They have stopped laughing, at least. Larry pours her more wine. Daphne flips through the volume of Quintilian.
“It’s not the accent or what a babysitter will say to Charlotte,” Laurel says. “It’s what I’ll miss. I don’t want to miss it. I don’t have to miss it. I just want to be with my daughter. That’s all. It’s not that complicated.”
“Well, maybe you’ll come back next year,” Gravit says, returning to his meal. “But I do think you should leave poor old Quintilian out of it.”
MO´THER. n.s. [moðon, Saxon; moder, Danish; moeder, Dutch.] 2. That which has produced any thing.
—A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
The first year that Laurel stayed home, she read nothing, rarely watched television, and saw virtually no one. Even her phone calls with her sister were neglected in the new world of Charlotte, the baby.
“You can never talk,” Daphne said. “We’re always interrupted. I have no time, either, you know.”
“I know. It’s chaos. I’m sorry. Maybe she wants to be fed. I’ll call you later.”
But later, Charlotte would need a diaper change. Or all her miniature pieces of laundry would need to be washed and dried and folded. Or Laurel would need to go to the market to buy bananas.
On each excursion to the butcher or the bakery, Laurel rolled the carriage through the streets like a stranger in an even stranger land, detached from the noise and the energy, and she felt both resentful and grateful that the outer world had so little to do with her and her child.
“It’s almost idyllic, to be so isolated,” she told Larry. “Or mythic. Epic? Biblical?”
“You forgot Shakespearean and operatic.”
“No, not twisted enough for Shakespeare, not broad enough for opera. Just overwhelming and otherworldly and quotidian.”
She was happy enough, however, to find a playgroup for her daughter when Charlotte was two—the idyll was becoming exhausting. A few hours to herself—yes, that would do nicely. A few more hours when preschool started next year? Well, yes, even better. Did Laurel stay in her daughter’s classroom just a bit longer in the morning than she needed to, just to make sure Charlotte was settled and happy? Perhaps. Did she wait impatiently at dismissal time each afternoon at the door to the school? Probably. It was not an easy transition. But Laurel was, nevertheless, preparing her reentry into the world.
“By reading Fowler’s Modern English Usage?” Larry asked. He turned the faded blue volume over in his hands, sniffed it, made a face, and gave it back to her.
Laurel put it on her bedside table. The 1967 sixth printing, second edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, a high school graduation gift from Daphne. The dedication neatly printed in their secret twin language translated, simply, as: “Off we go! Love forever, Daphne.” It was a book to read randomly, and she began thumbing through it.
“I miss all my words,” she said. “I wish I had our old dictionary. The new one is so different.”
“The new one? You mean the one that came out in 1961? The one that is a quarter century old?”
“Yes. It’s full of newfangled ideas. Fowler’s is full of oldfangled ideas.”
But, reading Fowler’s, Laurel was surprised at how newfangled some of his old ideas were. Here was a book that she had always thought of as holding language to the highest possible standards, an Edwardian don with a switch and a sorrowful expression. She hadn’t looked at the book in years, but Fowler’s was Fowler’s, at least Fowler’s ought to have been Fowler’s.
She was at first comforted to see that using “ample” with nouns that denote substances of indefinite quantity, like “coal” or “water,” rather than restricting it to nouns denoting immaterial or abstract things, like “time” or “courage,” was “natural and unexceptionable.” She had never said “there is ample water” or “there is ample coal,” and she doubted she ever would, partly because there wasn’t ample water or ample coal on the planet, and partly because she rarely used the word “ample” except with the word “bosom,” and she did not have all that much opportunity for that.
She moved along on the page to “analogy,” a long entry, almost an essay, which celebrated the instinctive ingenuity that allows people to make a new word using an analogy to an old word. More than one “book”? “Books”! We know to add an s to make it plural because we have already learned that more than one hat, say, is described by the word “hats.” Analogy. Daphne was charmed by Fowler’s affection—there really seemed no other word for it—for made-up words, though the words were more discovered than created. For if someone created a word that did not fit the correct pattern, it was not a proper word at all. It was the result of a phenomenon Fowler called “faulty word formation.” See also Hybrids and Malformations.
