Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog Read online

  ALSO BY KITTY BURNS FLOREY

  SOLOS

  SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS

  FIVE QUESTIONS

  VIGIL FOR A STRANGER

  DUET

  REAL LIFE

  THE GARDEN PATH

  CHEZ CORDELIA

  FAMILY MATTERS

  © 2006 KITTY BURNS FLOREY

  BOOK DESIGN:

  DAVID KONOPKA

  ILLUSTRATION:

  JOEL HOLLAND,

  WWW.JMHILLUSTRATION.COM

  MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

  145 PLYMOUTH STREET

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 11201

  AND

  8 BLACKSTOCK MEWS

  ISLINGTON

  LONDON N4 2BT

  WWW.MHPBOOKS.COM

  FIRST MELVILLE HOUSE PRINTING

  OCTOBER 2006

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-402-8 (EBOOK)

  Portions of this book first appeared in an altered form in The Vocabula Review, Harper’s Magazine, and Best American Essays 2005, edited by Susan Orlean and published by Houghton Mifflin.

  Photo of Brainerd Kellogg used by permission of the Polytechnic University Archives.

  The photo “Alonzo Reed and his wife in front of Seatuck Lodge” is from A History of Remsenburg (2003) published by and used with the permission of The Remsenburg Association, Inc.

  The photo “Gertrude Stein and one of the Baskets” is courtesy of The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The photographs on this page are courtesy of Maya Fineberg.

  The poem “A Dog” from Tender Buttons ©1914 by Gertrude Stein is used by permission of Stanford G. Gann, Jr., Literary Executor of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

  Florey, Kitty Burns.

  Sister Bernadette’s barking dog : the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences / Kitty Burns Florey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933633-10-7 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-933633-10-7 (alk. paper)

  1. English language — Sentences. 2. English language—Grammar. 3. English language — Syntax. I. Title.

  PE1375F56 2006

  428.2—dc22

  2006024703

  v3.1

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ENTER THE DOG

  TIMES CHANGE

  GENERAL RULES

  POETRY & GRAMMAR

  YOUSE AIN’T GOT NO CLASS

  DIAGRAMMING REDUX

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  chapter 1

  ENTER THE DOG

  Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. When it was introduced in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like the measles, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “him and me went” and “I ain’t got none,” until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.1

  Even in my own youth, many years after 1877, diagramming was serious business. I learned it in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette.

  Sister Bernadette: I can still see her, a tiny nun with a sharp pink nose, confidently drawing a dead-straight horizontal line like a highway across the blackboard, flourishing her chalk in the air at the end of it, her veil flipping out behind her as she turned back to the class. We begin, she said, with a straight line. And then, in her firm and saintly script, she put words on the line, a noun and a verb—probably something like dog barked. Between the words she drew a short vertical slash, bisecting the line. Then she drew a road—a short country lane—that forked off at an angle under the word dog, and on it she wrote The.

  That was it: subject, predicate, and the little modifying article that civilized the sentence—all of it made into a picture that was every bit as clear and informative as an actual portrait of a beagle in mid-woof. The thrilling part was that this was a picture not of the animal but of the words that stood for the animal and its noises. It was a representation of something that was both concrete (we could hear the words if we said them aloud, and they conveyed an actual event) and abstract (the words were invisible, and their sounds vanished from the air as soon as they were uttered). The diagram was the bridge between a dog and the description of a dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language.

  I was hooked. So, it seems, were many of my contemporaries. Among the myths that have attached themselves to memories of being educated in the ’50s is the notion that activities like diagramming sentences (along with memorizing poems and adding long columns of figures without a calculator) were draggy and monotonous. I thought diagramming was fun, and most of my friends who were subjected to it look back with varying degrees of delight. Some of us were better at it than others, but it was considered a kind of treat, a game that broke up the school day. You took a sentence, threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences. Those ephemeral words didn’t just fade away in the air but became chiseled in stone—yes, this is a sentence, this is what it’s made of, this is what it looks like, a chunk of English you can see and grab onto.

  I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams—the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which—once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed—those sentences could be comprehended.

  On a more trivial, pre-teen level, part of the fun was being summoned to the blackboard to show off your skills. There you’d be with your chalk while, with a glint in her eye, Sister Bernadette read off an especially tricky sentence. Compact, fastidious handwriting was an asset. A good spatial sense helped you arrange things so that the diagram didn’t end up jammed against the edge of the blackboard like commuters in a subway car. The trick was to think fast, write fast, and try not to get rattled if you failed nobly in the attempt.

