a small (and yes slightly peevish) sign of ‘Commentary”s decline

by on March 20, 2009 14

Whatever else you could say about Commentary Magazine in the old days under Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy, it had intellectual rigor. Both editors had literary chops. Podhoretz, it goes without saying– he has a first-rate mind (in the service of poor judgment, apparently unbalanced by black boys on the streets of Brooklyn when he was a kid). Kozodoy helped produce a historical classic, Jacob Katz's Out of the Ghetto, among other books. 
Now Commentary is edited by men from a journalistic/hasbara background: John Podhoretz, whose gadfly reputation is captured by his internet handle, Jpod, and Jonathan Tobin, a journalist who used to edit the Jewish Exponent.  The latest Commentary has a piece by Jonathan Gurwitz, of the San Antonio Express-News, about Christian Zionists. I got to the second paragraph and this phrase: "[Pastor John Hagee's] call went out to some 100,000 leaders across America, whom CUFI says helped spread the message to millions more."
The correct relative pronoun is "who." the leaders who helped spread the message. It's a pet peeve: writers who use whom when who is correct. This would never have gotten thru in the old days…

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, US Politics

{ 14 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Jim Haygood says:
    March 21, 2009 at 12:32 am

    Phil:

    Peevish isn't the word for it. Your posts here are a fingernail away from being illiterate, so I'd be careful. Yes, it's different for "print," but come on!

  2. kylebisme says:
    March 21, 2009 at 2:43 am

    Don't derive more meaning out of "Happy new year" than it's worth, especially not with him asking them to join up. Unless Obama says the settlers each have to either renounce Israeli citizenship to become Palestinians or go, this year won't get us any close to resolve the conflict than the last.

  3. LeaNder says:
    March 21, 2009 at 7:11 am

    This isn't good old "Jim Haygood" either. The perspective is clearly the by now well known of our spoofing activist.

    I still wonder why the name Jim Haygood is so attractive to this gent.

  4. Richard says:
    March 21, 2009 at 7:20 am

    Aguing grammmar with opposites should be beneath you.

  5. Scott says:
    March 21, 2009 at 8:12 am

    This is a funny post, and many in journalism have heard "leaks" about JPods editing abilities. I still puzzle over "which" and "that" however.

  6. Observer says:
    March 21, 2009 at 8:34 am

    LeaNder is perceptive–It's not Jim Haygood, but rather our old ID thief, imposter Bill Pearlman (aka SOG aka Chris Berel, his two most used pen names inter alia–especially Chris Berel since January). Bill will probably pick a new real name to use in his mix now that his use of Jim Haygood's name has become so transparent.

  7. LeaNder says:
    March 21, 2009 at 8:58 am

    Usage has shifted concerning "which" and "that" over the last century, so if you read older texts occasionally your confusion would be easy to understand, and usage doesn't seem to be as uniform as grammarian's would like it to be. I think our brain collects more data than we are aware of, including the occasional habit of storing data in the wrong "departments".

    I have to admit I tend towards usage versus grammarians:

    Older grammar books make two firm points about the difference between the two types of clause:

  8. Restrictive clauses are introduced by that and are not separated from the rest of the sentence by commas.
  9. Non-restrictive clauses are introduced by which and must be separated by commas from the rest of the sentence to indicate parenthesis.

    10. This makes the whole matter seem neat and simple. But few writers have ever followed these rules systematically, and it’s easy to find examples in which which is used to start a restrictive clause. Sir Ernest Gowers, writing in the 1965 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, comments rather sadly about this situation:

    If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.

    My problem is "which" doesn't feel non-restrictive to me. "Show me which?" Which – whichever? In German the equivalent for "which" (welcher, welche, welches) feels occasionally clumsy compared to the alternatively used relative pronoun (der, die, das), in English it doesn't. I just realized there is a similar debate concerning German usage, where I seem to be more on the side of grammarians paradoxically.

    But thanks, I'll watch that more closely now.

  10. William P. Fitzgerald III says:
    March 21, 2009 at 11:28 am

    There are more restrictive and non-restrictive clauses in the grammar books under heaven and earth, LeaNder and Phil, than are preceded by that and which or who and whom. With apologies to you know who, or is it whom?

    This has been submitted by an overly compusive comma inserter.

    WPFIII

  11. LeaNder says:
    March 21, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    Dead-on, William III, you hit the mark. I usually handle commas slightly carelessly. Althoug strictly, I find the English rules more plausible.

    But "who" usually is a subject and "whom" object, no?

    "whom CUFI says helped spread the message to millions more."

    I probably would have done it like this:

    ,who, CUFI says, helped spread the message to millions more.

    Ah, was that your point? Enigma William III?

  12. Citizen says:
    March 21, 2009 at 4:22 pm

    dunno but it was an accurate point, LeaNder

  13. LeaNder says:
    March 21, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    Citizen, if somebody mentions grammar or missing commas, I immediately have a guilty conscience. In that case I'll do my very best and sound as if I was very, very familiar with these matters. ;)

    I cut a longer more private note on my English teacher in highschool, he invented a special test for me. 20 sentences all containing errors. You had to find the mistake which gave you 1/3 of the points 2/3 you got for knowing the respective rule by heart. Full 2/3 for the same phrasing as in the grammar book. Verbal variations led to deductions.

    I decided to choose physics after that year. For whatever reason my math and physics teachers were the best.

    The longer note was about, what I found out about that teacher not long ago. I had always suspected it.

  14. Citizen says:
    March 22, 2009 at 12:11 pm

    LeaNder, and what did you find out about that teacher you had always suspected?

  15. LeaNder says:
    March 23, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    I just deleted a longer and more private note.

    I suspected him to be part of an old Nazi cadre. There was a simple rule. The authoritarian teachers all had basically supported the Nazis, the non-authoritarian even in post-war Germany had to go into some kind of inner immigration under his rules. There weren't only strict and utterly absurd rules for the students, but also for the teachers, a friend pointed this out to me, when I came to this school, after my family moved back to the South. You had to study the signs, the results to realize them.

    "He taught me" to completely freeze every mine, every face muscle, when he insulted me. I didn't want him to feel he succeeded. I had nightmares for decades to come about him. Series of nightmares sometimes.

  16. Margaret says:
    March 27, 2009 at 3:10 am

    LeaNder, I got a drop F for being five minutes late to class at the third occurence. Which probably saved me enormous angst, much more than it caused.

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