Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog Read online

  When it works, their system is actually quite ingenious. From Clark, they got the general idea and even a few details, like the use of dotted lines as connectors (though, frankly, it’s not always easy to figure out what Clark’s dots were precisely for). But many of the refinements that Clark sorely needed are all there in Higher Lessons—and the switch from freakish balloons to sober geometric lines imparts a certain dignity to the whole process.

  Reed and Kellogg began with a straight line: the expressway on which the sentence’s most important elements ran as smoothly as a Jaguar tooling along Route 80. Lines slanting above or below it like side roads were for modifiers and connectors—connectors that could lead to, say, another sentence (making a compound) or a second clause or a modifying phrase, all of which drove along their own little avenues. For participles, Reed and Kellogg cleverly devised a line with an angle in it, which they explain indicates that the word is partly an adjective (which travels on a slanted line) and partly a verb (a straight line):

  The gerund gets yet another kink in its line so that it seems to fall clumsily downstairs, which may be appropriate for a verbal noun:

  They devised a series of steps for adverbs and adjectives that modify each other:

  They use multi-story edifices for compound nouns, plus the broken line for coordinating conjunctions:

  And they quite sensibly use a simple parenthesis to show an appositive—in this example, a noun:

  As a sentence gets more and more convoluted, diagramming has to become increasingly inventive—hence the pedestal, a kind of access road for phrases that function as a noun or an adjective, or clauses that function as nouns. The pedestal may look precarious sometimes, with its huge, unwieldy load of words, but it lets you loft those monsters into places that are usually reserved for single units—like one of those huge, many-holed birdhouses for purple martins that you see stuck up on a pole:

  Diagramming also has its mystical side: it allows for the representation of something that isn’t there. If a word is missing from the sentence but is necessary for its meaning, an “x” is usually the all-purpose stand-in.9 In the example below, what is meant is that the house was more complicated than the house the birds had expected.

  And, as we have seen, Reed and Kellogg, in their infinite wisdom, even came up with the dramatically unmoored floating line for direct address (Mildred! Stop barking!) or interjections (Sheesh! Will that dog ever stop barking at those birds?)

  This complex system of highways and avenues became clearer when they chopped it into sections with small vertical lines, straight or slanting, cutting through the main lines or sitting on them like telephone poles. These divisions are eloquent in their simplicity: the aggressive slash dividing subject from predicate, the gentler one before the direct object, the slant forward or back as a subtle commentary on two words’ relation to each other, the broken lines for those less substantial connectors.

  All this is still in use today, virtually unchanged.10

  But Reed and Kellogg, like Clark, didn’t allow for a certain awkwardness that seems built into the language. When the sentence gets fancy—not Henry James-fancy, just regular-fancy—there is no way to avoid an ungainly diagram that can confuse rather than clarify. Reed and Kellogg face this objection head-on in the preface to Higher Lessons, arguing that it’s not a flaw but a merit, “for it teaches the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order,” forcing “a most searching examination of the sentence.” But surely it should be possible to work backwards, deducing the sense of the sentence from its diagram: just begin with the capitalized word and follow it along its line from west to east, tracing its north and south byways down to the last little prepositional phrase. But this is often impossible, and because you can’t keep the diagrammed parts together in a coherent way, the sentence emerges from its system of orderly lines no more clearly than from a fistful of balloons:

  The dog is two years old.

  If the dog barks again, we will shut her in the cellar.

  These sentences, plain enough before they’re Reed-and-Kelloggized, start to lose meaning when they set off down the road. (The dog is old? Oh—wait—she’s only two. And you’re going to shut her in the cellar? Ah, I see—only if she keeps barking.) The diagram can go only so far to accommodate their modest eccentricities; instead, they have to forfeit their character to accommodate the diagram. The more complex a sentence gets, the murkier it becomes when diagrammed—as we shall see in Chapter Four. It gets dissected, its parts get labeled, and then the whole thing is left stalled out on Route 84, waiting in vain for a tow truck—an exercise that has its uses, as we have seen, but that is basically pro-diagram and anti-sentence.

