May 16, 2006

Cutting in line: what would Of Nazareth do?

Mark Steyn's review "The Da Vinci Code: bad writing for Biblical illiterates" starts like this:

It's a good rule in this line of work to respect a hit. But golly, The Da Vinci Code makes it hard. At the start of the book, Dan Brown pledges, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." It's everything else that's hokum, beginning with the title, whose false tinkle testifies to Brown's penchant for weirdly inauthentic historicity. Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or those computer-generated letters that write to the Duke of Wellington as "Dear Mr. Duke, you may already have won!"

This paragraph is just about the only part of what Steyn has to say about Dan Brown's book that is not strikingly similar to a Language Log post by Geoff Pullum. That's not to say, however, that it's original.

Actually, Geoff Pullum's 1/18/2005 post "The Kaleidoscope of Power" did say of The Da Vinci Code:

Even the title contains a linguistic error, Adam Gopnik claims in this week's issue of The New Yorker. Leonardo came from Vinci. Da Vinci is not a name. It's a prepositional phrase, like of Nazareth in Jesus of Nazareth. What would Of Nazareth do?

But Geoff credits Adam Gopnik. And this witticism is apparently not original to Gopnik either. A very similar point is made in a post by Emily in the weblog "it comes in pints?", dated almost a year earlier:

Though it still grinds me a little when people refer to Leonardo Da Vinci as Da Vinci, which is like calling William of Orange Of Orange. [March 18, 2004]

And the "of Nazareth" version is used on a web page that claims to have last been modified in October of 2004:

Also, Brown refers to Leonardo da Vinci, as "Da Vinci" , all through his book. Since "Da Vinci" means literally, "of Vinci", that would be the same as us calling Jesus, "of Nazareth", instead of, Jesus, of Nazareth ! [apparently October 26, 2004 or earlier]

The "da Vinci is like of X" meme has been picked up widely: on September 27, 2005, Jay Nordlinger wrote in the National Review:

Okay, a little language, and a little art. I want to say: Et tu, Antonin? While at the Juilliard School the other day, Justice Scalia referred to "da Vinci" — meaning, Leonardo. I'm surprised at him.

The mistake of referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" is so entrenched, I'm afraid it's uncorrectable. I have had to fight with editors about this: You say "Leonardo," and they want to say "da Vinci," thinking it's his last name — thinking it's the same as saying "Reynolds." They think that, when you say "Leonardo," you're saying the equivalent of "Joshua." Actually, to say "da Vinci" is to say "of Orange," instead of "William."

Nordlinger quotes from Charles Moore's Spectator Diary "not long ago" (i.e. not long before September 2005):

My colleague Christopher Howse has pointed out that you can tell that The Da Vinci Code is rubbish just by its name. Students of art refer to the man in question as 'Leonardo', 'Da Vinci' being simply the identifier of his town of origin. So Dan Brown's title is the equivalent of a book about Jesus being called Of Nazareth. [That is much better than my "of Orange" example.]

(The passage in blue is Nordlinger's quote from Moore; the remark in square brackets is Nordlinger's comment on that quote.)

Depending on when Moore's piece actually ran (I'm not willing to pay 50 pounds for a subscription to The Spectator in order to find out), Moore's colleague Howse may have have misled him about the source of the "Of Nazareth" joke by failing to cite Gopnik. But this doesn't matter much, in my opinion -- it seems likely that some form of this insight has been commonplace among intellectuals for a while. It certainly pre-dates Gopnik, and it wouldn't suprise me to find a similar remark -- some re-phrasing of <referring to Leonardo as 'da Vinci' is like referring to X of Y as 'of Y'> -- dating from many years before.

