{"id":1409,"date":"2010-06-18T16:37:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T20:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2010-10-27T12:59:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T16:59:19","slug":"open-letter-to-the-awl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/06\/18\/open-letter-to-the-awl\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter to The Awl"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Brothers and sisters, with all respect, your <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theawl.com\/2010\/06\/the-snuck-wars-round-two\">declaration of war<\/a> is an admission of defeat. We beg you to reconsider this folly.<\/p>\n<p>First you tell us\u2014in what begins to sound like a rage-filled howl against the light\u2014that there is \u201cno such word as <em>snuck<\/em>.\u201d Then you send us a link to an Internet site, where we learn that <em>snuck<\/em> \u201chas reached the point where it is a virtual rival of <em>sneaked<\/em> in many parts of the English-speaking world.\u201d With enemies like that, who needs friends?<\/p>\n<p>You instruct us to look at the OED, yet when we do, we find not only a <em>snuck<\/em> entry there (\u201cchiefly U.S. pa. tense and pple. of <em>sneak<\/em> v.\u201d), but also dozens of usage citations, going back to the nineteenth century, many of which are taken from such known language slouches as Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner . . .<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Faulkner, the coincidence of our being crackers is not, as you imply, irrelevant in this case. The very first appearances of <em>snuck<\/em> are almost exclusively Southern, and opposition to it has always been inseparable from the idea that it sounds country, or vulgar, or demotic.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s probably why the dear \u201cass-people\u201d at your high school taught you never to say <em>snuck<\/em>. They wanted the best for you, and didn&#8217;t want your college professors making fun of you in class. That&#8217;s only proper. High school is the time and place for rigid prescriptivism of the kind you&#8217;re trying to put over on us. Later on, though, you put away high-school things. You wake up to the idea that English is an ocean, full of words that live, change, and die, and that your task is not to fix them in place but to master their flow, as best a person can.<\/p>\n<p>A story I heard during the course of my own education changed my mind forever on this subject. When William Tyndale was doing his translation of the New Testament in the sixteenth century&mdash;the one that got him killed&mdash;there was a certain ancient word for which he lacked an English equivalent. His solution was to mash together a French word, <em>beauty<\/em>, and an old Saxon one, <em>full<\/em>. That&#8217;s how we got <em>beautiful<\/em>. By your logic, we should stop using it, since, after all, it wasn&#8217;t a word. Nothing is, until it is.<\/p>\n<p><em>Snuck<\/em> is a beautiful, almost onomatopoeic word. We&#8217;ve asked you for a good reason not to use it. In return you&#8217;ve given us the opinions of a long-ago ass-person (enjoyable term in itself&mdash;your coinage?). That person has been oppressing you. Set yourself free. <\/p>\n<p>Yours in the cause,<br \/>\nJJS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brothers and sisters, with all respect, your declaration of war is an admission of defeat. We beg you to reconsider this folly. First you tell us\u2014in what begins to sound like a rage-filled howl against the light\u2014that there is \u201cno such word as snuck.\u201d Then you send us a link to an Internet site, where [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1087],"tags":[231,235,252,251],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letter-from-our-southern-editor","tag-grammar","tag-the-awl","tag-the-snuck-wars","tag-william-tyndale"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Open Letter to The Awl by John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 18, 2010 \u2013 Brothers and sisters, with all respect, your declaration of war is an admission of defeat. 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