  * * *

  Diagrams have other limitations.

  Reed and Kellogg, Sister Bernadette, and in fact several generations of English teachers have argued that diagramming sentences improves one’s writing. The diagram, then, would seem to be the supreme test: launching a bad sentence on the Sea of Reed and Kellogg would instantly expose it as bogus. But the sad fact is that many substandard sentences can be diagrammed. And there are other linguistic evils besides bad grammar.

  As I recall, Sister Bernadette never had us diagram ungrammatical sentences. (It would have been fun, but probably as risky as allowing us to go to a service in a non-Catholic church, which was strictly forbidden because, I have to assume, it was feared that we might like it there, and defect.) And in grammar books of Reed and Kellogg’s day, there was no allowance for anything but standard English. The professors had no patience with colloquialisms, dialect, slang, or other nasty bits that got in the way of grandiose sentences like “Poverty and obscurity oppress him who thinks that they are oppressive” and “Every day and each hour bring their portion of duty.”11 They seemed to take delight in providing plenty of specimens of what they considered unacceptable English. In Reed’s classroom, there was no getting away with colorful outbursts like “That stupid fellow set down on my new hat,” and Kellogg would certainly have flunked a student who wrote, “ ’Tain’t so bad as you think.”12

  According to Higher Lessons, the sentence “I, Henry, and you have been chosen” is incorrect not because it sounds demented or because it could be misconstrued as being spoken by someone named Henry to an unnamed other (or by the unnamed other to Henry), but because “Politeness requires that you should mention the one spoken to, first; the one spoken of, next; and yourself, last.” And the trouble with “I have got that book at home” is, somewhat confusingly, that “have, alone, asserts possession; got, used in the sense of obtained, is correct; as, I have just got the book.” So in 1878 anyone who asked a Brooklyn Polytechnic professor, “Have you got time to help me?” would have just got himself into some big trouble. If you look deeply into Higher Lessons in English, there seems to have been some cockamamie rule in the way of nearly everything anyone might want to utter.

  Standard English is, of course, the version of the language that has resulted from years of hand-wringing about the speed with which it has changed. But to try to hold back language change is like trying, as Monty Python and the Holy Grail would have it, to cut down the largest tree in the forest with a herring. The tree will keep growing. It’s the herring that will perish. Spoken Standard English is now a minority dialect—maybe it always has been. Despite the best efforts of editors, purists, and Sister Bernadette, people go on “speaking English any way they like” (to quote My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins once again), and writing it that way, too. Henry trained Eliza Doolittle out of her Cockney dialect and low-class vocabulary, but Eliza’s counterparts today would raise Henry’s eyebrows to unprecedented heights—and they don’t have Eliza’s incentive (room and board and really fabulous new clothes) to clean up their English. For many English-speakers, perhaps a majority, constructions like “Me and him went out” and “Mom laid down on the bed” are perfectly acceptable—not just in speech but in writing.

  And they can easily be diagrammed. />
  Both of those sentences are completely logical from the point of view of the speaker—and both are completely wrong. The diagrams alone tell us nothing about their wrongness: that would require a further explanation by the teacher. So what’s the point? This can’t be what Reed and Kellogg had in mind when they suggested that diagramming a sentence “teaches the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order.”

  Noam Chomsky has pointed out that nonsense can be perfectly grammatical. His own example is a sentence both nonsensical and improbable: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”13 This is as easily diagrammed as a sentence that makes perfect sense, like “Wingless black crows fly clumsily.”

  Or take one of those misleading and amusing newspaper headlines like SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM,14 which vividly illustrates the power of the hyphen. Even more splendidly ambiguous, because less easily fixed, is FARMER BILL DIES IN HOUSE. It diagrams like a dream, but that doesn’t help us decide whether it’s about a dead agriculturist or a piece of legislation.

