THE BLUNDER BOARD -- Message 4

From a sharp-eyed lady living in Kentucky, who takes Anthony to school (we’ve inserted page numbers for her references):

We love the blog. We used to attend St. Gertrude church in Sharonville and had to listen to all Father Cekada’s pretentious little side remarks in his rambling sermons. We knew there was no substance behind his smirk, but no one dared expose him because they didn’t want to be kicked out of the cult. My family couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Believe me, the SSPX church we found was an oasis.

My pet peeve about writers today is redundancy. It shows how shallow they are. WHH is brimming with redundancies. Did you Readers catch “didactic Bible History lesson,” [p. 331], “Jewish Seder” [p. 289], “defy any logic or linear reasoning” [p. 172], “Jewish Qehal…of the Old Testament” [p. 34], “high-voltage third rail,” [p. 2], and “both elaborate and complex” [p. 175]?

There are loads more in the book. Father writes like a backward high schooler.

The Reader replies: Observations such as the above underscore our principal contention: In the world of academic writing, Anthony Cekada is a stranger in a strange land. Redundancies are failures of prose and thought – sure signs of an inferior education as well as tokens of a lazy mind. Hence they amount to an automatic disqualification to participate at any level in the forum of ideas. In Thomistic psychology, we would say that Fr. Cekada never acquired the habit of knowing; in other words, he was never delivered from the bad condition of being involved in error contrary to the truth.*

A formal education furnishes us with certain habitual preferences – virtuous biases, if you will — for privileged discourse. If we’ve had demanding, well-trained teachers working in legitimate educational institutions, there are forms of expression we can never bring ourselves to use in serious writing, notwithstanding the opinions of learned revisionists. It’s very similar to our ingrained disposition for the traditional Latin rite: no matter what the modernist liturgical experts may have argued, we cannot forsake our allegiance to the Tridentine Mass.

For those of us who were educated during the ’50s and ’60s (the same years during which Fr. Cekada came of age but without acquiring the old culture), we find it impossible to ignore the strictures of uncompromising nuns and priests who loathed redundancies, clichés, non-standard diction, unstructured paragraphing, misuse of correlatives, etc. When we entered college, a stable curriculum reinforced all the partialities of our mentors and sanctioned those wayward undergraduates who embraced the emerging verbal laxness of a new and barbarous age. For that reason, today I still am unable to write (although I occasionally say) “the reason why.” I know the peerless Fowler merely condemned the expression as a hazy “tautological overlap”; linguistically I understand Bryan Garner’s defense of the usage as idiomatic though mildly redundant; and I can almost see Theodore Bernstein’s point that the “why is necessary more often than it is dispensable.” Nevertheless, I cannot shake the memory of my professor, a learned domestic prelate with a doctorate in American literature, who commanded in red pencil on the paper of a brilliant friend (who thought Tennyson had given her license): Omit why—redundant! **

Anthony Cekada, not even a minor talent, has no store of cautionary memories to prevent him from writing in the language that really informs his mind: Madison-Avenue slogans, commercial jingles, sitcom punch lines, and the undisciplined journalese of the mass media. There is no quiet voice within counseling him to think twice about what he just wrote, not to be content with the ready phrase his innate sloth proposes, and to search for a fresh expression. How can there be such a voice without formal education or the common sense to remedy an obvious deficit by the assiduous study of what words really mean? His contentment with his ignorance means that, in addition to enduring laughable redundancies, we must suffer insipid mixed metaphors like “the prayers…had shrouded holy things in an obscurity which only the wisdom of Augé and company were now able to dispel” (p. 222).***

It’s clear that Fr. Cekada prefers senseless fluency to reflective, labored prose composition. The thoughtlessness of his “semiconscious writing” (to borrow Garner’s phrase) is as undeniable a symptom of a necrotic intellect as putrefaction is of wet gangrene. We repeat what we have avowed all along: the sheer incompetence of Anthony Cekada’s style, his flaccid argumentation, and his ghastly errors of language and fact are an affront to the discerning reader. As Fowler notes, if an “author writes loosely he probably thinks loosely also, and is therefore not worth attention.” ****

* De anima, Lectio 11, §§359 & 363.

** Anthony Cekada’s alienation from the academic culture of the mid-20^th century extends far beyond redundancies and threadbare phraseology to choice diction. For instance, on page 183 he wrote, “…the early Christians were not as [read so] enthusiastic about bare walls as the modernists might like to have us believe.” No one taught him back then that, in negative statements, the so…as construction is superior to as…as.

*** Dispel means to rid by driving away or scattering (Latin, dispellere); a thoughtful writer would have written something like unveil, unwrap, or uncover (if he hadn't been tempted to use the battered and tired "shrouded"). Perhaps Father had in mind the overused "mist" metaphor.

**** Under the article “tautology” (2^nd sedition)