Two reviews of the same book. Same pages, same arguments, same thesis about the history of pedantry. And yet Colin Burrow's LRB piece and Clare Bucknell's NYRB take might as well be describing two different species of razor clam. The one is frabjous, writhing with etymological joy and sideways lunges; the other, by all accounts, is a more decorous affair. Burrow's review, as our own Language Hat notes, is so expressive in itself that it demands its own post. And that's the thing about words: they're not just vehicles for meaning, they're the meaning. We've said it before, in a different key, when we noted that Still You, Just With More Vocabulary: Why Language Doesn't Change Who We Are, the self doesn't dissolve when you swap a synonym. But Burrow's review suggests the opposite: that the *way* a thing is said changes what it says, and that a review can be so stylistically alive that it becomes its own artifact, a footnote that swallows the text.
We're not going to pretend we've read Visser's *On Pedantry* cover to cover. But we've read enough reviews to know the difference between a critic who summarizes and one who performs. Burrow isn't just writing about pedantry; he's doing it, lovingly, obsessively, with the zeal of someone who has found a kindred spirit in a 16th-century marginalia. And that's the real takeaway here, the one that matters for anyone who writes, reads, or thinks for a living: a review is not a verdict. It's a conversation. Sometimes it's a conversation with the book, sometimes with the author, and sometimes it's a conversation with the entire history of the language itself. Burrow's review is the latter. It's the kind of writing that makes you want to immediately look up the Proto-Germanic root of "pedant" (we won't, but you could), and it's the kind of thing that reminds us why we bother with this whole messy enterprise of putting words on pages in the first place.
What does this mean for you, the reader, in practical terms? It means you should stop worrying about whether you're reading the "right" review. You're not. There is no right review. There are only doors. Burrow's review is a door that opens onto a room full of dictionary men and their obsessions; Bucknell's is a window onto the same room, but with better light and less dust. Both are worth peeking through, but only one of them will make you laugh out loud on public transit. And here's the thing we'd tell you if you asked us directly: don't read either one to decide whether to buy the book. Read them both to decide whether you want to live in their heads for a while. The book will still be there. The reviews won't. And if you're the kind of person who circles back, who already has a tab open on that, you already knew this was never about the book anyway. It's about the burrow. The spooty, sideways, gloriously excessive burrow. Watch for the moment Burrow stops writing about pedantry and starts weaponizing it, that's when you'll know he's won.
