James J. Kilpatrick
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Today's New York Times has an obituary for James J. Kilpatrick ("James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice, Dies at 89", by Richard Goldstein) that focuses, as the headline promises, on Kilpatrick's career as a conservative voice in newspaper columns, books, and television appearances. In passing, Goldstein mentions Kilpatrick's (often decidedly peevish) career as a critic of grammar, usage, and stye:
Mr. Kilpatrick railed against turgid prose in "The Writer's Art" (Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1984). In his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, William Safire wrote that Mr. Kilpatrick's essays on "the vagaries of style are classics."
The Writer's Art is no longer in print, and used copies, though available, are absurdly expensive. Unfortunately, I didn't snap one up when they were on the market.
JJK played a significant role in at least eight Language Log Classic postings:
ML, 7/29/06: James J. Kilpatrick, grammarian (link)
ML, 12/11/07: Authoritarian rationalism is not conservatism (link)
ML, 12/14/07: The non-existence of Kilpatrick’s Rule (link)
ML, 2/6/08: Genitive anxiety (link)
ML, 2/12/08: The liturgy of lost causes (link)
ML, 3/26/08: James Kilpatrick, linguistic socialist (link)
ML, 3/28/08: The values of “correct grammar” (link)
GP, 3/29/08: Modesty, hod-carrying, everything but relevance (link)
On several topics (including "double genitives", as in a friend of Kim's), but especially Kilpatrick's Rule (as we called it), stipulating that only the narrow-scope reading is available for negation in combination with a universal quantifier — that is, Mass Transit Not an Option for All Drivers, for example, can mean only 'for all drivers, mass transit is not an option, for no drivers is mass transit an option', and not 'it's not the case that mass transit is an option for all drivers, for some drivers mass transit is not an option' (which is what essentially everyone gets, and conveys, as the meaning, and has done so at least since the time of Shakespeare, "All that glisters is not gold", and similar examples).
Note that he didn't say such sentences were ambiguous (with many speakers having a mere preference for the wide-scope reading), he said that they had only the narrow-scope reading, and that using them to convey the wide-scope reading was some kind of wince-making, eyeroll-provoking, groan-inducing mistake (the winces, eyerolls, and groans were in his original text). His claim was interesting in connection with the actual facts of elite usage, but much more interesting for the assumptions that could possibly have led someone to such a preposterous assertion (some kind of reasoning from first principles, combined with a strongly held belief that what is correct in language is what follows from these principles, that is, that what is correct is what should be correct — here I paraphrase, and grossly simplify, Mark Liberman's discussions.).
That's how JJK entered LLC.
He's appeared a number of times here on New Language Log, mostly in comments, and mostly in connection with themes from LLC, but occasionally on other points, like split infinitives and "split verbs", where, so far as I can tell, he seems to have taken positions that accorded with linguists' descriptions of actual (rather than fancied) standard English, though not of course for the same reasons that linguists give.
He lived to be 89, and handily survived his passionate defenses, in his 20s though his 40s, of segegation based on his conviction that "the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race" (written in 1963), a position he later attributed (in 1970, conceding that segregation was a lost cause) to his upbringing as a white boy in Oklahoma City.
None of the LLoggers ever experienced the sort of public belligerence he displayed towards those he saw (indeed, cultivated) as opponents, for example Shana Alexander on "60 Minutes", in exchanges satirized on "Saturday Night Live" by Dan Ackroyd (in the Kilpatrick role) and Jane Curtin (in the Alexander role): "Jane, you ignorant slut" / "Dan, you pompous ass".