“The total poll midway in December was 16,244 so that upward of half the electors were abstentients”—the words of a journalist cited as an example of this transgression, though the journalist himself was not named, perhaps to protect him from angry Fowlerites incensed by his creation of a new word (“abstentients”) based on a false analogy with “dissentients.” If the anonymous journalist had remembered the Latin verb abstinere, a correct “analogy would have led him to ‘abstinents.’”
Laurel laughed. How many journalists these days would remember their Latin verbs when trying to come up with a word for more than one voter who did not vote? Daphne? She imagined her sister changing “abstentients” to “abstinents” in DownTown and explaining the correction to a writer bug-eyed with rage. In reality, Daphne, even Daphne, would do what Fowler ultimately suggested: she would write “half the voters abstained.”
Why did half the voters abstain? Laurel wondered. There was not the faintest indication in Fowler’s entry of what the vote was about.
She rubbed her eyes. Fowler’s was literally musty, which showed how long it had been since she’d cracked open the volume, and her eyes stung.
Dead specimens of unsound analogical bases—they were everywhere, Fowler admitted. “Who thinks of ‘chaotic,’ ‘operatic,’ ‘dilation,’ and ‘direful’ as malformations? Yet none of them has any right to exist…” Except, they do exist, and by existing, “have now all the rights of words regularly made. They have prospered, and none dare call them treason…”
Word formation. Even the thought made Laurel uneasy. Here was Fowler, the arbiter, the authority, the last word of the last generation that cared about word usage, implying that distinguished, dignified words were themselves once new words, ungainly words, hobbledehoy words.
She felt vaguely disloyal. To what? To whom? She closed the book, turned off the light, went to sleep.
“I think I have been intellectually understimulated,” she said to Larry the next day.
“I can’t help you there.”
“No. You can’t.”
They were taking a walk in the late, light summer evening. Charlotte was on Larry’s shoulders and kicked her feet on his chest when she wanted him to speed up.
“I was reading Fowler again today. A classic dictionary of usage, and I felt as though I were reading, I don’t know, Marx in 1850 or something.”
“Revolutionary grammar?”
“Yes!”
“I like Harpo best,” Charlotte said. Larry was indoctrinating her with Marx Brothers movies, as well as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
“I wonder if there is anyone in the universe who likes Chico or Zeppo the best,” Larry said.
Charlotte stopped kicking. “That’s sad.”
“Charlotte, did you know that everyone makes up new words without even realizing it? Like when a baby learns to say ‘book,’ and then just from hearing people say ‘hat’ and then ‘hats’ when there are more than one, or ‘top’ and ‘tops,’ that kind of the thing, the baby thinks, Oh, I’ll add an s to ‘book’ because there are a bunch of book so I ought to call them books.”
Charlotte said, “‘Books’ is not a new word.”
“No, but it i
s for the baby.”
“I hate babies.”
“I wonder what babies think of you,” Larry said.
“Babies don’t think! They’re babies.”
“They stick their heads in gravy and wash it off with bubble gum and send it to the navy.”
Charlotte, who was too young or too sheltered to have heard that particular chant, became quiet and thoughtful.
Laurel was thinking, We have to be taught that “oxen” is plural for “ox,” but not that “shoes” is plural for “shoe.” We use analogy and learn “shoes” on our own without even knowing we’re learning it.
She wished analogy did the work for more things human beings had to learn. Like how to make a pie crust. Or make a living. Perhaps it did. Perhaps analogy was the secret of the universe.
“I think I’ve discovered the secret of life,” she said.
Charlotte looked down at her, drawn briefly by the prospect of a secret, but then saw a pretzel cart and lost interest.
