Foreword
With introducers like me， Jim Quinn may not need enemies.
I m prepared to grant (whether granted by me or not it will be
instantly apparent to every sane reader) that American Tongue
and Cheek is a wonderfully lively send-up of contemporary lan-
guage correctors--Edwin Newman， William Satire， John Simon，
that lot. But some themes in the beck bother me. To begin with，
I don t buy Quinn s denial of the connection between bad thinking
and bad writing. The reasoning behind the denial is familiar:
Pound， Eliot， and Yeats， good writers， flirted or worse with fas-
cism， therefore they must be bad thinkers， therefore quality of
writing and quality of thought aren t related. (For the edification
of left-leaning radicals Quinn extends his point， using Auden as
his example of a good writer who flirted or worse with COmmu-
nism.) This is， I think， shaky stuff? Wrong-headed they were on
occasion， even cruel--the poets Quinn names--but they weren t
negligible as interpreters of history or as critics of the cultural life
of mass urban authors who， unlike themselves， remained skeptical of totalitari-
anism derives from the intensity of their responsiveness--both as
thinkers and as writers--te the social change occurring in front
of their eyes. And dismissing the results of that responsiveness---
Eliot s admittedly sniffish but everywhere provocative Notes To-
ward the Definition of Culture， for instance--as bad thinking but
good writing is foolishness.
Count one: here and there Jim Quinn oversimplifies.
Count two: Quinn oRen seems to deny the existence of any
substantial ground for preferring one usage to another. I have no
quarrel， as I say， with the case the author brings against the
prissy purists he calls pop grammarians. These fellows， who ve
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