Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

by Kitty Burns Florey

  And what about the famously language-mad French with their ne…pas construction? Presumably it has been approved by the French Academy, an institution that makes Sister Bernadette’s uptight linguistic obsessions look like un pique-nique dans le parc.

  If Mick Jagger had sung “I can’t get any satisfaction,” he would not have had a hit on his hands. If Elvis had tried to get away with “You are nothing but a beagle,” he might very well have gone on working as a truck driver in Memphis instead of being a world-famous rock star who drove around in a custom-made Stutz Blackhawk.65

  * * *

  37 The sentence was perpetrated by The New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler, but, unfortunately, no one recalls what it was.

  38 March 13, 2006, page 43. Eleanor Gould Packard retired in 1999.

  39 I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. —Mark Twain

  40 When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split. —Raymond Chandler

  41 No, it’s not like A Modest Proposal. He was quite serious. In “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue,” he blamed the degeneration of English on, among other things, “illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys.” The Swifts of today—the most extreme of the prescriptivists—tend to blame it on TV, the permissive ’60s, and a political correctness that supposedly caters to minorities.

  42 The newest edition of Webster’s—the Eleventh—notes, mildly, “It usually is not found in belles-lettres.”

  43 In The Stories of English, David Crystal finds it necessary to set the record straight: “There is no simple or direct relationship between grammar and behavior.”

  44 The chances are enormous that a certain percentage of people reading this sentence will take butt to refer to someone’s backside—thus does the language grow and change.

  45 I was taught that the proper construction is “I am taller than he”—a short way of saying “I am taller than he is.” This way, I and he are both in the same case, the nominative. Now that I think about it, this seems like irrational nitpicking, but I’m sticking with it anyway, as a little hommage to the Sister Bernadettes in my life.

  46 In Saturday, Ian McEwan writes this sentence: “Distress is making him nauseous.” I know it sounds Miss Peckhamish, but there’s a nice distinction—rapidly disappearing—between nauseous (causing disgust) and nauseated (feeling disgust).

  47 This must be related to the woefully mistaken belief that “penultimate” means “the absolute last,” simply because it sounds as if that’s what it should mean.

  48 I feel similarly passionate about “the lion’s share,” which doesn’t mean “most of it”—it means “all of it,” which is why it’s witty. The expression goes back to good old Aesop: the lion goes hunting with the fox, the jackal, and the wolf: they bring down a stag and prepare to divide it. The lion says, “The first quarter is for me because I’m King of Beasts; the second is mine as arbiter; I get the third for my part in the chase; and as for the fourth quarter, I’d like to see which of you will dare to lay a paw upon it.”

  49 I have one friend who simply cannot fathom how I can copy edit all day without going crazy. She, on the other hand, is a gardener to the wealthy, specializing in posh Manhattan terraces, and how she can bear to be out in all weathers mucking around in the rich folks’ dirt is beyond me. We realized recently that we’re both trying to do the same thing: transform something that’s naturally unruly and difficult into something neat and comprehensible.

  50 The South Carolina writer Dorothy Allison commented in an interview: “Do you know what it’s like to diagram a Southerner’s sentence? You put a Southerner to tell you a story and if you don’t rein ’em in at all—it will go on for hours.”

  51 Though there is a certain charm to Gertrude Stein’s assertion that “It is not clarity that is desirable but force,” which I suppose is a variation on the venerable William Strunk’s advice: “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud.”

  52 But, after all, didn’t the mighty Flaubert once spend an entire afternoon putting in a comma and the next afternoon taking it out again?

  53 Let me put in a vote of thanks for at least two of my local markets, which, bless their hearts, label the express lane “10 items or fewer.” I’m hoping this is a trend.

  54 George W. Bush, September 20, 2005, Gulfport, Mississippi.

  55 I do understand that the British have different punctuational priorities than we do—including not only the hyphen thing but an aversion to the serial comma exemplified in Truss’s main title—but that doesn’t make them right.

  56 In fact, having lived for over a decade in a Polish-Hispanic neighborhood of Brooklyn, I’m never anything less than charmed by signs like “WE DO DUCK WORK” and “ENGLISH SPOKE IN HERE.”

  57 There’s an Australian garage-rock band called The Aints, an offshoot of another Australian garage-rock band called The Saints—which nicely encapsulates the history of the contraction as it traveled over the years from sanctioned to outcast.

  58 I found a lovely limerick on the Internet, written by someone identified only as “speedysnail”: One word with an undeserved taint / Is surely the infamous ain’t. / It’s all we have got / To shorten “am not” / As amn’t is awfully quaint.

  59 Don’t get me started on “I’m calling from my cell” or “What’s your social?”

  60 In The American Language, H. L. Mencken calls it “a distinction that is well supported by logic and analogy.”

  61 I would consider my life seriously impoverished if he stopped calling a toilet a terlet and that big thing in the cellar the erl tank.

