Lost causes in grammar

In 1951, when I was in the first grade, a paperback book called Grammar at Work was published. It was the work of Joseph Bellafiore, principal of Lafayette High School in New York City. I was recently handed a copy of this book, on the cover of which is written in ink, "Desk Copy - H.R. 18." The book remains in remarkably good shape, so apparently it was not used that much.

Leafing through it, I was drawn to a section called "Errors to avoid in diction or choice of words." There are 78 of these errors to avoid, and most of them still make sense all these years later. The first one, for example, advises not to say accept when you mean except. The last one discourages the use of youse. Good advice, I'd say.

Yet several of these 78 points remind me of how true are this book's very first words, "a living language." Living things change. And the English language has changed since 1951.

Take for instance the use of the word some as an adjective meaning excellent. Bellafiore forbids this. Yet the very next year, 1952, Charlotte's Web was published. And we all remember the words Charlotte spun on her web to save her friend, Wilbur the pig, from the dinner table: "Some pig." This book was written by E.B. White, one of the authors of The Elements of Style, a much more important book than Grammar at Work on the subject of proper English usage. The battle to save some from being used as an adjective in this way
was lost right there.

Some other lost causes that Bellafiore fought for include these:

Do not say aggravate as a synonym for irritate. Yes, aggravate means "to make worse," but meanings change over time, and now most people think it means to irritate, only more so.

Do not use can when you are asking for permission. Kids of my generation grew up playing the game "Mother May I?", the point of which seemed to be to teach us that may was the proper word to use when asking for permission. It didn't work. I suspect that most of the English teachers I had said can rather than may, at least outside the classroom.

Do not say healthy when you mean healthful. Children are healthy because they eat healthful foods and get healthful exercise. But when is the last time you heard anyone use the word healthful?

Do not use mad when you mean angry. Mad may actually mean insane, but most of us get a little insane when we get angry. At any rate most people have been saying mad to mean angry for a long time. That ship has sailed.

Use the word nice to mean "refined or carefully discriminating," not "pleasant or well-behaved." What? I can't remember a time when nice didn't mean pleasant or well-behaved.

Say plan to, not plan on. Sure. I plan on doing just that.

The joy of gobbledygook

Some words are just more fun to say than others. Rutabaga, for example. Or pumpernickel.

Somehow neither of these words made the cut for L Is for Lollygag: Quirky Words for a Clever Tongue, a charming dictionary of words that are a pleasure to pronounce. Many of these words, such as gobbledygook or humdinger, aren't even necessary. We have other, shorter, simpler words we could use. But, especially in the spoken word as opposed to the written word, brevity and simplicity are not primary objectives. More important, at least in casual conversation, is entertainment value.

Comedians know this. Writers like Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll knew it as well. Yes, they were working with written language, but they knew their books would be often read aloud and enjoyed as much for the sound of the words as for their meaning. (In Carroll's case, sometimes the words didn't even have any meaning.) We might say the same thing about Dr. Seuss.

Say aloud some of these words from L Is for Lollygag: cantankerous, dungarees, haberdasher, hullabaloo, peccadillo, plethora, rapscallion, rumpus, scalawag, serendipity, wisenheimer and Zamboni. Pleasurable words need not have several syllables. Even words like crux and rogue are included.

I was surprised how often I thought of my mother while reading this book. I didn't realize it during my youth, but she must have loved the sound of such words as catawampus, conniption, gadabout, gallivant, gumption, kitty-corner and persnickety. All these words are in the book.

If the words are fun, so are the definitions. Here's how this book defines amok: "going  crazy or out of control, like children who've had too much sugar. People usually run amok because walking amok would take too long." With writing like that it's a shame Chronicle Books did not see fit to give the writers, Molly Glover and Kate Hodson, cover credit. Their names are listed, however, in small print, on the copyright page. To that I say fiddlesticks!

A novel collection of stories

Is it a novel or a book of short stories? Surprisingly, it isn't always easy to tell.

Take Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, for example, or Mister Monkey by Francine Prose. Both consist of stories that could stand alone, yet they have characters and a few other points of reference in common. It helps when the author makes it clear what it is, as Edward Rutherfurd does when he tells the history of places like London, Paris and New York in a series of stories, some of which may take place decades or even centuries apart. He calls his books novels, so that is what they are. Other writers aren't as helpful.

