Friday, May 29, 2009
The Curse (?) of Cursive
Grammar buffs—writers, teachers, editors, and copyeditors, all of which I have been—took delight from Kitty Burns Florey's slim volume about sentence diagramming, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. It was witty, anecdotal, and well-designed, even if it didn't quite explain how to diagram sentences (although there were examples and enough discussion of the principles to bring much of it back). But its goal was not to teach us how to; it was to remind us that, no matter how well or poorly diagramming works to teach us grammar, a solid knowledge of grammar is useful.
Florey's new book, Script & Scribble (190 pp., $22.95, Melville House) addresses the problem that penmanship seems to be going the same way as diagramming. She claims that many school districts are no longer teaching cursive, replacing it with “keyboarding” (what was billed as “typing” when I took the course in the summer of 1965). We don't write letters, college papers are typed (or keyboarded), and our handwriting gets worse and worse. Doctors are being sued for illegible prescriptions.
Like the last book, this one hangs from the framework of dual histories: that of the process and that of the author's connection to the process. Writing has a longer (and frankly more interesting) history than diagramming, and Florey's discursive approach gives us story and context together. The book's design also highlights her footnotes, which constitute a strong argument for more footnotes in popular writing (unfortunately, one of the numerous production glitches that diminish the pleasures of this book sets the notes and their reference numbers out of sync through most of the first chapter).
While these features are entertaining, they aren't necessary to get us interested in the meat. Most of us don't write well, and most of us don't feel good about it. Most of us (at least most of us of a certain age) were also trained in some variant of the Palmer method (Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian cursive, popular in Tennessee, are both derived from Palmer). So is the problem with us, or with the people who taught us cursive, or with cursive itself? Should we give up trying to write with anything other than block letters?
Florey combines realism with optimism, so her answer to the last question is no. To the question before that, she says yes: all three factors share responsibility. She gives numerous examples of what even the notoriously difficult Spencerian script can do when taught well to students who apply themselves. But she also realizes that most of us won't put in that much work, since we already haven't. We prefer to think that our illegible handwriting is a sign of how unique we are.
The art of handwriting interpretation comes out of and supports that conclusion. As Florey points out, there is little science to say that graphology works, or how it might work, but that does not stop us from believing in it. However, many of the systems of graphology (and there are nearly as many as there are systems of cursive script) depend on elements that are not universal, such as looping ascenders and descenders. There may be something to it, but I'm afraid that it is, like Florey's discussion of it here, only an interesting diversion.
But many of us really do need to write legibly, and not only doctors and those of us who draft with fountain pens. Florey's entertaining little book cajoles us into a reasonable solution, one that has been tested in school systems and self-education programs. It isn't the latest idea, but it's clear and relatively easy to learn. I, for one, will be trotting off to teach myself how to write the “fine Italian hand” of 16th-century italic.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Assessing the Installation
(Another column from the Nashville Free Press.)
This is aside from the headline in The Onion, “Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job,” although I certainly agree with that. But what does it mean to be “installed?”
Originally (the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is from 1548), this was used strictly for bishops and other churchmen. One of the many advantages of being a bishop is that you don't have to sit in a regular pew with the peasants. You get a special seat, in a row of seats, slightly recessed so that you have walls and armrests at your sides. When you are officially invested with your authority as bishop, you get the right to the bishop's stall. You are placed in the stall (much as at an investment into office you are put in the specific clothing--vestments--of that position, robes and sashes and whatnot).
Although we (sadly, perhaps) lack an official costume of the presidency (some countries do still have sashes), we do have an official seat. It is not the chair itself--presidents get to pick from an assortment of chairs--but its location in the Oval Office that makes it the boss's chair. The tradition of departing presidents leaving notes for their successors, even if they switch desks, lends this weight. So the new president, after taking the oath, is entitled to do business from the presidential chair in the presidential office.
