Nonsense Verse

One for the home team

In her chapter on "Sentences," Ms. Prose imparts some wisdom, and a charming analogy:

What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature. ... Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.

A novelist friend compares the rules of grammar, puntuation, and usage to a sort of old-fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is a bit like having someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your reader to be more comfortable, especially if you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.

I couldn't have put it better. It's an odd feeling, reading a book and having the sense that something is off -- realizing, as you're trotting along, that at some point a few words back, you must have taken a wrong turn, because all of a sudden you've arrived in a place that seems foreign, disjointed. And you have to go back, retrace your steps, try to figure out where the sentence led you astray, where some rapscallion of a comma showed up in the wrong place or flashed the wrong warning signal. A lot of people, when reading, can recognize when something is amiss but don't always have the tools to explain what, precisely, that is. The authorities who set the rules don't make it very easy for us, either, throwing out all these enigmatic terms like "apposition" and "participial" and "restrictive" and "subjunctive mood." (How is it helpful when you're looking for an explanation to something, but in order to understand the explanation, you have to go to the dictionary for translation?)

So I feel the writerly people's pain. It's tough to get it down. And yet, in the long run, trying to figure it all out can only help.

I vaaant to suuuck your subjuuunctive

One might say that in terms of readers (and writers), the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who like (not to mention are capable of) reading grammar and usage books cover to cover, and those who don't. Most people, one can assume, fall into the latter category. If that were not the case, you'd see a lot more copies of Hodges' Harbrace Handbook and The Elements of Style being flipped through on the subway or at airport newsstands.

The obvious reasons for this are that (1) most people don't care enough about the finer points of usage to bother reading an entire book on the subject, and (2) many such books are so heavy and dry that any joy at finding wit within their pages, if it (the wit) exists at all, is soon quashed by the exhaustion that comes from just trying to slog through the damn things.

There are exceptions to the "too dense to stomach" rule. I didn't read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, for all the reasons stated in this New Yorker review*, which declared, "'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' is really a 'decline of print culture' book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised)." And yet Eats appealed to a fairly large subset of the American book-reading population -- if we are to take the NYer's word, the segment who, like the author, Lynn Truss, fall into this camp: "They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place." There are enough of these people to have made Eats a best seller, even though, as the NYer points out, "Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor."

The hyperpopular Eats, then, ends up being a somewhat shoddy example of how to get people more interested in grammar (that is, in good grammar). But there are superior usage books, packaged in quite palatable form, on the market. Three I've long had on my reference shelf: Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, both by Bill Walsh, an esteemed former colleague; and Woe Is I, by Patricia O'Connor.

This past year I added another, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. And this one is unlike any usage book I've ever read.

Vampire was originally published in 1984 and revised in 1993, so obviously I'm late in discovering its syntactical delights. It's got the clear explanations and the droll humor of the others. But where it distinguishes itself is in its voice and presentation.

Vampire is a grammar book with a wickedly libidinous sensibility, populated with dark, lusty characters, Russian and Victorian, French and Transylvanian, all of whom you might expect to run into at a candlelit picnic in a graveyard adjacent to an enchanted forest, an affair presided over by Vincent Price and immortalized in ink by Edward Gorey. It holds the reader's attention not just in display (it abounds with antique etchings) but with censorious little asides that dare the reader to turn away:

"Singular pronouns take singular verbs. And what might these pronouns be? And must you go riffling off, losing your place here and forgetting what you're after and ending up in a field of cows?"

The sentences Gordon spins out and lines up to illustrate her points are lush and wicked. She describes linking verbs as "copulative," for instance -- and later, as "erotic":

And here they are, caught in the act of copulating in various positions:
I am willing and I'll be ready in a while.
She sounded eager, but he couldn't be sure.

Here she is demonstrating that not all -ly words are adverbs:

When dressed in his most uppity drag, the transvestite vampire appeared a stately damsel all tricked out for tea.

To demonstrate a pronoun in the possessive case, she offers:

They trampled on my nightie, those shortsighted mastodons.

And in explaining a confounding noun that's plural in form yet singular (or is it?) in meaning:

The shade of sadness we call the blues can take a singular or plural verb, since anyone who has them can't be bothered to look it up, or to be consistent about whether it is -- or they are -- in pieces or in a solid hopeless mass.
The blues is hard to lose.
The blues have tracked me down in this upbeat part of town.