I started reading Alice Hoffman's Blackbird House (2004) under the impression it was a novel. Soon I was not so sure. Some editions of the book identify it as a novel. Mine does not. Neither the paperback cover nor the copyright page makes it clear. Then I skipped ahead to a conversation with the author at the end of the book, where Hoffman refers to her "stories." So let's call it that, yet her book actually has much in common with Rutherfurd's. While Rutherfurd tells the history of a certain place with related, sometimes reoccurring characters, Hoffman does the same thing, but her place is a fictional New England house. Her "history" tells of the occupants of that house over a couple of centuries.

These stories are beautifully written in that lyrical style Hoffman does so well in her best work. Some end tragically, as with sailors lost at sea, a murder or a suicide, while others paint more positive pictures. As for painting pictures, the most important color on Hoffman's palette is red. In these stories we find red hair, red skin, red pears, red oaks, red-winged blackbirds and so on. There is the more common blackbird in the first story, "The Edge of the World," but after that it is a white blackbird that flies through the stories, as if it were the ghost of that original bird. Some characters view it as an omen, but whether it brings good luck or bad varies from story to story.

Hoffman says in the conversation at the end that Blackbird House began with a short story she was asked to write for the Boston Globe. That story, "The Summer Kitchen," inspired the rest.

I love this book, whatever it is.

Reading as character building

Karen Swallow Prior

I have yet to read Karen Swallow Prior's book On Reading Well, but I did find an interview with her on the web that I found interesting. She argues that reading builds character, or at least can build character. It depends upon what we read, how carefully we read it and how well we digest what we read.

"What we read contributes to virtue when we read timeless works that convey universal human experiences that transcend time, place, and social position," she says. "In the book, I show how we can learn about diligence from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, patience from Jane Austen's Persuasion, justice from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities — and much more."

Watching the PBS series The Great American Read I was struck by how often those people interviewed to promote one novel or another spoke of the virtue conveyed through that particular novel. It wasn't just an entertaining story. It was a story with a good message, a story that teaches something good to its readers.

I recall one woman saying that reading a good novel was a better way to work through one's problems than going to a therapist. It may also do more to make you a better person than listening to any sermon. A novel places you in the mind of another person, putting your feet into that person's moccasins, so to speak. Just the act of viewing things from another person's point of view can make you a better, more sensitive person.

Can movies do the same thing? Well, yes, at least up to a certain point. Movies, however, deal more  with images than with words, and never mind the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. In reality, words carry more lasting impact. Last Satuday at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg I heard Roy Peter Clark, author of The Art of X-ray Reading, say that if you add up all the words in the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the Constitution, the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer and a few other notable pieces of writing, you come up with fewer than a thousand words. Yet no picture could mean as much or convey as much as those words.

Words from war

A few days ago we marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War on Nov. 11, 1918. The war was great only in the sense that it was big, not that it was very good. Just a few years later there was an even greater war, so now we just call it World War I. Let's hope we stop counting.

Big events often add words to our vocabulary, and that was certainly true of that war. Each fall I try to celebrate, or at least observe, the 100th anniversary of the birth of new words or expressions in the English language, and it should be no surprise that the war that finally ended in 1918 produced a number of new words, including a few that year such as buck private, D-day and recon, all words I would have expected to have come out of World War II. The word internee may also be a product of the war. The expression oo-la-la probably also resulted from the war, since we associate it with French women, and American soldiers certainly met a lot of French women during and after the war.

Jeannette Rankin

The Russian Revolution began in 1917, but not until the following year did a lot of words associated with that event find their way into the language. Consider Bolshie, Leninism, neo-Marxism and Red Army.

The election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to Congress in 1916 led to the creation of the word congresswoman in 1918. Why it took a full year for that to happen I cannot imagine.

Here are some other useful words that sprang into existence that year: baby blues, blah, breakthrough, decertify, defeatism, defeatist, devalue, both extrovert and introvert, fadeout, force-feed, major (as a verb), maladapted, Mickey Finn, motorboating, Murphy bed, narcissistic, politicization, pre-med, roomie, rustproofing, scrimpy, shimmy, speedster, streamline (as a verb), surrealist and umpteen.

A few words coined in 1918 have all but disappeared from the language. I am speaking of farmerette Girl Guiding, Indianization and pitch-in dinner.

As always I am grateful to Sol Steinmetz and his book There's a Word for It for this little birthday party.

Dogs take charge

The dogs had to have their chance. Had to be left unhampered to try for success where the human race had failed.

