CHAPTER SIX

Wise to the Words

The writing of good English is . . . a moral matter, as the Romans held that the writing of good Latin was.

—ROBERT GRAVES AND ALAN HODGE

 

WORD COURT

The Importance of being a COMMA.

You are in the position to confirm what the Supreme Court has already stated in U.S. v.s. Cruikshank 92 U.S. 542553. Namely that the 2nd. Amendment does NOT give persons the right to keep and bear arms without regulations within a well regulated Militia.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms. shall not be infringed.”

The comma after the word State is for the stated purpose, according to Webster’s Encyclopidic Dictionary, as a punctuation mark denoting the shortest pause in reading, and separates a sentence into divisions.

A comma is clearly NOT a period and cannot be used to separate and construct two sentences.

Am I right or is the N.R.A. right?

P.S. Feel free to correct any errors in punctuation or structure. But NOT in content!

 

Several years ago, when the United States Constitution was having its bicentennial, National Public Radio decided to cover the Constitution from every angle anyone there could think of, including some loopy ones. A producer asked me to copy-edit it and its amendments, and tell Morning Edition’s listeners about the changes I thought should be made. That experience brought home to me how differently the Founders used punctuation from the way that I use it, or any contemporary writer does.

In the late 1700s the norms of comma placement had more to do with suggesting where pauses might occur in speech than they have today, and less to do with demarcating grammatical structure. Neither the commas nor even all of the words in the Constitution mean quite what they would if the document had just been drafted. Historical research, not grammatical inquiry, is the way to tell what the Founders had in mind—and what exactly the Second Amendment means.

 

That we need to conduct historical research in order to understand our own Constitution, a document of supreme patriotic and practical significance, is a good reminder that the more our language changes, the less of the past it can effortlessly convey to us, and the less of the present it can convey into the future.

The letter that began this chapter leaves me wanting to know something else, though. Does its author believe, as his postscript suggests, that punctuation and structure are trifles and his meaning will be clear even if what he writes is riddled with errors? (And, of course, he has made a few errors, including—despite his insistence that a comma is not a period—putting a period instead of a comma after “Arms.”) Or does he believe his general point, that something as small as a comma can be all-important, in which case any imprecisions in his punctuation and structure may well make his letter as hard to interpret as the Second Amendment?

The truth about punctilios and meaning, I’m sure, is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, it is hard to know what that letter means in every particular, just as the Second Amendment is notoriously open to interpretation. On the other hand, when we read either the letter or the Second Amendment, we get the idea. The amendment, further, is in force; people protest it, others militantly support it, and their disagreement is no more than peripherally concerned with commas. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights overall are widely admired, and not for their freedom from solecisms and the excellence of their punctuation. (All the same, my correspondents do enjoy complaining about the phrase “more perfect Union” in the Preamble, inasmuch as perfection is supposed to be incomparable.) Not for Shakespeare’s rigorous adherence to the rules of contemporary standard English do we marvel at Hamlet and As You Like It. The point is: cultivate beautiful ideas and say them or write them down as best you can, and you will have editors like me as your acolytes.

Sometimes—often—that phrase as best you can is a euphemism for trying just hard enough to avoid embarrassing oneself, but here it means what it says. And we can almost always try a little harder to express ourselves a little more nearly perfectly. As best you can has many aspects, including some that this book has scarcely hinted at.

Oddly enough, a refinement on observing the punctilios—putting the commas where they belong, remembering that perfect is incomparable, and all the other hundreds of sparkly little facets of higher English we’ve considered—is forbearance from observing the punctilios inobservantly. For example: What’s between two things is not supposed to include them, and so when the news on National Public Radio recently mentioned in an item about a railroad disaster that “these trains were built between 1991 and 1993,” either that was put wrong or it was an awfully convoluted way of saying “trains built in 1992.” I myself have corrected whole boxcar-loads of phrases like “presidential debates held between 1960 and 1980”—a phrase that in context was certainly meant to include the debates of 1960 and 1980. But not long ago I came upon a rate that “fluctuated between 33 and 45 percent.” Hmmm. “Fluctuated from 33 to 45 percent,” right? No doubt the rate did hit 33 percent and 45 percent. But the fluctuation occurred between the two points, making between the better choice here. Whenever I begin to think that I can make a minor distinction like that one with my eyes closed, some new, eye-opening variant of it turns up.