  62 Check out the song “My Home in San Antone” as sung by Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, which includes the line: “Where the old folks still say you-uns.…”

  63 “Hoe cake,” which was actually baked on a cleaned-off hoe by Indians who had it for lunch as they worked out in the fields—probably usually for a white boss—was a kind of biscuit made with white flour, adapted from a similar cake, using corn, that they made before they were forced onto reservations. As John Winthrop, Jr., the governor of Connecticut, reported back to the members of the English Royal Society in 1662, the Indians actually ate the corn they grew, rather than simply feeding it to their pigs: “Sometimes they bruise it in a mortar and boyle it and make very good food of it, baking it under the embers.” The reaction at the Royal Society ranged from incredulity to hilarity.

  64 Now usually known, less intimidatingly, as elementary or middle school. Originally, grammar schools were so called because there you learned grammar—in those days, Greek and Latin grammar, not your namby-pamby native tongue. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, the rebel leader Jack Cade lashes out against grammar schools and men who “talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.”

  65 During his colorful youth, my husband worked at a car wash in L.A. where he was once privileged to vacuum Elvis’s Stutz.

  chapter 6

  DIAGRAMMING REDUX

  Diagramming has lost much of the cachet it used to claim in education circles when I was in school. Sometime in the ’60s, it nearly came to a dead stop. But, like pocket watches and Gilbert & Sullivan operas, the practice persists, alternately trashed and cheered by linguists and grammarians. It’s often used in ESL courses, and it’s making a small comeback in schools—mostly progressive private ones, but also in public schools here and there around the country. A Cincinnati high-school teacher I talked to insists that “the study of grammar, along with its component of diagramming, helps students become more critical readers and cogent writers.” Diagramming can be found lurking in some university linguistics courses, though it’s been pretty much superseded by tree diagrams.

  These are considered more complete and, according to a friend of mine who teaches them, easier: traditional diagrams often not only distort the original word order of a sentence, but, as I�
�ve mentioned, can also be insanely complex even when they’re dealing with a relatively ordinary sentence:

  There are diagramming websites run by a few diehard enthusiasts—mostly home-schooling parents—complete with chat rooms and lively disputes about what’s the best age for children to begin (the consensus is eleven or twelve). A delightful man named Gene Moutoux (who kindly provided the more difficult diagrams in this book) has a Kellogg-esque moustache, a popular website, and a Workbook of Sentence Diagramming that’s a favorite with teachers and is now in its second edition. In addition to SenDraw, a nifty computer diagramming program from the University of Central Florida that does away with wobbly lines forever, there’s a video available called English Grammar: The Art of Diagramming Sentences that was made in 1999 but features a very 1950s-looking teacher named Miss Lamb working at a blackboard. The CIA uses some form of diagramming in its computer spyware to clarify and structure the information they get from emails and chat rooms by showing how words relate to each other. (Diagramming will no doubt prevent them from hunting down astronomers or sociologists who email to their colleagues sentences like “The period of revolution of the moons of Jupiter equals the time of their rotation around their axes” or “The sexual revolution exploded into American society like a bomb.”)

  The most offbeat use of diagramming is in an essay entitled “The Architecture of the Sentence” by the writer William S. Gass (written with his wife, Mary Gass, an architect), in which the authors equate the structure of the sentence with the structure of a building, explaining their thesis in a series of examples that culminate in the “diagramming” of a fiendishly complicated, ingeniously symmetrical sentence by placing it in the rooms of the 1929 McKim, Mead and White floor plan for the Brooklyn Museum.

  And perhaps the most practical function of diagramming occurs in a court of law, when, now and then, a grammarian is asked to diagram a sentence in order to elucidate a knotty document, on the assumption that a diagram will make everything clear. However, as Gene Moutoux comments, “One diagrams according to one’s understanding of the sentence. Someone understanding a particular sentence differently would necessarily diagram it differently.” And he adds, “Meaning does not spring magically from a diagram.”

  * * *

  On a slushy Valentine’s Day, I stopped in to observe Laura Shearer’s seventh graders at a school in Greenwich Village. Every Tuesday, she teaches them grammar—which means she teaches them to diagram sentences. She doesn’t know anyone else who does it, but back in Ohio Laura diagrammed sentences herself, loved it, and decided to pass it on.

  Why?

  “It just makes grammatical ideas clearer,” she says. “It’s a tool for teaching them how to construct a sentence correctly.”

  Does it make them better writers?

  She dismissed the idea. “Maybe it will make them better editors, but it does not improve their writing.”

  The most important function of diagramming in their lives, though, may be the fun factor. In Laura’s opinion, it’s good for them in ways that have nothing to do with grammar, or even language. As seventh graders, they’re at a transition in their lives as students: they’re being asked to become abstract thinkers, and sometimes that’s confusing and unsettling—and the onset of puberty, of course, only makes it all worse. “There’s so little clarity in their lives at this age,” Laura told me, and the wonderful concreteness of diagrams provides some welcome simplicity. “They love this stuff.”