Clifford D. Simak, City

In City, Clifford D. Simak’s classic sci-fi novel from 1952, the world has gone to the dogs, quite literally. Educated dogs like Bounce and Rover aren’t even sure that Man ever existed. He may have just been a mythical creature. Nevertheless they ponder the meaning of a series of eight tales that describe the gradual disappearance of humans and the emergence of dogs as the dominant species.

Sometimes thousands of years pass between these stories, so great changes sometimes take place between tales. Mankind does not become extinct exactly. Most humans choose to relocate to Jupiter, where existence is possible only by taking a radically different form, thus becoming something other than man. This new form somehow alters the mind in a way that makes it becomes to the human mind. Those who do not migrate elect instead to "take the sleep," or hibernate, for long periods, forever in some cases.

They leave behind their dogs, who have learned to think and speak like humans, and robots, which can do all the things dogs can't do, lacking thumbs. This new world seems like an ideal one, for there is a strong moral code forbidding violence against other creatures. Dogs won't even harm their fleas, though the fleas don't seem to live by the same code.

Yet trouble is brewing in this Eden. The world is becoming seriously overpopulated, and killing may be the only solution.

Simak maintains a serious tone throughout a relatively short novel that could easily turn comic. He tackles some tough issues and poses some intriguing situations. He also, in a book published 66 years ago, offers a perceptive look into 21st century living: "It was all here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair." Except for that "twirling a dial" part, that's a pretty accurate picture of the Internet.

English words from non-English places

Two books I read recently were goldmines of word origins, a subject I find interesting.

In Hero of the Empire, Candice Millard's account of Winston Churchill's daring escape during the Boer War, she mentions the possible origins of such words as:

Early trench coats

trench coat — So called because British soldiers wore a similar coat designed by Thomas Burberry in the trenches in France during World War I. Earlier Burberry made gaberdine coats for soldiers fighting in South Africa.

sniper — In India, riflemen skilled enough to kill small birds called snipes were termed snipers.

khaki — Derived from a Urdu word for dust.

corral — The Boers got their word kraal from the Portuguese word curral, meaning a circular livestock enclosure. The English turned it into corral.

Tony Horowitz serves up even more word origins in A Voyage Long and Strange:

saga — It "stems from a Norse word for 'say,'" says Horowitz.

canoe — From the native word canoa, heard by Christopher Columbus.

hammock — Caribbean islanders called this swinging bed a hamaca.

tobacco — Islanders smoked rolled-up weeds, which they called tabacos.

cannibal — Natives told Columbus about a man-eating tribe called the Canibales.

hurricane — From the Taino word huracan.

barbecue — From the Taino word barbacoa.

Appalachian — There was an Indian tribe in Florida called the Apalachee.

moccasin — From the Algonquin word mockasin

tomahawk - From the Algonquin word tomahack.

raccoon — From the Indian word aroughcun.

Horowitz also suggests, without much conviction, that the Indian chammay, meaning friend, may be where the English got the word chum.

Before the Pilgrims

Mid-November may not be the best time to mention it, but the settlement of North America by Europeans did not begin with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. A whole lot of exploration and settlement took place before that, and all this is the subject of a fascinating book by Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange (2008).

Americans make a big deal about the Pilgrims, and in a few days most of us will feast in their memory, but Horwitz wanted to know about those explorers and settlers who came before. He wanted to, as much as possible centuries later, walk in their footsteps and see what they saw.

It is not a pretty picture, which may be why most Americans, including most American history teachers, choose to ignore it, or at least gloss over it. By 21st century standards, these were not nice people. They lusted after gold. They robbed, raped, enslaved and massacred the native people they encountered. They didn't even behave kindly toward their own people, as in the case of the Roanoke settlers who were abandoned.

Horwitz begins with the Vikings, who explored and founded short-lived settlements in the northeastern regions of the continent around the year 1000, then turns to Christopher Columbus, who succeeded "because he was so stubbornly wrong." He died believing he had found a new route to India. After that Horwitz examines such explorers at DeLeon and DeSoto and the settlements in St. Augustine and Jamestown.

But Horwitz looks not just at the past but also at the present. He travels to places that may (or in some cases may not) have been visited by these people, looks for remnants of their time there and talks with both scholars and people who now live in these areas to get their take on the past. Much of this is written in the manner of Bill Bryson, full of information presented in a wry and whimsical way.