Laurel barely noticed. She was thinking about Fowler, how generous he was. Generous toward all the unconscious word-formers of the world. Generous toward even the hapless journalist he could not help but take to task for his fallible analogy of “abstentients.” But mostly, generous toward words themselves. She was touched even by the way he phrased things. “Fallible” word formations, as fallible as the hapless humans who created them. He saw language as if it were living and breathing and muddling through like everyone else.
“‘Chaotic’ is a malformation,” Laurel said aloud.
But Larry and his rider were already galloping off into the park, leaving Laurel on the corner of Seventy-Eighth Street. She found a bench and sat.
Men of the sixteenth century created the word “chaotic,” mistakenly using “eros” as a pattern for “chaos.” It was a Frankenstein’s monster of a word, Laurel thought affectionately, picturing it lumbering this way and that, coarse black stitches across its square green forehead. The monster waved its arms and stumbled wildly. Chaotically.
Eros as a pattern for chaos—all of Western culture resided somewhere in that formulation. But, wait, wasn’t Eros the son of Chaos? How complicated and incestuous and Greek, Aeschylus Greek, the whole argument was becoming in her head.
Children pedaled by on bicycles. The summer sun shone yellow and rich through the maple leaves above her. The city sounds hung in the background, a cloud of sound, of shifting gears and screeching brakes and sirens and horns, while children in a nearby playground made high-pitched children noises and a few birds called out into the din. Laurel watched a starling pick at a discarded ice-cream cone. We’re all malformations, she told the bird as it sparkled off, iridescent, with its bit of garbage. A bunch of Darwinian accidents that succeed. Words surviving against the hostile forces of habit and convention!
“Sorry we took so long,” Larry said. Charlotte was by his side now, her hand in his. “The horse got tired and we had to dismount and walk back.”
“What did you do while we were gone, Mommy?”
“I talked to a bird.”
“Did it talk back?”
“No, it just listened.”
“Then what’s the point?” Charlotte said, and she gave an exaggerated sigh, something she must have learned from a TV show, Laurel thought.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, Larry was polite when she mentioned Fowler, Charlotte less so. But even at the risk, the certainty, of exasperating her family, Laurel found she could not resist the faded blue volume.
“It’s like pornography,” she told Larry. “The more you read it, the more you need to read it. Or so I’ve heard.”
Fowler, gallant and chivalrous, calling for the rescue of words that were “cruelly used”! As if they were running into the fog, shivering on the London streets, clutching pitifully at their thin shawls.
She had to call Daphne. No one else could share her excitement.
“Do you realize,” she said to Daphne, “that ‘as well as’ is a conjunction and not a preposition? So you have to say, ‘You were there as well as I,’ not ‘as well as me’? Fowler swoops in to rescue ‘as well as’ from prepositionism…”
“Prepositionism?” Daphne laughed.
“It’s a faulty analogy. My own. But seriously, I don’t think I would say, ‘You were there as well as I’ or ‘You were there as well as me.’ Would you? I would just say, ‘We were both there.’”
“Which would probably be the truth,” Daphne said. “In matching outfits.”
“Fowler’s very protective of words. Like you. But on the other hand, he’s also very…” Laurel paused. She had been about to say, He’s also very open-minded. And gentle. And gracious.
“What? Very what?”
“Oh, well, funny. Also like you.”
“Thank you, but of course that’s bullshit about ‘as well as’ not being a preposition. Fowler is so inconsistent. You really can’t rely on him, Laurel.”
The tone was familiar to Laurel. It was a pecking-order tone, a tone that had once been her exclusive right. When had the rank of Older (therefore superior) Sister been degraded to Hobbyist and Housewife? When had Younger (Adoring of Older) Sister become Distinguished Language Columnist? When had the ranks been so drastically reorganized? Perhaps when she had become a housewife and Daphne had become a language columnist.
“In the future,” Daphne was saying, “stick to The Chicago Manual of Style.”
