Pitching Tenses
December 22, 2009
I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s terrific new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. The narrator, a twenty-year-old college student from the Midwest, returns to her small rural town and observes this about the way they speak there:
They used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in, “I’d been gonna do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whoosed away again, beyond my grasp. “I’d been gonna do that” seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant “Hell yes, if I had a time machine!” People here could narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: “I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said …” It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this?
–Dennis
Sign Of The Times
December 20, 2009
MISSING MORE THAN AN APOSTROPHE
Confessions of a Failed Father
December 10, 2009
My twelve-year-old daughter told me yesterday that she has cut off all communication with a friend because he used the word “deteriorate” in a sentence. “You speak like a seventy-year-old,” she told him in scorn. When I told her that she should admire people with large vocabularies, not make fun of them, she blew me off, too. “I’m not grammarful,” she said.
Where did I go wrong?
–Dennis
Send Me A Letter
December 8, 2009
These days our mailman rarely delivers any joy, just drudgery. A jury duty notice from the county, a license renewal application from DMV, and, of course, bills, bills, and more bills, and even more catalogues, addressed to me and past occupants of this old house.
In the olden days, as our daughter refers to all eras pre-her and pre-Google, I used to look forward to the daily haul, hoping for a party invitation, a letter, a postcard. But no more. Now Evite, email, and the likes of internet cafes around the globe have put an end to the majority of pleasant postal surprises.
I have a trunk in my attic filled with the ups and downs of my past: more Dear John letters than I would like to admit (Would those now take the form of an efficient but poorly punctuated text? its not u its me), old diaries (Would these now take the form of a let-it-all-hang-out myspace page?), worn photographs, whose faded quality speaks to the passage of time (flickr?).
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet, I’m as Google-happy as the next gal. Since September, 1998, when the search engine started to chug, I’ve googled everything and everybody I have ever known, wished I had known, wished I hadn’t known, and hope to know. It’s just that I mourn whatever it is that is dying with the diminishing habit of letter-writing. As a ghostwriter and book researcher, I can tell you that one of the most fruitful and satisfying dimensions of combing through my subjects’ personal histories has been my own front row seat to the epistolary drama that unfolds before me with each new project.
After our first date, my husband Fed-Exed me a package. I thought the extravagant gesture of overnighting something to a destination two miles across town was a clear sign. Here is a man who values the symbolism of letter-sending, I thought. Inside, was a book he had told me about over drinks. I Never Came to You in White was an epistolary novel by one of our colleagues, Judith Farr, about Emily Dickinson’s life told through a series of imagined letters.
So that’s why I was happy to read about Thomas Mallon’s new book, Yours Ever, and am hoping some co-blogger with the initials DT puts it under our Christmas tree. Slate uses the occasion of this book’s publication to write a fine piece on the value of letter-writing.
I miss getting letters. I miss the intimacy, the feeling of opening up the envelope and pulling out an expensive piece of stationery or a silly card –tangible proof that someone cared enough to go to the trouble. “I sent an email, do I still need to write a thank-you note?” my daughter asked after celebrating a recent birthday.
Well, you don’t have to,” I responded wistfully, “but it sure would be nice.”
–Barbara
Addendum: just as I was about to hit the “publish” button, a new email came in. It was an e-card sent by a friend, via something called someecards, its motto: “when you care enough to hit send.”
Gate-Crashers
December 6, 2009
Yesterday I chided a Washington Post writer for describing a gathering of a mere twenty reporters as a “media circus.” My point was not simply that it was a cliché but that it was hyperbolic: a gathering of folk that small could hardly be described as a “circus.”
In that very same post, I described the Salahis—the couple who went to Obama’s first state dinner uninvited—as “gate-crashers.” Imagine, then, my chagrin when I read in the next morning’s Post the following letter to the editor:
The Dec. 2 editorial “Party’s Over” was unfair to Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who were being labeled “gate-crashers” at the Nov. 24 White House dinner.