As important as history may be, Horwitz concludes by stating that myth may be more important. It feels good to ignore a "monstrous man" like DeSoto and failed settlements where so many people died and focus instead on myths about Pilgrims. (They weren't called Pilgrims until many years later, they had a feast but didn't make a big deal out of it, the Indians were uninvited guests, they probably ate venison and fish but not turkey, etc.) As journalists like to say in jest, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Great American reading

Regarding the Great American Read concluded last month by PBS, some observations:

1. The selection of To Kill a Mockingbird as America's favorite novel should have surprised no one. Most of the books on the list of 100 finalists have a certain constituency: female readers (Pride and Prejudice, Little Women), male readers (The Hunt for Red October, The Godfather), younger readers (The Hunger Games, Ready Player One), older readers (The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath), black readers (The Color Purple, Invisible Man), Asian-American readers (The Joy Luck Club), Latino readers (Bless Me, Ultima, Dona Barbara) Christian readers (The Shack, This Present Darkness), romance readers (The Notebook, Outlander), mystery readers (And Then There Were None), science fiction readers (Foundation, The Martian) and so on. In fact, the majority of the books on the list appeal mainly to certain groups of readers.

Yet To Kill a Mockingbird seems to appeal to everyone who reads it (or has seen the movie starring Gregory Peck). Thanks to English teachers across the nation, it has been read by many, many people. This was an obvious choice.

2. Outlander as the second choice does surprise me. I know it is a very popular series of novels, but more popular than the Harry Potter series (third place) or James Patterson's Alex Cross books? I would have guessed Pride and Prejudice would finish second. In fact it was fourth.

3. Wisely PBS counted a series of books as a single book. I am wondering if this is why Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not make the list of 100 novels, though The Adventures of Tom Sawyer did. Were these books considered a series just because they have a few characters in common? If not, I would have thought Finn the more popular novel.

4. I spend a lot of time wandering in bookstores and leafing through book catalogs, so I was surprised at how many novels in that list of 100 I had never heard of. I'm speaking of books like The Coldest Winter Ever, Ghost and The Mind Invaders. Each of these novels finished near the bottom of the list, so maybe a lot of other people haven't heard of them either.

5. Everyone was permitted to cast one vote a day, whether for the same book or a different one. Thus the vote has almost as much to do with the commitment of its fans as with the popularity of the book itself. I did not vote at all, but if not To Kill a Mockingbird, which novel would have gotten my vote (or votes)? Lonesome Dove (22), perhaps, or the Narnia series (9), or The Catcher in the Rye (30) or The Grapes of Wrath (12)? I didn't vote mainly because I don't have a favorite novel. I love many novels, including many not on that list.

6. Although there were books on the list obviously written for adult readers, a surprising number were books for young readers, whether children (Charlotte's Web, The Little Prince, the Narnia series, etc.) or teens and young adults (the Harry Potter books, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Book Thief). Many of the books, in addition to To Kill a Mockingbird, are books commonly assigned in classrooms. Many of those listed books are novels I read for college classes. Many adults read few books, whether because of lack of time or lack of interest, but they remember, sometimes fondly, those books they read for school. I suspect the reading done in those early years greatly influenced the final tally of votes.

Living by the sword

In the fencing master's house, one had only to close the shutters in order for time to stop in its tracks.

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Fencing Master

In a mystery-suspense novel about a man who teaches fencing, you know that sooner or later the fencing is going to be for real. Arturo Perez-Reverte does not disappoint in The Fencing Master, one of his earliest and best novels (1988).

Don Jaime, a man of advanced middle age, is a respected fencing master in Madrid in 1868, a time when a sword is no longer the weapon of choice. Fencing is being seen more as a sport or a physical fitness routine than as means of self-defense or the way to settle matters of honor. He misses the old days, but continues to teach a few students.

These are restless times in Spain as talk of rebellion against the queen is heard on the streets and in the cafes. Don Jaime has little interest in all that.

Then he gets an unexpected pupil, a beautiful woman, already skilled in fencing, who asks him to teach her a certain maneuver he has taught only a few, a dangerous but usually effective way to decide a fight with another skilled opponent. With some reluctance, for as a traditionalist Don Jaime believes swordsmanship is a man's business, he agrees. She is, after all, very beautiful.