Part of the dullness of reading grammar books is their mind-numbing repetition. Not so Gordon's, thanks to its refreshingly inventive explications. Gordon can illustrate a single concept using fifteen sentences in a row, but instead of putting the reader to sleep, they manage to bewitch, bother and bewilder (in a good way), until a person can't help but finally understand the role of, say, the subjunctive complement.

In the end, rather than taking us back to the tedium of childhood grammar school, Gordon immerses us in a world of nefariousness and whimsy -- all in the service of appositives and gerunds, past and future perfect tenses, splices and run-ons. And it's a world the reader will be loath (not loathe) to leave when the final page is turned.

*I'd recommend reading the entire New Yorker article, by the way. It begins as a review but evolves into a beautiful meditation on the mechanics versus the art of writing.

The goose is greedy*

I'm conducting an experiment: Will the prospect of earning a few extra dollars a month be enough incentive to keep me writing here, on the interweb?

"Pshaw! Don't tell me you're in this for the MONEY?"

Well, no, of course not. It's just that I'm lazy, you see. And I live in New York City, where there are so many other ways to spend one's time than playing on, and writing for, the interweb. And many of those things require the distressing handing over of many, many dollars. Without some sort of incentive here, I'm worried that the fresh enamoration engendered by my sassy new logo and nifty TypePad tools will soon fizzle, as I seek out other ways to spend my time and other ways in which to earn those dollars -- like working more, or teaching dance lessons, or running off to join a burlesque cabaret.

Speaking of random, I have to say: Do you not LOVE the redesign of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com? So pretty. I visited them just now to look up "engendered," to make sure I was using it right, and a synonym for "dim," which I typed first instead of "fizzle," but which I knew ought to change because a "dimming" of "enamoration" just didn't seem right to me. Right? But yes, I could spend hours just clicking back and forth through those easy-to-reach dictionary/thesaurus/encycopedia tabs. Swoon.

And the encyclopedia tab! "Not much use for that," you may be thinking. "Looking up the meaning of a word or searching for a tastier synonym is one thing, but looking up, what, every use of that word known to man?" Not quite. The encyclopedia, you see, offers great juicy spasms of randomness. For instance, an encyclopedic look-up of "fizzle" yielded this amazing morsel: Doggy Fizzle Televizzle. (!!!) Do you know what this is? I am completely out of it, so my guess was that it was a children's show, most likely featuring rotund, primary-colored creatures with squeaky voices and scary I'm-high-on-E eyes who did a lot of bouncing. But no. If only I weren't lacking in the all-important MTV gene (whose first cousins once removed include the VH1 gene and the BET gene), I would have been signaled by the root, "izzle," that this was an extension of the "fo' shizzle my nizzle" ... thing. And from that I might have deduced that Doggy Fizzle Televizzle was not, in fact, a children's show, but an all-Snoop-Dogg-all-the-time show.

But wait! The wondrousnous does not end there. After this discovery I of course had to know, once and for all, what in god's name "fo' shizzle" really means, and so I turned to the Urban Dictionary, whose first explanation was this:

"fo shizzle ma nizzle" is a bastardization of "fo' sheezy mah neezy" which is a bastardization of "for sure mah nigga" which is a bastdardization of "I concur with you whole heartedly my African american brother"

(See there how I also got it wrong the first time? I said "my nizzle," when really the cool kids know it's "ma nizzle." There I go betraying my East-West-Coast-sushi-eating-latte-sipping half-whiteness.)

The Urban Dictionary being a free-for-all in its own right, "fo' shizzle"  is also explained to be, among many other things, an antiseptic-looking Vietnamese noodle house (is there any other kind?) and a term originating in medieval England whose meaning was "Alas! An advasary has come upon us! To the catupults!"

In a perfect world, the Urban Dictionary would also be a tab on Dictionary.com/Thesaurus.com. I am more than willing to help broker this deal. For my cut of the proceeds, of course.

* Thank you Marc Bell, "Shrimpy and Paul and Friends"

Just so we understand each other

To all friends, acquaintances and strangers who've ever written me an e-mail and appended a message to the effect of, "Please forgive all my hideous typos/grammatical flubs/embarrassing word choices, I was writing fast/didn't spell-check/had one too many bourbons before sitting down to write," I give you this -- so that you may never fear writing again.

Danger: Unconventional dialoguing ahead

Last night I started reading On Beauty, having finally worked my way down to it on the "to read" pile. I'm only 16 pages in, but something's tripping me up that I hope I can get used to.

