Ms. Adult Wordpower, too

And while we’re bashing ditzy teenage beauty pageant contestants, let’s be mindful that semi-literacy is also a problem at The New York Times. On Monday, while reporting that MTV Networks has chosen John Ashbery as its Poet Laureate, Times reporter Melena Ryzik committed the following disaster to print:

“Mr. Ashbery too was pleased by their choices, particularly because they reminded him of what was in his own canon.”

Has the word canon become so debased in common parlance to mean, generally, oeuvre? The Oxford English Dictionary, in a 2002 addendum to the latest edition online, notes that canon can mean “In extended use (esp. with reference to art or music): a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field. Freq. with qualifying word.”

So, yes, canon has been watered down to signify almost any collection of must-read texts (or must-see artworks or must-hear musical compositions), or rather, perhaps ‘restored’ is more apt than ‘watered down,’ for in ancient Greek usage, the source word for our canon was used in a fairly similar way; however, one thing regarding canon has not changed, and indeed, cannot change without yielding up an altogether different concept: canons require communities. In Canons and Creativity, literary critic Robert Alter provides a brilliant summary of what, exactly, a canon is:

“A canon is above all a transhistorical textual community. Knowledge of the received texts and recourse to them constitute the community.”

So, in Ms. Ryzik’s formulation, it would appear that someone’s “own canon” contains an audience of one. How very Ashberian. While Mr. Ashbery might delight in such philological shenanigans, it would be far simpler to say that Ms. Ryzik’s knowledge of the word canon and its proper usage is about as thoroughgoing as our beauty pageant contestant’s grasp of geography instruction.