Besides using language that says what it means, we may decide to use language that fails to do that, the better to say what we mean. English contains words whose entire point, as we discussed in the “Double or Nothing” section of Chapter Five, is their effect on tone. It contains ordinary expressions with undevious reputations which mean the opposite of what they say. “No doubt it will be sunny this afternoon,” for example, is a shade more doubtful than “It will be sunny this afternoon,” and “Surely we won’t need umbrellas” means only that that’s one person’s guess.

Whole realms of our language, in fact, are only tenuously related to what the words mean outright. Coded messages may lurk in what speakers and writers are avoiding saying. For example, “She has such a pretty face” in certain contexts means that her shape leaves something to be desired, and “She has a good figure” means that her face is not pretty. “Mistakes were made” not only means what it says but also hints that we won’t be hearing the speaker take responsibility for the mistakes.

Further, there are the unintended consequences of what has and hasn’t been said. We can hear the smug reproach or disparagement in “She has such a pretty face,” and we may well take the remark as a declaration that the person making it is a prig. “Mistakes were made,” as the listener hears it, sounds a lot like “I am a weasel.” Variations on “I am not to blame” often come out of the mouths of politicians, but, strangely, by the time these reach the ears of listeners, they have all turned into “I am a weasel.” A person who listens carefully can often hear advocacy journalists announcing “I am incapable of being fair-minded on this issue,” and lifestyle journalists announcing “I am dippy,” and many other people telling truths of which they’re unaware.

Besides what isn’t said, another kind of coded message is overstatement, and another example of unintended consequences is the effect that overstatement can have. As I learned one recent morning from another radio newsbreak, the union in a current and seemingly ordinary labor negotiation had the day before issued a press release likening the company to “a bloody-handed criminal blaming his victim after the fact.” Good grief! No doubt this figure of speech was meant to convey the depth of the union’s belief in its own cause. But it actually made me feel that things couldn’t be as bad as all that, and that what the union said couldn’t be accepted at face value. Ironically, the more passionate the overstatement, the likelier it is to arouse suspicion. When we feel so strongly about something that we’ll say anything to make our point, we may be better off saying nothing.

Other examples exist of words performing different jobs from the ones for which they superficially seem intended, but here I will set that idea aside. Tone of language has a number of less convoluted tools at its disposal as well, among them how personal or reserved, how vulgar or dignified or prissy, how erudite, how funny, how hip, how righteous, or how considerate a speaker or writer is trying to be, and how ineptly or cleverly he or she is managing to try. Any one of these qualities which is present to any degree may have its own unintended consequences: hearers or readers may be put off to learn intimate details from that confiding stranger, or they may fail to be engaged by the reserved one, finding him stuffy.

On and on goes the list of qualities that can affect the impression language makes. What language describes can be all over the map, and yet language itself is relentlessly linear: words must be expressed, and understood, one at a time. Anyone trying to tell a complicated story, in which various things happen at once, or make a complicated argument, in which there are multiple relationships among ideas to be explored, has to wrestle the words into some sequence or other. And language can be as detailed or as loftily distant as we please: I can lead you in a slow, meticulous, attentive sweep of a given patch of conceptual territory, examining and analyzing many of its particulars as we go, or together we can skim over it, noting little more than its boundaries.

Speakers and writers who devote a great deal of attention to matters such as these—to schematizing their thoughts—and are not subtle about it tend to seem obsessive and pedantic (as in “Now let us consider three results of this fact, the first of which has two significant aspects”). But people who devote no attention at all to such matters can be annoying in their own way. If they’re telling a joke, they never manage to put the punch line last, and serious and humorous subjects alike come out like shaggy-dog stories. In effect, these people are asking their readers or hearers to do much of their work for them.