Of course, most of what we watched on January 20 was not part of the installation. There were only two elements of all the presentations that had binding value, and they were the administration of the two oaths, for vice president and president. (“Administer,” as you may have guessed, comes from an Anglo-Norman root meaning to officiate at a religious ceremony.) Those oaths constitute the actual inauguration.
So what does that mean, “inaugurate?” Does it have anything to do with drilling a hole in the ground? No. (That's “auger.”) The Latin root is inaugurare, to read omens from the flight of birds. Before making any change in government, it would only make sense (to a pious Roman) to see what could be divined about the consequences of the change. We may have lost our faith in omens, but 68% of us (according to last year's Pew poll) believe we have guardian angels. Consulting or relying on the supernatural is second nature to us.
Bringing a new president in office is cloaked with words that tie it to a religious rite, a solemn obligation. The words try to remind us of the importance of the moment, of the words of the oath--words so important that they had to be administered twice, you will recall.
This is all fitting for a man who chooses his words as well and as carefully as our new president. I expect the next four years to give us a lot of language worth thinking about.
Friday, May 22, 2009
How do you like your eggcorns?
I've recently started writing a column for the Nashville Free Press. Here's the first one.
The English language is wonderful. The best estimates of the available vocabulary range from about 600,000 to a million words. In the right hands it can make us weep or cry, sometimes simultaneously. And that's without even using all of it, not to mention the new words that are being added daily, such as “misunderestimate.”
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
Like any good software, English (and most languages, in fact) has a lot of redundancy built in. We can raed a stencene lkie this one and usrdnenatd it. We can solve acrostic puzzles, using scattered letters and the lengths of missing words to reconstruct a sentence. We can usually guess what the word at the top of the next column or page will be. (Of course, a lot of this is thanks to our amazing brains as well, but this is a column about language.)
Redundancy doesn't only catch errors and fill in gaps. It also gives us puns and all sorts of wordplay, and mondegreens and eggcorns.
A mondegreen is the mishearing of a song so that we rearrange the sounds into different words, as with the classic hymn, “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” or the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”
An eggcorn is similar, but is based on some common word or phrase that we mis-hear and reinterpret in our own way. “Eggcorn” for “acorn” is the eponymous error, and you can see how it almost makes sense.
Of course, in the modern world we now have machines that can create eggcorns for us. I have a collection of phrases, many from student phrases, and I'm fairly sure that some of them--”a girl fried” and “a calibration of life,” for example--come from excessive reliance on spelling checkers. (Let me interject a favorite peeve here: While I sometimes check my spelling, I rarely make a mistake with my spells, and never do them on the computer. I do not use a spell checker.)
Many of the best eggcorns, though, come out of creative ignorance. George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” complains about some of the early sightings, such as “tow the line,” which appears to have something to do with barges rather than the orderly disposition of feet. The very best open up new lines of meaning for us to think about. The young man who complained about the “pre-Madonna” on his football team had a vague sense of what he meant to say, but the gaps in his knowledge let pop-culture and classical religious iconographies seep in. The student who was “knocked incautious” may well have been a poor speller, but has also introduced a new understanding of human behavior.
At their finest, eggcorns approach poetry. They offer alternative interpretations, giving us a deck from which we can launch our own creativity. In fact, I've already written six poems based on my collection. (To be honest, the first wasn't based on an eggcorn, but on this line from a final exam: “Writing, for me, is a way of putting my thoughts on paper.” That's an idea that gives a writing teacher a warm glow of achievement.) I take them all literally, as though the original authors knew what they were saying. Literalism isn't often the best approach to poetry, but it's working for me.
I do have an interesting sense of conflict about this. I'm getting good material from these mistakes, but one of my day jobs is to teach students not to make them any more. If my campaign ever succeeds, and I get people to think before they commit their words to paper, I'll run the risk of running out of ideas for this series of poems. On the other hand, I've already got dozens stockpiled. That should last me, at the very least, through my summer vocation.