  As we became more proficient, the tasks got harder. There was great appeal in the Shaker-like simplicity of sentences like The dog chased the rabbit (subject, predicate, direct object) with their plain, no-nonsense diagrams:

  But there were also lovable subtleties, like the way the line that set off a predicate adjective slanted back toward the subject it referred to, like a signpost or a pointing finger:

  Or the thorny rosebush created by diagramming a prepositional phrase modifying another prepositional phrase:

  Or the elegant absence of the preposition with an indirect object, indicated by a short road with no house on it:

  The missing preposition—in this case to—could also be indicated by placing it on that road with parentheses around it, but this always seemed to me a clumsy solution, right up there with explaining a pun. In a related situation, however, the void where the subject of an imperative sentence would go is better filled—in my opinion then and
now—with the graphic and slightly menacing parenthesized pronoun,2 as in:

  Stop that loud barking!

  Questions were a special case: for diagramming, they had to be turned inside out, the way a sock has to be eased onto a foot: What is the dog doing? transformed into the more dramatic:

  The dog is doing what?

  Mostly we diagrammed sentences out of a grammar book, but sometimes we were assigned the task of making up our own, taking pleasure in coming up with wild Proustian wanderings that—kicking and screaming—had to be corralled, harnessed, and made to trot in neat rows into the barn.

  We hung those sentences out like a wash, wrote them like lines of music, arranged them on a connecting web of veins and arteries until we understood every piece of them. We could see for ourselves the difference between who and whom. We knew what an adverb was, and we knew where in a sentence it went, and why it went there. We were aware of dangling modifiers because we could see them, quite literally, dangling off the wrong line:

  Trotting down the road in a red collar, I spotted the dog.

  And we knew that gerunds looked like nouns but were really verbs because they could take a direct object:

  Part of the fun of diagramming sentences was that it didn’t matter what they said. The dog could bark, chew gum, play chess—in the world of diagramming, sentences weren’t about meaning so much as they were about subject, predicate, object, and their various dependents or modifiers. All you had to do was get the diagram right—the meaning was secondary. And for a bunch of eleven-and-twelve-year-olds, there was a certain wacky charm to that idea.

  At my school, diagramming was part of our English classes for three years. Once the gates of elementary school slammed shut at the end of eighth grade, I never encountered diagramming again. Presumably, by then, our grammar was impeccable—a doubtful proposition, perhaps reflecting the optimism of the nuns about the perfectibility of human beings. With diagramming behind us, we were encouraged to use our skills in the writing of compositions on such topics as (I refer here to a yellowed copy of our school paper, which I was privileged to edit as a senior) keeping Christ in Christmas, the importance of good dental health3, and why Nixon should be elected president, even though Kennedy was a Catholic.4

  * * *

  The nuns, of course, didn’t have a monopoly on teaching sentence-diagramming. If my parochial school education was quintessentially ’50s (meaning regimented, bland, and conservative), the public schools were not much different.

  My first exposure to diagramming was a year before Sister Bernadette presented us with her noisy dog. One of the few perks of going to my school was that, because Sister B. and her cohorts were Sisters of St. Joseph, March 19th—St. Joseph’s Day—was a school holiday. No one else in the entire world got March 19th off—just kids who were taught by that particularly benevolent order of nuns. This was odd and wonderful, the equivalent of an obscure Jewish holiday like Shemini Atzereth. In New York City, the alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules are suspended on Shemini Atzereth; at St. John the Baptist Academy in Syracuse, New York, getting-up-early-for-school rules were suspended on March 19th. It was a day of strange, incongruous liberation. When I was in fifth grade, that meant I was free from the bizarre disciplinary practices of our teacher that year, Sister Agnella, who extorted a penny from anyone who dropped a pencil on the floor and two cents for talking in class—all coins shipped straight off to the missionaries in Africa.

  So a day off was very nice except that, in the remote suburban neighborhood from which I was bused into the city to school, my few Catholic friends were citizens of schools not graced with Josephites but with Franciscans or some other order—all of them worthy, no doubt, but not, for some reason, as generous with their days off as the blessèd Sisters of St. Joseph. And my other friends—snootily known to us as “non-Catholics”—went to the local public school. So sometimes St. Joseph’s Day, which in Syracuse is often wintry and bleak, could be, frankly, boring. Either that, or I was a hopeless nerd. Whatever the case, on March 19th of my fifth-grade year, I went to school with my friend Carol Mae.

  Carol Mae was a year ahead of me. Maybe a day in a sixth-grade class in a heathen school seemed pretty wild to someone like me, whose idea of a really exciting afternoon was reading The Password to Larkspur Lane for the tenth time. Carol Mae was my raciest friend, someone my parents considered distinctly iffy: her mother ate candy and watched the soaps all afternoon, their house was a cheerful mess, and her father was usually mysteriously absent. I was not, for example, allowed to go to Carol Mae’s for sleepovers. Going to school with her, on the other hand, was considered a wholesome activity.