  And Woody Allen, in his incomparably absurd essay “Slang Origins,” as part of his explanation of where the word “fiddlesticks” comes from, provides this diagrammer’s delight (I keep wanting to spell that “diagrammar”), which neatly illustrates a dependent clause, a couple of nice prepositional phrases, a compound object of a preposition, an infinitive phrase, and a hyphenated compound adjective:

  Whenever a man in the banking profession announced his marriage to a circus pinhead, it was the custom for friends to present him with a bellows and a three-year supply of wax fruit.

  Lewis Carroll’s famously nonsensical “Jabberwocky” is also eminently diagrammable (and really fun to do), but the diagrams don’t explicate it. Fortunately, Carroll does that for us in chapter VI of Through the Looking Glass. But knowing that brillig means 4:00 in the afternoon and that toves live on cheese and are something like badgers, something like lizards, and something like corkscrews, only increases its nonsensicalness.

  On the other hand, one my favorite sentences—supposedly a Groucho Marxism—is hell on wheels for parsers but is immediately clarified when it’s diagrammed:

  Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

  But that is a rare and beautiful case.

  In his justly famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell comments, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”15 Despite the truth of this insight, the linguistic maven and conservative pundit William Safire has rated George W. Bush’s hot-air-spewing second inauguration speech (known as the “freedom” speech because Bush used the words freedom, free, and liberty forty-nine times), as one of “the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history.” I’ve read the speech. It’s lovely. But, unlike Safire, a lot of word-watchers, including Jacob Weisberg in his Slate.com column, “Bushism of the Week,” find it instructive to deconstruct President Bush’s more everyday English, which is usually mangled: statements like, “We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading in order to make sure there’s not this kind of federal—federal cufflink.”16 (I could quote Orwell’s essay yet another time, but I’d just be beating a dead tiepin.)

  Like so many other bad sentences, the Bushism I just cited is baffling to the point of insanity,17 but that doesn’t mean it can’t be diagrammed. Sister Bernadette would be tight-lipped and disapproving, offering up silent prayers for the speaker and perhaps for the country, but—after removing the halting stammers that are part of most people’s speech—she could wedge those two sentences into neat diagrams.

  The substandard utterances I hear all the time on the streets and the subway, and that my school-teaching friends swear they get in writing (“Me and her axed him to take us to Mickey D’s”), can also be diagrammed very handily.

  Axed in this context transcends its violent image and is simply a replacement for asked18—call it a synonym. It looks okay on its little predicate line, and if you didn’t know it was “bad English” and saw it only as part of a diagram, you’d be like, what’s the problem, dude? (The usage is not new: it was probably brought to America by settlers from the English Midlands, where it’s still current. It’s also worth noting that, in the first translation of the Bible into English (1526) by William Tyndale, ax is standard in sentences like: “And the people axed him, and sayde: What shall we do then?”).

  As for me and her in this context, who’s to know they’re not as good as she and I? Just set them down there on the subject line, where they look just fine if you never learned why they don’t.

  As I started to say a couple of digressions ago, although diagramming a sentence can sometimes expose its structural problems, it doesn’t touch the deeper issues. A diagram can’t ferret out a lie, correct a lapse in logic, or explain a foray into sheer lunacy. And, for all its tail-wagging cuteness, it can’t expose the pitiful state of the speaker’s education—or the problems with an educational system that cuts funding instead of providing our schools with smaller classes, enough textbooks, and well-stocked libraries.

  * * *

  9 As we’ve seen, Sister Bernadette perhaps eccentrically preferred “(you)” instead of “x” when, for example, commanding her dog to stop barking. But in other diagramming situations, I seem to recall that she inflicted the occasional “x” on us.

  10 In 1950, Homer C. House and Susan Emolyn Harman introduced an expanded system, and the book was a best-seller.

  11 I’m betting that some arcane but now defunct rule governed the use of every and each in this example.

  12 Huckleberry Finn is banned today in many places because it’s politically incorrect; in the 1880s, when the book came out, it was banned by the Concord, Massachusetts, library for “systemic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions.”