However, it's worth noting that Pullum and Nordlinger both take the trouble to make it clear that the remark is not original to them. Steyn, in contrast, does not. As a result, quite a few bloggers have credited him with brilliance for trotting out his version of this well-worn witticism. For example:

Who looks at the world in quite the way Mark Steyn does? Here he's putting The Da Vinci Code into perspective:

It's everything else that's hokum, beginning with the title, whose false tinkle testifies to Brown's penchant for weirdly inauthentic historicity. Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or those computer-generated letters that write to the Duke of Wellington as "Dear Mr. Duke, you may already have won!"

Another one:

Steyn wins in a knockout. It wasn't really even a fair fight:

It's a good rule in this line of work to respect a hit. But golly, The Da Vinci Code makes it hard. At the start of the book, Dan Brown pledges, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." It's everything else that's hokum, beginning with the title, whose false tinkle testifies to Brown's penchant for weirdly inauthentic historicity. Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or those computer-generated letters that write to the Duke of Wellington as "Dear Mr. Duke, you may already have won!"

And another:

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn (the Da Vinci Code)

Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or those computer-generated letters that write to the Duke of Wellington as "Dear Mr. Duke, you may already have won!"

Or again:

A Steyn-slap to the Da Vinci Code. Nobody does it better. [emphasis added]

But in fact another writer did it at least as well, and in almost exactly the same way, and earlier. This sort of reputational mis-attribution is just what Jonathan Baron was writing about in his post "Plagiarism as probabilistic harm":

Plagiarism exists only as part of a system in which people are rewarded for their work. The reward in these cases is primarily reputation, or a personal record. [...]

When people pass off someone else's work as their own, they butt into the queue. This weakens the system and makes it less trustworthy. The harm from such weakening is probabilistic and not always noticed immediately.

Let me say at this point that I've been a fan of Mark Steyn's writing for some time. He's opinionated, clear, memorable and often very witty. For example, read the opening of his May 7, 2006 column "Moussaoui gets life, the terrorists win":

"America, you lose," said Zacarias Moussaoui as he was led away from the court last week.

Hard to disagree. Not just because he'll be living a long life at taxpayers' expense. He'd have had a good stretch of that even if he'd been "sentenced to death," which in America means you now spend more years sitting on Death Row exhausting your appeals than the average "life" sentence in Europe. America "lost" for a more basic reason: turning a war into a court case and upgrading the enemy to a defendant ensures you pretty much lose however it turns out. And the notion, peddled by some sappy member of the ghastly 9/11 Commission on one of the cable yakfests last week, that jihadists around the world are marveling at the fairness of the U.S. justice system, is preposterous. The leisurely legal process Moussaoui enjoyed lasted longer than America's participation in the Second World War. Around the world, everybody's enjoying a grand old laugh at the U.S. justice system.

Except for Saddam Hussein, who must be regretting he fell into the hands of the Iraqi justice system. Nine out of 12 U.S. jurors agreed that the "emotional abuse" Moussaoui suffered as a child should be a mitigating factor. Saddam could claim the same but his jury isn't operating to the legal principles of the Oprahfonic Code.

Whether or not you agree with Steyn's sentiments, you have to admit that this is brilliant writing. "Upgrading the enemy to a defendant" and "the Oprahfonic Code" are particularly nice touches, in my opinion. And as far as Google knows, these phrases are original to Steyn, as is the observation that Moussaoui's trial lasted longer than America's engagement in WWII. I bet that all the rest of it is original Steyn too, though I haven't checked.

My own experience has been that the students who engage in the more subtle forms of plagiarism are often among the smartest and most verbally adept. Something similar seems to be true of Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kaavya Viswanathan and the like. Such people are not borrowing in order to make up for their inadequacies, it seems, but in order to help establish or maintain a reputation that they have every reason to believe that they deserve.

[By the way, Steyn could have found a better replacement for his Duke of Wellington example (also a variant of an old joke) by looking in Geoff's August 26, 2004 post "A letter from the Lord Quirk". And if he'd cited it as Pullum cited Gopnik or as Nordlinger cited Moore, he'd have been welcome to it.]

Posted by Mark Liberman at May 16, 2006 12:08 AM