  And so it was. I can’t remember the name of the sixth-grade teacher at the Main Street Elementary School, but I do recall that she was strict—not wacky-strict like Sister Agnella but strict like teachers on TV: no-nonsense hands-on-hips what-do-you-think-you’re-doing strict. I see her as tall and thin, with a name something like Miss Peckham. That may be a fantasy. But I do recall that, weirdly, she seemed to like having me in her class. I suppose the slight distraction was balanced by the flattering fact that I chose to spend my exotic day off under her authoritarian thumb.

  I don’t actually remember much about that day, but I do recall that the class was diagramming sentences and also “parsing” them, which we never did at my school but which I’m told was common (as diagramming was not) in British schools. Parsing involved shouting out the function of the words in the sentences Miss Peckham wrote on the blackboard—something like “The—article! Dog—noun! Barked—verb!” Maybe it was just a bad day at Main Street Elementary, but the whole thing seemed very boring and obvious, and I sat there thinking, no doubt, of my shelf of Nancy Drew books and wishing I’d stayed home like a normal person.

  Or maybe Miss Peckham didn’t have Sister Bernadette’s flair. Maybe it was no fun without the element of competition with my peers. Or maybe it was like a training bra: I just wasn’t ready. A year later I dove with glee into parsing’s artier sibling, sentence diagramming.

  * * *

  While chasing rabbits may be fatiguing, and diagramming a sentence that says so may be rewarding, a generation or two later the whole topic has become, admittedly, distinctly unsexy.5

  Maybe the world moves too fast to slow down for grammatical niceties; diagramming seems a perfect emblem of the earnest mid-19th-century times in which it was invented. Self-improvement in those days meant acquiring the trappings of gentility—and impeccable grammar was at the top of the list. (It was also the heyday of elocution lessons, elegant penmanship, posh etiquette, and ramrod-straight posture.)

  People still hunger to improve themselves, but now much of it is about having flatter abs or better work habits or a more spiritual holistic evolved mindful outlook. There are no rap songs about sentence diagramming, no movies starring Meg Ryan as a pert English teacher trying to revive it, no true-crime novels about “The Diagram Killer” who carves I | am evil on his victims’ chests. In a world of suddenly popular scold-fests like Eats, Shoots & Leaves, there are no best-selling editions of Reed and Kellogg’s Higher Lessons in English, the ground-breaking little masterpiece that introduced sentence-diagramming to a grateful world. No one has illustrated it as Maira Kalman has so entertainingly The Elements of Style. On its back cover, English Grammar for Dummies even promises that “you won’t have to diagram a single sentence.”

  I’m not really sure why what was mostly considered a lark half a century ago is considered dull today. Maybe now there are more larks in the average classroom than there were in Sister B’s. But it’s a sure bet that Bill Gates won’t be adding MS-Diagrams to the Windows menu anytime soon.

  * * *

  1 I’m thinking here of Mark Twain’s famous and still highly entertaining essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in which Twain concludes that “in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 literary offenses out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”
But Wilkie Collins called Cooper “the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America.”

  2 In this case, Sister B. departed slightly from Reed & Kellogg and from most traditional diagrammers, who would express the implied “you” with the less interesting and more generic “x.” X would probably stand in for “to” in the preceding example as well.

  3 I won a prize for an essay on the subject that contains the somewhat startling—possibly ground-breaking—observation that “Good dental health and good mental health are related.”

  4 Answer? Nixon would be tougher on Communism.

  5 And this despite the intriguing fact that grammar is an outgrowth of the word glamour: they are, in fact, the same word, through the magic of something called “dissimilation,” in which glamour becomes grammar in much the same way peregrine becomes pilgrim. Whichever way you spell it, the word was originally about magic and witchcraft. Grammar meant learning, which a few centuries ago was understood to involve magic, or at least astrology. And even today, a glamorous person casts a spell.

  chapter 2

  TIMES CHANGE

  Reed and Kellogg started the diagramming craze with their Higher Lessons (even the title exemplifies the period’s air of dogged aspiration), but, in fact, they were preceded by a man named S. W. Clark, who in 1860 published a tome called A Practical Grammar: in which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another. Tellingly, the title page advertises that the book is “illustrated by a complete system of diagrams.” What it doesn’t mention is that the diagrams are balloons.

  Clark was born in 1810 in Naples, New York, a town on Canandaigua Lake in what is now wine country. He was the son of a farmer but didn’t seem to take to the land: he worked instead as a clerk in a store. Perhaps, even then, as he languished behind the counter selling potatoes or millinery or inkwells (the record is murky), he was pondering ways of making grammar visible. Whatever the case, at age 23 he finally quit his job and went on to Amherst College—graduating with honors—and devoted his life to teaching.