What a bafflingly awful piece by Clive James in the Monthly (February 2008).
I doubt that Neil Harman will ever be regarded as a great prose stylist, even by the modest standards of tennis reporters, but he is innocent of the charge (botching an extended metaphor) levelled at him by James. Harman's words "wild card who has torn through this event" clearly apply, not to the "firing" Henman, but to his opponent, Ivanisevic. How James manages to misread this sentence, and apply these words to Henman, only he knows. In fact, he has misread the sentence twice, because the words "wild card" are not a metaphor for Henman, but a statement of fact about Ivanisevic. A "wild card" is an invitation to take part in a tournament for which the player has failed to qualify. When Harman calls Ivanisevic a "wild card", he is simply drawing attention to the fact that he was at Wimbledon that year only because he had received such an invitation. The fact that James' criticisms are garnished with references to Baudelaire doesn't obscure the fact that he has misread and misunderstood a very simple sentence. Which wouldn't matter so much if the point of the article were not for James to preen himself over the fact that he knows how to parse a sentence.
"Code-share" is certainly an inelegant phrase, but it isn't a corruption of "co-share" - James has got this one precisely the wrong way round, because "co-share" is not a newly-minted tautology but a spoken corruption of "code-share", either pronounced lazily or perhaps misheard. Again, this point is trivial, but if you're going to be a pedant, you have to be right, or you end up looking foolish.
James does not spare himself from criticism - his crime, apparently, is "too-particular writing". But how, then, to explain his assertion that "American English is the version of the language least prone to error at present"? This is a claim so broad and imprecise as to be meaningless. What does James mean by "American English" - the English spoken in Brooklyn, or Mississippi, or Malibu? The English spoken by John Updike, George W Bush or Paris Hilton? And even if we allow that such a thing as "American English" exists, to what has James compared it in reaching his conclusion? Has he really checked whether the inhabitants of Guernsey or the Cayman Islands don't use the language with unerring precision? What makes this pointless, sweeping, unprovable statement both funny and ridiculous is that it appears in a paragraph in which James laments that it's a "hard fate" to write as carefully as he does.
As Baudelaire never said, it takes someone as clever as Clive James to write something as silly as this.
