Tossing aside the notion of secrecy or the expected discretion, she described furniture built from coffins, goblets created from severed human skulls, gas-light fixtures made from human bone-and the coup de grâce, a mysterious urn presented to her as a gift that held the cremains of a man. Diablo!” Omene dramatically described the club's quarters to the San Francisco Morning Call on June 10, 1893. "It was, in fact, a regular chamber of horrors–far worse indeed than anything I have witnessed before … there was nothing else but skulls and bones and coffins. So when Omene, a natural self-promoter with a knack for entrancing journalists, came on the scene in 1889, she gained national notoriety.īut it was one particular encounter at a secretive Chicago newspapermen’s club, now known as the “Coffin Dance,” that made the belly dancer, as well as the members of Whitechapel, infamous. “I'm from out of town,” Fallows explains, somewhat apologetically, then adds, “I'm sure the Atlantic has never used the term.Above: A 1945 Tribune story tells the tale of the famously macabre Whitechapel Club.Īt the end of the 19th century, America had still never seen a belly dancer.
“I've never heard that one,” an admission that provokes a guffaw from this class of humanities majors. “How about problematize?” someone wants to know. Another often misused word, it simply means “creating problems.”
It means wretched, nauseating excess, as in ‘fulsome praise.’” “‘The enormity of Obama's achievement’ would be a Tea Party sentiment.” Fulsome is another example. “This does not have to do with size,” says Fallows, but means monstrous, horrible, evil. Meanwhile, Fallows is quizzing students on uncommon words that are often confused with common ones, such as enormity. “Please let's don't quote this lie/lay error and therefore contribute to the national epidemic of this yokel usage.” About another writer, who had the temerity to call himself “Jeff” in his byline, Whitworth observes, “Ernie Hemingway, Bob Penn Warren, Bill Faulkner, and Jim Joyce all advise against this.” About yet another: “He's no writer. No one knows the difference between nauseated and nauseous (if you're nauseated, you're sick if you're nauseous, you're making other people sick).ĭuring the lecture, a copy of Please Let's Don't, a hardbound collection of marginalia by former Atlantic editor William Whitworth, makes it way around the room. When Fallows throws out questions such as, “What's the difference between persuade and convince?” just a few students know the answer (you persuade someone to act, you convince someone to believe). It soon becomes obvious that the secret-revealing session is necessary. “If there's a violation of a rule,” says Fallows, “and fixing it makes it ugly, start from scratch.” “I'm told that Schlimmbesserung means an improvement that makes things worse.” It does. “The more of these you're aware of,” Fallows says, “the more grace notes there will be in your writing.” But there are “gradations of usage,” he says, and editors at publications such as the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books are highly attuned to them.
Of course the idea of correct grammar has its critics, Fallows says, including his own wife, who insists-as linguists do-that there is no such thing as proper usage. “But an accumulation of these details marks a sophisticated versus an unsophisticated command of the English language.”
“There's no one secret,” says Fallows, longtime correspondent for the Atlantic and author of numerous books, including Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (2006) and Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2009). To the chosen few in his Art of Nonfiction course, he will “reveal the secrets of usage and grammar.” Halfway through spring quarter, James Fallows, the Robert Vare Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence, promises to initiate a small group of undergraduates into a very exclusive club. Eye on the Quads Secret Society James Fallows teaches about right, wrong, and shades of gray in grammar.
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