotic public space. The “rules” are real, but so are the drivers who ignore them.
The subtext is democratic and slightly grim. If correctness can hinge on luck, then linguistic status is less meritocracy than street hazard. You can be educated and still misstep because the crosswalk keeps moving: idioms shift, meanings drift, prestige dialects change their outfits. White’s joke also carries empathy for the anxious writer - the person trying to sound natural without sounding wrong, trying to arrive intact on the other side of a sentence.
It works because the metaphor is physical and immediate. Grammar becomes embodied risk, and the genteel debate over “proper usage” is revealed as a social contest with consequences, not a tea party of preferences.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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