Some part of any verbal communication may be, as well, sheer inept, random noise, such as the ambiguity that can result from typos and bad grammar and ideas that the speaker or writer hasn’t thought through and would never express if he or she had. The louder this noise is, the more the listener or reader should beware. As Robert Graves and Alan Hodge warn in The Reader Over Your Shoulder, “When people have to write from a point of view which is not really their own, they are apt to betray this by hedging, blustering, an uneasy choice of words, a syntactical looseness.” Or, in the words of an anonymous diplomat quoted in The Complete Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gowers, “What appears to be a sloppy or meaningless use of words may well be a completely correct use of words to express sloppy or meaningless ideas.”

Although we may sympathize with those who just say things or write them the way the things come into their heads, it is obvious that to do so is to ask to be misunderstood. Too bad, but getting the tone and the sequence right, as well as the information, can be a lot of work. This is true not just for high-flown rhetoric and literature meant to have enduring value but also for communication of the most humdrum sort.

Witless of me though it is to plunge into the humdrum at this rhetorically exalted moment, I’d like you to have an example of how much trouble one may need to go to in order to get something simple right. I know someone we’ll call Barbara, to disguise her identity, whose neighbor employs a private garbage-collection service. As the garbage truck turns into or out of the neighbor’s driveway, it often veers off the pavement onto Barbara’s grass, gouging ruts as it goes. After the seventh or eighth time Barbara had smoothed out her lawn, she began to be annoyed. I offered to compose a letter for her.

 

Dear ——,

I hope you are well. I am writing now to call your attention to a small matter that perhaps has hitherto escaped your notice. By this I mean the irregularities in the surface of the portion of our property that lies nearest your home. These irregularities have been accumulating over the past number of months. Considering them unattractive, I have been investigating their origins. I am sorry to report . . .

 

Um, no. That won’t do. I’m trying to be suave, but what I’m actually doing is droning on.

 

Dear ——,

Your garbage truck is digging ruts in my land. This must stop.

 

Droning this is not, but now I seem hostile and abrupt—as if I were a drafting a ransom note.

 

Dear ——,

I’m sure that I would want to know if we were upsetting our neighbors, including you, in any way. And so, reluctantly, I must put pen to paper to extend to you the same courtesy—namely, . . .

 

With this one, don’t you picture me pausing every few words to wring my hands?

 

Dear ——,

I’m writing about the ruts on my property along the road running past our houses. It seems that your garbage-collection service’s truck is digging them when it turns wide to enter your driveway. Smooth them out though I do, they keep reappearing. I’d like for the roadside to look nice. Can you help?

 

Ah. There we are.

I don’t mean to present this version as a paragon. It didn’t work: my friend sent it, the truck kept gouging ruts, and neither an apology nor any effort to repair the damage was forthcoming. Sometimes not even as best we can achieves the goal desired. All the same, we’ve got to keep trying. Just now, too, I had a specific goal in mind: to illustrate what varied impressions one person can make even while conveying a single, simple message.

This book is, of course, practically a textbook on what varied impressions different people can make. I’m sure you’ve gotten mental pictures of many of my correspondents. The great majority of them seem like excellent company, don’t they? But perhaps you’ve felt that a few of them drone on, a few are hostile and abrupt, and a few are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No doubt the people gave these impressions in spite of themselves. They probably intended to demonstrate their suavity, or admirable directness, or sensitivity, but they lacked the command of language that would enable others to enter into their state of mind. If not that, then they were deluding themselves about the fine personal qualities they hoped to express.

I don’t mean to present myself and my personal qualities, either, as any paragon. All the same, I believe that the highest purpose of language is to allow us to exhibit ourselves as the noble creatures we perceive ourselves to be. With our words—particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them—we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best. Our words, outside ourselves, can be objects for us to reflect on, objects to perfect, evidence for us to study if we want to know whether we’re as kind or as clever as we like to think we are—and then they can be tools to help us be that kind or clever if we can just use them skillfully and patiently.

It is impossible for us to see ourselves minute by minute as others see us, or as they would see us if they were present; it is impossible to be continually our best selves. But we can demand of words serving as permanent representations of us that they be their best: judicious, lively, sympathetic, wise—or what qualities would you hope for?

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote, in the introduction to Local Knowledge:

 

To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

 

Then again, the philosopher E. M. Cioran wrote, in The Trouble With Being Born:

 

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

 

And though I wish to but know I cannot, so I shall.