All the dialogue ends with "said so-and-so," rather than "so-and-so said," which to normal mortals probably isn't that big a deal, but in my case, well, it's making my brain do flip-flops.

I'm used to the news convention of putting the speaker first, followed by "said." (Some sentences require exceptions, but that's the general rule.) But in On Beauty the lines go like this:

1. "You can't phone him," said Howard quietly.

2. "Thanks so much," said Howard and began his return journey up the stairs to his study.

3. "Is this for real?" asked Kiki, but got no reply.

I try really, really hard not to edit while I'm reading books on my own time, for pleasure. But those last two in particular made me twitch.

I read a line like No. 3 and go, "Gack! Why? Why not 'Kiki asked, getting no reply'?" Because it also doesn't sound right to me to use "Kiki asked, but got no reply." Nor does "said Howard and began." Huh? Is it just a cadence thing? An American grammar versus British grammar thing? Whatever it is, the inside of my noggin was so tangled up after I closed the book that I lay in bed for at least two hours, unable to asleep, unable to stop transposing in my head: "said she, she said, said she, she said," until the sun came up.

"If you were gay, it'd be okay…"

More and more, I'm hearing straight male friends use "gay" as a synonym for "dumb" or "pathetic," or use it as a form of friendly ribbing, without giving it a second thought.

"That's so gay," they'll say. And every time, I find myself doing an involuntary eye-roll, to which they respond, "What?" Sometimes it's a defensive "what," a meek "what," because even if deep inside they know there's probably something off about using "gay" this way, they can't quite put their fingers on why, or if they can, then they're not quite willing to admit it.

One friend even said, by means of excuse, something very specific, to the effect of, "I don't mean 'gay' as in homosexual, I just mean 'gay' as in stupid."

They don't get it. "But I don't mean it in a derogatory way," they say. But that's just the thing, guys -- yeah, you do.

They don't see that by applying the word to negatives, they in turn make the word itself a negative. They don't pause to ask, "Why, of all the words that would fit this situation here, have I chosen to use 'gay'?" Hm. I wonder.

I don't hear straight women using it in these contexts. And I don't hear gay men or women using it. I only hear it being used by straight men, the group most likely to feel threatened if labeled "gay." And even though these straight men swear they're not using it "in that way," it nonetheless betrays their sensitivity and slight (or great) revulsion to the word: for them, being called "gay" would be a bad thing (a minor teasing or a major insult, depending on the situation), and so "gay" is simply flipped around to describe bad things.

I get the same sick feeling when I hear a guy being berated for "throwing like a girl" or a man saying something like "women's basketball doesn't really count." Maybe these dudes mean it jokingly, but in saying such things, they're betraying a hint of their deep-down-true selves -- the chauvinistic, homophobic side of themselves (some to greater degrees than others, granted).

"Gay" offers a one-two punch: it doubles for "wimpy" and "lame" and their ilk, but it also replaces all words overtly feminine that used to stand in for "weak," at a time when men have learned that it's not cool to belittle things by equating them with female traits.

"But it's just a harmless word," the men might complain. Okay, if that's the case, why "gay"? Why not just "sad" or "weak" or "pathetic," words that more precisely get at what they mean? Or why can't these guys steal from their own thesaurus entries of negative gender connotations and say something like "brutish" or "caddish" or "loutish"? Or why not keep it gender neutral with something like "wack" or "tired" or "wrong"?

Or hey, if it's color they're after, a slightly more original coinage, why not try something that evokes a less-than-macho straight male -- say, "Niles," from the TV show Fraser. Imagine it:

The pitcher's on the mound, he throws the ball, it's waaay outside. The fan's instinct is to yell, "Stop pitching like a girl!" (the phrase he used as a kid). Except his wonderful and amazing girlfriend is sitting right there, and if he uses that, he knows he'll get a good solid thwap to the nuts as soon as she stands up to go to the restroom. Then he thinks of shouting, "That's so gay!" But he can't do that because these two leather-clad biker guys sitting to his left may or may not be gay, you never can tell, but in any case, he's not going to take any chances, because gay or straight, those guys could definitely kick his ass. So instead he yells, "God, you're so Niles!"

Perfect, right? Everyone can see how Niles probably hasn't handled a baseball since he was about six years old. And the fan keeps it in the club -- using a straight man to insult a straight man.

That's the ticket. "Niles" it is. Soon, everyone will be saying it. And you heard it here first.

To celebrate, why dontcha sing along...