Language

A Meditation upon Things in which I will briefly speak of the Icelandic Parliament, “creature features” of the 1960’s, Cicero, Duke Ellington, Shakespeare and excessive pedantry.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a short piece by James R. Hagerty that raised my ire:  “Use More Expressive Words!” Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore.   The article describes teachers who have banned certain words from student assignments, like “go,” “said” and “good” because they are considered insufficiently expressive.   This attitude is not new, of course.   It certainly existed when I was a young student.  I suspect it was first promoted by Peter Mark Roget’s publisher, to spur sales.

Among the condemned is the word “thing.”    I’d like to make a plea, if one can be entertained at this late date, for full pardon, and show that “thing,” like all words (even big words) can be used in insipid ways by mediocre authors, it is also capable of great delicacy, truly a word to be cherished, not discarded.

Let’s start with a simple, familiar example, the legendary song, “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing)” with music by Duke Ellington, words by Irving Mills.   How can one write this without using “thing” or “anything”?  We could try, “Your music will not have popular or critical acclaim if it lacks rhythmic syncopation in the current vernacular,” but this is hardly an improvement.

Of course, we don’t need to stray from the King’s English to have a fling with a thing.   The Bard himself used this forbidden word to good effect, in Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 1, where Marcellus berates the hoi polloi for turning out for Caesar’s triumph: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!”

It is worth mentioning, in passing, that Caesar himself would have been familiar with “thing” in its Latin form, “res”.   In Latin the term has a dual meaning, “thing” but also “affair” or “deed.”   So his adopted nephew, Octavian would later have inscribed in bronze his “Res Gestae Divi Augusti” (Things Accomplished of the Divine Augustus).   One of Caesar’s enemies, Marcus Cicero, wrote a book called De Re Publica or “of the public thing”, maybe better translated as “concerning public affairs” or, in the word as it has come down to us, “On the Republic.”

Some of that flavor lingers on in English today.  You might say you cannot accept an invitation because, “I have a thing next week.”  The British English (forgive the redundancy) “husting” (what Americans might call a “stump speech”) was literally the “house thing” or a small deliberative assembly.  In modern Icelandic (forgive the oxymoron) they have the Althing or “all thing”, their legislative general assembly.

“A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true,” as Herman Melville said.   Well before Melville, and well after, things that go bump in the night have been called…well…things.

Consider Hamlet, Act I, Scene 1: “What, ha’s this thing appear’d againe to night?”   And then consider all the horrible horror movies that haunted movie screens (and UHF television channels) in decades long past, such as:

• The Thing from Another World (1951)
• The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958)
• Godzilla versus the Thing (1964)
• Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1966)
• The Thing with Two Heads (1972)

Thus the case for thing.  Perhaps you care to suggest some other examples that illustrate the versatility and vigor of “thing”?

There are other words that the pedants despise that I contrariwise cherish.  Perhaps, next time I will give a few thoughts on another word that has “the right stuff.”

Evidently today is National Grammar Day.  I am not a fan.

Like most Americans of my generation I was taught to identify parts of speech, diagram sentences and intone with the rest of the class the mysteries of the three-and-twenty most holy helping verbs: “is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, have, has, had, do, did, does, may, must, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should”.   Because I was good at it, and felt a call to the service of pedantry, I continued my novitiate in stranger accents, in German, Latin and Greek.

I was well on my path the the priesthood of a grammarian, when in 1992 I abandoned all my vows in a bus in Somerville, Massachusetts, when a drunk showed me what language was really all about.

I’m not one to start a conversation with a stranger —  even a sober one — on public transportation.  But in this case I had little choice in the matter, since this particular gentleman insisted on initiating a debate on the virtues of the Allman Brothers, a subject which I was neither equipped nor inclined to discuss with him.

When I expressed my disinclination to debate, and further, my ignorance of all things Allman, the dear fellow was offended and let out a string of expletives, starting with “Un-freakin’-believable” (albeit with a more emphatic, saltier interposed participial adjective than I can relate to you here) and continuing for several minutes.  Nothing he said was grammatical.  Little was even coherent.  But what I did understand was pure genius.  I wish I had a tape recorder.  As my stop approached, I hesitated a moment, intending to thank the man, offer him my congratulations and laud him as a poet of the first order.  But the smell, as well as my own instinct for self-preservation, held me in abeyance.

Since that day I have been an apostate to grammar.  I think we should all have a range of ways to speak and write,  and should be able to modulate according to circumstances. Language is like a wardrobe.  A man should have jogging shorts as well as a tuxedo.  In the end, language is not about rules.  It is about suiting the words to the occasion, of putting the right words in the right places, and what is “right’ will depend on circumstances.

So down with grammar, down with the rules! Go, split an infinitive, dangle your participles, and like my good friend on the #86 bus, even separate your inseparable prefixes.  To quote Duke Ellington, “If it sounds good, it is good”.  And remember that the goal in the end is expression and understanding.  If you are understood, then you’ve accomplished more than many.

As Gertrude Stein wrote:

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone.

 

A word cloud made using Wordle, of the texts of all inaugural addresses, from that of April 30th, 1789 until today’s. The 500 most-used words are displayed (leaving out ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘is’, etc.) with font size proportionate to frequency of use.

Some of the least-used words in inaugural addresses, the hapax legomena of inaugural addresses, used only once in that corpus, include ‘cocaine’ (George W. Bush), ‘Batavian’ (John Adams), and ‘cattle’ (Benjamin Harrison). Oh what I’d pay to hear, just once, a president inveigh against cocaine-snorting Batavian cattle, rather than platitudes about new beginnings. (And I’ll guarantee you that within a week this page will be the #1 authority, as judged by Google, on bovine cocaine abuse in Batavia.)