* * *
Unencumbered by a baby and the joyful obligations of motherhood, Daphne had prospered over the last few years.
“I work twenty-four hours a day,” she said on one of her rare visits uptown. “Michael, too.”
Charlotte, who had just learned that a day had twenty-four hours, looked at her skeptically.
But Daphne did work long hours. And she was getting more and more recognition for her work. The People’s Pedant had become so popular that DownTown ran it every week. She was asked to go on the local public radio station to discuss a change in the New York City curriculum. She was asked to speak at fund-raising library luncheons. She gave talks in Philadelphia and Boston.
“And boy, does she let you know it,” Laurel said one night to Larry.
“Do you want to speak in Philadelphia?” Larry asked.
“No. But I know just as much about language as she does. You know what word I heard her use the other day? My least favorite word: ‘loser.’ She said someone was a loser. I hate that word. The world is not a competition.”
Larry rolled over, closer to her in the bed, put an arm around her. He was half asleep, which he thought was half the right way to be at four in the morning. “I’m sorry you’re upset,” he said.
“I’m not upset.”
You’re not competitive, either, he thought, laughing to himself. Not one bit.
“I know she thinks I’m a loser.”
“No, I’m sure she—”
“No, she does. I know she does. I feel like I’ve won the lottery, though.”
“The Charlottery.”
There was a small, satisfied laugh and he felt the tension leave her. She was asleep.
He got up and sat in Charlotte’s room, watching her sleep. Daphne was all right. Charlotte loved her. And he had never had as good a friend as Michael. They played tennis every week, in Riverside Park when it was warm, beneath a big bubble on the East Side when it was not. And they sailed in the summer when the two families descended on Larry’s parents at the house in Maine. They were even thinking of getting a little sailboat together. Michael said there was a marina in Brooklyn, far, far out, near Floyd Bennett Field. Larry had never heard of Floyd Bennett Field, but the idea of being able to sail in New York City—well, it was just the kind of idea Michael would have, just the kind of idea Larry would never have, and just another reason that he was so happy to have Michael as a friend. He and Michael were as close as ever, closer, but the two sisters, together, were sometimes … he tried to think of the right word. “C
hildish”! That was the word.
FAR´DEL. n.s. [fardello, Italian; fardeau, Fr.] A bundle; a little pack.
—A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
“This is hell, nor are we out of it.” The writer of that sentence was referring to the political situation, and Daphne could not but agree. Even so, it was not the degradation of American ideals that caused her to sputter now as she circled the sentence. It was the use of the word “nor.” Daphne jotted down a few notes on a pad, then began writing.
As the People’s Pedant, Daphne had perfected a gentle dry tone that was just this side of condescension. She no longer needed to fill her column with words like “fuck” and “shit” and “douchebag” to maintain her credibility. She had only to point out the vagaries of other writers’ choices. In the elevator bringing her copy in to the Times, she fought off the nagging sense that someone in that building might discover what a feeble, ignorant fraud she was. She fought off the simultaneous feeling of resentment that her new colleagues had yet to recognize her seriousness and brilliance and to therefore resent her back. She fought off the vertigo that had begun the day before.
She was a guest columnist for the most important newspaper in the country while the real language columnist took time off to write a book. And she was pretty sure she was pregnant.
Her editor at the Times, a white-haired man of late middle age who sported red suspenders, a cloud of cologne, and the stub of an unlit cigar, made her feel even younger and less important. He was indifferent to most of what she wrote, having been a city reporter before winding up as an editor in the backwater of non-news weekly columns. But he chuckled at this piece, which featured a grammatical faux pas by one of his old rivals.
Daphne tried not to feel as pleased as she did at his approval or as nauseated by his scents. The nausea she thought she understood, but why this breathless, loyal-canine need for an old journalist’s praise? It was undignified; it was girlish; it was unprofessional.
The Grammarians Page 14