According to news reports, the couple believed or were led to hope that they had received as invitation to attend the function. The couple did not furtively tunnel into the complex, scale its fences or over-power the guards. They apparently arrived at the White House, argued their case to the responsible official(s) and were admitted after passing through metal detectors. Their arrival at the dinner was even “announced” by the designated announcer. Once inside, their behavior at the event seemed to have been unremarkable.
Setting aside what the Salahis actually believed or hoped, the question that struck me was the linguistic one: is “gate-crashing” really the right word to describe what they did? Hadn’t I fallen back on a mindless cliché, just as I had accused the Post writer of doing, and wasn’t I being as mindlessly hyperbolic?
Perhaps. Given the dictionary meaning—“to gain entry to (a party, a concert, etc.) without invitation or payment”—the word seems accurate enough. But I started wondering about the overtones. No matter what the word denotes, the image of crashing violently through gates calls up threatening, even illegal behavior, which is why the thesaurus lists “barge in,” “crash,” “intrude,” and “irrupt” as synonyms.
But I’m probably over-thinking the matter. English is filled with words that started out forceful and then dwindled to next to nothing. I agreed to help my daughter with her Social Studies homework this morning. “Awesome!” she said. I’m sure all she felt was gratitude, or more likely relief, since she probably thought I would give her all the answers. She certainly didn’t feel awe. And in my own lifetime “narcissistic,” which began as a label for a serious psychopathic disorder, has come to be used to describe any minor instance of garden-variety self-absorption—such as, say, what the Salahis engaged in last week.
–Dennis
REPORTER’S MIND WANDERS WHILE WRITING STORY
December 5, 2009
The Salahis—that odd couple who gate-crashed the White House’s state dinner—showed up at a Front Royal, VA, courthouse yesterday to answer to an unrelated suit involving their failure to pay money to a landscaper they had hired. They were met, unsurprisingly, by a larger-than-usual number of reporters. “Camped outside,” the Washington Post reporter wrote, “was a media circus of 20 reporters and photographers.”
Setting aside the perplexing question of angels and heads of pins, does twenty really count as a “circus”? I suppose it might if that “media circus” at Front Royal was made up of the clowns who should have been back at the Post copy-editing their stories.
–Dennis
The Upside of Transgression
December 3, 2009
Tiger Woods has contributed much to our world: his great athletic gift, his philanthropy, and now, fodder for our worst gossipy, voyeuristic inclinations. But he is also doing his part for vocabulary building. In the wake of his unfolding car-hitting-hydrant, golfclub-wielding-wife scandal, he has issued a few statements trying to staunch the raw sewage of speculation that passes as news these days. In the most recent statement, he began by saying, “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.”
In the hours following Tiger’s mea culpa, the word “transgression” and the search “transgression definition” topped the Google trends list. Perhaps people unfamiliar with the term may be confusing it with “transgender” (which has also been in the news quite frequently of late); being transgendered is in no way a transgression unless of course your politics are all screwed up but I’ll leave that to the political blogs and stick with language. In any event, we should be grateful to Tiger for clearing up any confusion over a word that is such a part of our social fabric, particularly here in the nation’s capital where we have so many politicians whose motto seems to be: so many transgressions, so little time…
–Barbara
Mark Twain, Again (with apologies)
December 1, 2009
As it happens, while Barbara was writing her last post about the would-be memoir-writers, I was reading in the Washington Post Jonathan Yardley’s review of Ben Yagoda’s new book, Memoir: A History. In his book, Yagoda quoted Twain, and Yardley was so taken by Twain’s comment that he quoted Yagoda’s quote of Twain in full, and I am so amused by the passage that, with thanks to Yagoda and Yardley and apologies for inflicting all of you yet again with a Twain quote, I am quoting it below. Here is Twain on the unreliability of memory:
I used to remember my brother Henry walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that and it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion for thirty years that I did remember it—for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. . . . For many years I remembered helping my grandfather drinking his whiskey when I was six week old but I do not tell about that any more now; I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.
–Dennis