When he introduces her to another of his students, he loses her to him. Then that man is found dead, a victim of a wound from a sword like what would result from the trick Don Jaime taught the woman. He doesn't tell the police, but suspects she might be the killer. That is, until a woman's body is recovered and identified as the woman in question.

From there the plot moves along at a fast pace, culminating in the most exciting sword fight not found in The Princess Bride.

Tapestry with loose threads

Linda raised her head and put on a smile. "A school is a tapestry of threads," she began.

Laurie R. King, Lockdown

Not only is a school "a tapestry of threads," but so is Laurie R. King's latest novel, Lockdown. Many different, seemingly independent and unrelated threads eventually come together to reveal a complete pattern or picture. Anyway that's the metaphor King plays with, and it works more or less.

Linda McDonald is the principal of Guadalupe Middle School, whose plans for a Career Day are coming to fruition. (Do middle schools really have career days?) In a series of mostly short chapters, mostly focused on a single character's thoughts and actions, King shows us the threads. An unbelievable (and I do mean unbelievable) number of these characters have troubled, even violent, pasts and could be the cause of the trouble we know is in store for this school on Career Day. Exactly who it is and what they will do is the picture the author withholds until this tapestry nears completion.

The school itself has a troubled and violent past. One student has been murdered, another is missing. Unfortunately King, best known for her popular Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery series, does not weave all these many threads into her completed tapestry. But the novel certainly is suspenseful.

Determined to become a hero

The name Winston Churchill causes most of us picture an old man acting heroically during World War II. In her 2016 book Hero of the Empire, Candice Millard gives us a new image to consider, a young man acting heroically during the Boer War.

As a young man, Churchill yearned to be a hero the way so many young men today yearn to be rock stars. He ultimately wanted a political career, but what better way to win a seat in Parliament than to become a national hero? To this end, he was willing to go anywhere in the world and face any risk, even to the point of riding a white horse into battle. As a journalist he helped start the Boer War, then went to South Africa to cover the war, but carrying a gun and intending to do more fighting than writing.

His chance for heroism came when he and others aboard a train were captured by the Boers and imprisoned. Churchill tried to convince the Boers that because he was a journalist he should be released, but too many of them had seen him with a gun in his hands. He was also, even then, too famous to release.

When he heard that others were planning an escape from the military prison, he wanted to be part of it. Yet they declined to tell Churchill the whole plan because of his habit of talking too much. They couldn't trust him with the secret. Some four decades later this would be British prime minister trusted with one of the greatest secrets of all time, the D-Day invasion.

On the night chosen for the escape, the others decided at the last minute the time was not right, but Churchill went ahead anyway and managed to get over the fence by himself. Thanks to his resourcefulness and a good deal of luck, he managed to travel hundreds of miles to safety. As a national hero, he was easily elected to Parliament.

As she did with the story of Theodore Roosevelt's narrow escape in the Amazon in The River of Doubt and the unsuccessful attempt to save the life of James Garfield in Destiny of the Republic, Millard makes this narrative as suspenseful as a thriller. Biographies of Roosevelt, Garfield and Churchill give these incidents brief attention. Millard inflates them to life-size to show her readers just how significant they actually were at the time they happened.

A dark knight

I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not.

Walker Percy, Lancelot

People who do terrible things always blame somebody else, usually their victims. Just read the accounts of recent atrocities, or much older ones. So it is with Lancelot Lamar, a prisoner in a mental facility in Walker Percy's 1977 novel Lancelot. He has done something terrible, though we do not find out what it is until late in the story.

The novel is a stream-of-consciousness monologue that, as Lancelot is talking to an old friend who has become a priest, is part reminiscence and part confession. Like a typical mental patient, he can't stay on  subject, so his narrative twists and turns over a broad area, making the novel a difficult read that readers may or may not find worth the effort.

Lancelot tells how he discovered that his wife has been unfaithful. His daughter has a blood type she couldn't possibly have if he were her father. Margot, a woman whom he once could not breathe without (as he says repeatedly), is now an actress in a film being shot partly on the Lamar estate in New Orleans. The film features a hurricane, and coincidentally a real hurricane is now bearing down  on the city. He sets up cameras in various bedrooms to determine exactly who is sleeping with whom. Then he takes action.

The name Lancelot is not the only allusion to King Arthur, Camelot and all that. "Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery," he says at one point. He makes frequent mention of the Holy Grail and his own quest for an “unholy grail.”

The story has an upbeat ending, or at least Lancelot thinks that it does. But isn’t he crazy?