  13 People have argued against this sentence’s improbableness, particularly insomniacs who are all too familiar with furious sleep, and clever souls who point out that ideas can indeed be “colorless,” meaning bland, and “green,” meaning naïve—in other words, ideas that are so dopey they might as well be asleep.

  14 A book of this title includes more than 100 pages of these groan-inducers.

  15 There was no way I could keep Orwell out of this!

  16 George W. Bush, March 30, 2000, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  17 As Twain would advise, “Use the right word, not its second cousin.” Or its great aunt who is locked up in an asylum.

  18 I don’t know why this is so widespread—and gaining. I used to think it was easier to pronounce. “I asked him” is, arguably, a mouthful: getting your tongue and teeth around sk/d/h is not that easy, and few people are willing to make all those sounds in a scrupulous way. It’s more likely to be “I ask dim,” the “k” sound amounting to little more than a tiny click, or—try it, you may find that this pronunciation in fact comes quite naturally—the much simpler “I assed him.” To “ax” him is actually harder to articulate, and why it’s so common, is a question that, as they say, goes beyond the scope of this inquiry.

  chapter 4

  POETRY & GRAMMAR

  Gertrude Stein, of all people, was a big fan of diagramming. She’s also probably the only major writer who has said so in print—and not only in print but in front of large audiences. In 1935, when she was nearly sixty and very famous, she sailed over from Paris for a lecture tour of the States, and one of the things she told her audiences was, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”

  Well, in most people’s experience, sentences don’t exactly diagram themselves; they have to be coaxed, if not rassled. But Gertrude Stein always meant what she said, and so we have to believe that, for her, those sentences marched along their intersecting lines like good little soldiers. In the 18
80s, when she was in school in Oakland, California, diagramming was a recent invention. Reed & Kellogg’s book was still fresh, teachers were probably still excited about it, and they passed that on to their students—the equivalent today might be a new reading program featuring hip-hop lyrics and biographies of sports figures.

  I haven’t read much Gertrude Stein. In fact, until recently, despite majoring in English in college and even acquiring an M.A. in literature, I am chagrined to admit I had read nothing of hers. I was dimly aware of “Rose is a rose is a rose.”19 And I saw the Rev. Al Carmines’ Gertrude Stein musical, In Circles, in 1969 at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York, which should have tipped me off to her brilliance.20 But it wasn’t until I became intrigued by her comments on the excitement of diagramming sentences that I really discovered Gertrude Stein. I dipped a toe into her Lectures in America. To my astonishment, I found myself dipping another toe, then both feet, until before I knew it I was in up to my neck and flailing wildly as I struggled not to be sucked under by her astonishing prose.21

  Everything I read fascinated me. Gertrude Stein sounds like a strange mix of James Joyce, George W. Bush, Lewis Carroll’s White Knight, and the precocious three-year-old grandson of a friend of mine. And yet, like Carroll and Joyce and little Declan, she often makes a strange kind of sense. For example, “Complications make eventually for simplicity and therefore I have always liked dependent adverbial clauses.” Or (and here she departs entirely from any resemblance to George W. Bush), “I have been very glad to have been wrong. It is sometimes a very hard thing to win myself to having been wrong about something. I do a great deal of suffering.” And then, “We still have capitals and small letters and probably for some time we will go on having them but actually the tendency is always toward diminishing capitals and quite rightly because the feeling that goes with them is less and less of a feeling and so slowly and inevitably just as with horses capitals will have gone away.” Her Theory of Diminishing Capitals is backed up by a reading of S. W. Clark’s appendix to his Practical Grammar, where he stipulates that capitals must be used for “Common Nouns fully personified,” e.g., “Here Strife and Faction rule the day.” Like horses, indeed, this usage has galloped out of our world.