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I Understand Internet Writing, but Would a Little Style, Clarity, and Grace Kill Us?
Robert Hartwell Fiske: A Micro-Appreciation
“No damsel was ever in such distress, no drayhorse more flogged, no defenseless child more drunkenly abused than the English language today.” John Simon, New York magazine movie critic for 38 years, writing the Forward to Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Disagreeable English
Joseph Epstein called Robert Hartwell Fiske a “word man.” His premature death in 2016 was a great loss to the English language.
Fiske wrote about proper grammar and good style in the early 2000s, when such things were being demolished by digital prose like a tsunami destroying a beach-front restaurant. He even tried to battle the tsunami on its own (lack of) ground, publishing a splendid online journal, The Vocabula Review, for nearly twenty years before his death in 2016.
Fiske published two of my essays. Although I received no pay, the acceptance pleased me since the great Joseph Epstein praised Fiske’s work, so that meant I was only one nerd removed from greatness. Granted, it didn’t make…
