David Foster Wallace Quote
If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Hypothesis to be included as a valid theory in the textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply or aspect for perspective, these usages become ipso facto valid parts of the language. The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they’re pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the facts they are recording. It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re observing and tabulating, but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an authoritative ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do. Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories.
If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Hypothesis to be included as a valid theory in the textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply or aspect for perspective, these usages become ipso facto valid parts of the language. The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they’re pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the facts they are recording. It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re observing and tabulating, but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an authoritative ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do. Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories.
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About David Foster Wallace
Wallace grew up in Illinois. He graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His honors thesis at Amherst, about modal logic, was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). In his writing, Wallace intentionally avoided tropes of postmodern art such as irony or forms of metafiction, saying in 1990 that they were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. Infinite Jest, his second novel, is known for its unconventional narrative structure and extensive use of endnotes.
Wallace published three short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989); Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), which was adapted into a 2009 film; and Oblivion: Stories (2004). His short stories and essays were published in outlets like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines, and three collections of his essays were published as books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997); Consider the Lobster (2005); and Both Flesh and Not (2012). Wallace also taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
In 2008, after struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.