  The students in Laura’s class are enthusiastic, bright, and unintimidated. As they file into the room—chatting, teasing each other, greeting their teacher by her first name—I can’t help contrasting them with Sister Bernadette’s class, which was silent, cautious, reined in: officially being good, which was, more than anything, what parochial schooling in those days was all about. I envy these kids their freedom to be neither bad nor good but just normal.

  On the other hand, I have to admit that Sister B had an easier time of it. Laura has to spend the first five minutes just calming them down, and in a 40-minute class, not a lot gets done. (“Have you ever taught?” she asked me. “It’s all about patience.” Sister B would simply have stood there in her black veil and white wimple and glared at us until we were quiet—except that we were already quiet.) Some of Laura’s students are dressed for Valentine’s Day, the boys in red t-shirts, the girls in red dresses (one alarmingly low-cut, revealing wishful 12-year-old cleavage) and sporting heart barrettes or jewelry. Again, I think back to my schooldays: the boys wore the usual shirts and trousers to school, but we girls wore maroon serge uniforms that seemed designed to make us look as ungainly as possible, and the school’s only concession to Valentine’s Day was to let us cut red hearts out of construction paper, print “Have a heart for the missions” on them, and sell them for a nickel apiece to raise money for those worthy missionaries in Africa. Strangers to irony or, apparently, embarrassment, we pinned them to the fronts of our uniforms.

  Laura’s kids are at a pretty basic stage of diagramming: no long Proustian rambles yet (though Laura assures me they’re looking forward to them). The first sentence they deal with is “Does she like pizza and ice cream?” The girl who volunteers to go up to the blackboard makes an artistically perfect diagram

  She is gleefully corrected by another student who has noticed she left out the word does. Everyone joins in; at this point, Sister B would be getting out her ruler, but Laura remains quietly firm. And eventually they get it right.

  A boy raises his hand. Something has just occurred to him, and he asks excitedly, “How do you diagram apostrophes?”

  “Not now,” Laura tells him—very patiently.

  Compounds are the lesson of the day.

  The bird and the rabbit eat and fish.

  No one comments on the oddness of a rabbit going fishing. They are concentrating on getting the lines parallel, sometimes resorting to a yardstick and a lot of squinting. They move on to direct objects vs. subject complements—or what, in my day, were called predicate adjectives: The boy is smart. The diagrammer makes a mistake, and treats smart like a direct object.

  “Direct object?” Laura asks. “Direct object?” Her voice rises. “Remember I kicked my brother from last week? Can you kick smart?”

  “If you kick me, you kick smart,” the class smart-alec puts in.

  Laura rolls her eyes. Someone slants the offending line properly toward the subject.

  Life goes on. Direct objects are mastered: Joey ate pie.

  “What kind of pie?” someone calls out.

  “Cow,” says the smart-alec.

  When Joey’s pie is taken care of, Laura announces that they’re going to try something new. Immediately, they are silent, expectant. She draws a blank diagram on the board, and tells them to fill it up. (“You teach them,” she tells me later, “and then you let them teach you.”) She keeps it simple: she draws a straight line and bisects it with a longer one to separate subject and predicate. Then she draws a shorter perpendicular line, making room for a direct object

  A girl wearing a pair of Valentine’s Day-red lips pasted to her cheek raises her hand first. “I have a sentence,” she says. “But it might be a little offensive.”

  Laura goes into Sister Bernadette mode. “Offensive? We don’t do offensive here.”

  “Well, it’s not that offensive,” the girl says tantalizingly.

  Now everyone wants to know what it is. She goes to the board and fills up the diagram:

  There is a general outcry (“Ew! Gross!”) in the midst of which, Laura manages to say, “Good for them! Snails are delicious.” More gagging noises, followed by a discussion of snail-eating, and finally, a modification of the sentence by one of the kids:

  French boys eat snails.

  Everyone relaxes.

  There is not much time left. The subject of linking verbs is raised. Laura asks, “What’s a linking verb?” (I feel a moment of panic: Don’t let her call on me!) Linking verbs are a problem for a couple
of kids; mistakes are made. “I am frustrated,” Laura says. “I am mortified. We can’t go on to prepositional phrases until every single person in the room gets this.” She gives them a homework assignment. “And if you don’t remember something, for Pete’s sake, go back to your notes. Don’t space out on this.”

  They promise not to space out. She makes them sit quietly for half a minute. They look at her, poised like race-horses at the gate. “Dismissed,” she says finally, and they are off.

  “They exhaust me,” Laura tells me when the room is empty. Then she smiles. “But aren’t they great?”

  * * *

  According to the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.” So after all this time immersed in diagramming past and diagramming present, diagramming popular and diagramming vilified, diagramming silly-waste-of-time and diagramming useful-learning-tool, I’ve managed to find a moral to the story—or at least to draw a few conclusions.