Bryan A. Garner (born Nov. 17, 1958, in Lubbock, Texas) is a lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher who has written several books about English usage and style. He is the author of Garner's Modern American Usage and editor in chief of all current editions of Black's Law Dictionary, among other titles. He has written more than 18 English-language-related books that are now in print, and they are among the most influential books on language and the law. He is president of LawProse, Inc., a Dallas company that provides seminars on writing for lawyers and judges throughout the United States--in fact, by far the biggest company engaged in this endeavor. Garner founded LawProse in 1991 and, by 2007, had trained more than 95,000 lawyers and judges in continuing-legal-education seminars. He continues to teach at Southern Methodist Law School once a year, but most of his teaching concentrates on lawyers who've already been admitted to practice--even the most senior ones. He is said to be witty, sardonic, and facetious in his six-hour lectures, which seek to persuade lawyers to give up their simplifiable (some would say silly) jargon and learn to write in humane, down-to-earth ways. That's a tall order, and Garner has always recognized it: each generation of lawyers needs to be taught the skills involved in producing straightforward English. Garner's passion for language showed first in Canyon High School, in the Panhandle of Texas, and intensified in college to such a degree that he began working on Shakespearean usage under the guidance of two early mentors, Professor John W. Velz and Professor Thomas Cable, both of the University of Texas. For his senior thesis, entitled "The Latin Element in Shakespeare," Cable proclaimed that the University should award him a Ph.D. instead of a B.A.--that his senior thesis was much better than most of the Ph.D. dissertations he'd been reading. Garner published many excerpts from this thesis, mostly notably "Shakespeare's Latinate Neologisms," and "Latin-Saxon Hybrids in Shakespeare and the Bible." These essays have been not only published but anthologized in various sources. At the University of Texas Law School in 1981, Garner began noticing odd usages in the lawbooks--many of them dating back to Shakespeare--and he decided to include them in his first real book, "A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage." That book was published by Oxford University Press in 1985 to widespread acclaim.
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Garner's Modern American Usage
Garner first authored A Dictionary of Modern American Usage in 1998. The second edition, titled Garner's Modern American Usage, was released in 2003. The books grew out of his lifelong interest in English grammar, semantics, and usage. Both editions have been well received by professional writers, linguists, and lexicographers. In the April 2001 issue of Harper's, the novelist David Foster Wallace said, "The fact of the matter is that Garner's dictionary is extremely good ... Its format ... includes entries on individual words and phrases and expostulative small-cap MINI-ESSAYS."[1] Garrison Keillor has called it one of the five most influential books in his library. Other critics, from John Simon to William Safire to Bill Walsh, have extolled the book's approach to giving guidance in a nuanced, non-hamhanded way. Michael Quinion of WorldWideWords.org noted in his review[2] that usage guides “row a course against the current of modern lexicography and linguistics,” which are descriptive fields that often fail to "meet the day-to-day needs of those users of English who want to speak and write in a way that is acceptable to educated opinion.” Quinion opined that Garner lays down rules without falling victim to “worn-out shibboleths or language superstitions.”
Other reviewers have been slightly more reserved in their praise, while acknowledging the book's virtues. Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log, the distinctly descriptive-leaning editor of the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, writes that Garner's approach is “very reasonably balanced between prescriptive and descriptive approaches.” Pullum, however, is critical of the book's failure to reflect “the progress that has been made toward correcting mistakes" in the analysis of English syntax made by 18th and 19th century linguists.[3]
See also
List of English words with disputed usage
External links
Listen to a two-hour interview [1] with Garner on KERA 90.1. You can download an mp3 podcast of the interview here: Hour 1 and Hour 2
