Carpentry
 |
| Jane Resh Thomas |
A
lecture about grammar can be funny and touching. If you don't believe so, watch a TED lecture about emotion and the power of the subjunctive, the mood in the English
language that concerns possibilities and hypotheses and things that might have
been, if other things had been different. (I just used subjunctive mood a
couple of times without even trying.) The TED speaker, a linguist, explains
that English employs three moods and offered examples: indicative (I'm
speaking at the TED conference); subjunctive (I might shit my pants);
and imperative (Bring me a change of clothes). He grew up in a family
who came to America from Vietnam, speaking a language at home that has no
subjunctive mood and therefore doesn't allow a speaker to consider the possibilities
in “if” or “might” or “should.” The speaker was a little boy when his large
family left Vietnam. They were about to board a bus leaving for the airport on
their way to America, but the boy screamed and cried so much that they decided
to wait. As the bus they had intended to board pulled away, artillery
demolished it. Despite the family's shock, their language did not enable them
to talk about what might have happened.
 |
| Phuc Tran |
The
linguist carried the name Phuc Tran, which sounds like something different in
English than it does in Vietnamese; what a razzing he must have suffered when
he told his fourth-grade bullying classmates that he was changing his name to
Peter. Hating the art and English classes he had expected to love in
college, he signed up for ancient Greek and liked it so much that he studied
Sanskrit, too, a language even harder than Greek. He went on to Latin and then
to German immersion, so now, fluent in six languages, he understands grammar
from the inside out, the outside in, and every which way besides.
What
would a non-native speaker make of “every which way,” an expression common in
1940s Kalamazoo, when and where I grew up? My family also said, “I can't hardly
believe it.” A welder once told me that the bosses and the metallurgists spoke
a different language among their peers than they did with the workers, while he
knew only one; he had come to college, he said, in the hope of speaking more
than one way. This principle of rhetoric is decorum, suiting the
language to the situation. Knowing how to say both “I can't hardly
believe it” and “I can hardly believe it,” gives me latitude that I didn't have
back home.
RickiThompson's son, who speaks Japanese, told me that the seventy-odd English
prepositions perplex Japanese people, whose language has only seven. How do we
know whether to say He put the baby on the bed or in the bed;
He put the baby to bed or into bed? Do we hang the painting atop
the bed or over the bed or above the bed or above the head
of the bed? Might above the bed mean on the ceiling? What
does She's lying under a tree mean; a non-native speaker might
think that the sentence means the woman is buried there. Which is
closer: She's sitting by the tree, next to the tree,
or beside the tree? Usage of prepositions is not so tricky for people
who were born into families who speak English, but few of us can explain the
subjunctive mood with much confidence that a non-native speaker could
understand how to use it. The British use subjunctive more often than Americans
do, one reason they sound funny to us. Unless we've studied languages, we know
most of what we know about them by ear.
Grammar
serves us, rather than our serving grammar. We nevertheless do better as
writers if we know how the language works. We can create effects only to the
extent that we've mastered the language. If we don't know when to employ past
perfect verb tense in an English sentence (She had put the baby to
bed), we can't show the chronology of actions merely by adjusting verbs.
The Sapir-Whorf proposition holds that the grammar of a language affects the
way people conceptualize the world and themselves in it. English allows me to
say, If the weather weren't so cold, we might have had a picnic and to
think about what we missed. For a Vietnamese speaker whose native language
lacks the hypothetical subjunctive mood, if and might statements,
and consequently thinks entirely in facts, that sentence is just ridiculous.
Observers
will find glitches and broken rules in this essay. For example, I've shifted willy-nilly
from second-person to third-person to first-person-singular to first-plural. We
need editors to catch our typos and other mistakes, but our goal is to write
with purpose. I admired the lovely simplicity of Ron Koertge's style in his
recent Inkpot piece about horse racing. That simplicity was chosen—intentional
and purposeful. E.B. White never used two clauses or three syllables if one
would do. The average length of sentences in the novels of Saul Bellow is said
to be eleven words. These and other successful writers' rhetoric and style are
not accidental.
A
writer without knowledge of grammar and rhetoric and usage is like a carpenter
who can't drive a nail. We can live under leaves in a lean-to, grunting to each
other, or we can choose to be carpenters. If we intend to be cabinet makers,
though, working sometimes in knotty pine but sometimes in rosewood and ebony,
with skills beyond those of rough carpenters who knock together two-by-fours
for laying concrete, we need more than a casual grasp of our tools.
#
