Am I a “Grammar Nazi”? [UPDATED]

That’s probably what Mike Masnick at techdirt would call me.  According to Masnick, most people who presume to correct your grammar are motivated by a desire to lord it over you and rub their class and educational superiority in your face.  Masnick at least implies that grammatical correctness, especially when pursued with zeal, is elitist and antidemocratic, and that as long as understanding is adequately transferred (ah!  there’s the rub!), language has done its job:

There are times [...] when I feel that the strict “rules” that are put forth by grammar go too far. If the text makes the point in a way that people can understand, what is the problem? [...] So I’m glad to see an English professor taking on the grammar nazis.

Salon is running a review of a new book by English professor Jack Lynch, called The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, which argues that grammar nazis should chill out. Grammar rules are mostly to make people feel elite, not to make them any clearer, according to the book. Again, I have no problem with basic grammar rules for the sake of clarity, but focusing too much on the rules over the clarity is a mistake, and it’s nice to see at least some “experts” agreeing.

(To my relief, plenty of people defend grammar in the comments.)

In Salon, Laura Miller, reviewing Lynch, hits even harder on the theme of class warfare:  grammarians artificially Latinized English in the 18th century, because only the upper class learned Latin; later, linguistic Emily Posts served immigrants and arrivistes for whom a veneer of class was the price of admission.  And Miller is with Lynch in affirming the utilitarian standard of comprehensibility, as if once the minimum comprehension mark is hit, any further refinement can only be for the sake of snobbery:

Many of the most roundly deplored “debasements” of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible [...]  The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.

Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun “impact” used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it’s said, then a coup has been effected. The “verbing” of nouns (or the creation of “nerbs”) has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.

In other words, practical people — the “silent majority,” the millionaire next door — use language as a tool and care only that it gets the job done.  Effete elites may also use it as a tool, but it’s a heavy-duty carbon steel Smith & Hawken tool with a European ash wood handle “certified by the Forest Stewardship Council” as “sustainably harvested” (S & H just went out of business, by the way).  Good grammar today is a fetish of taste, a flaunted price tag (on one’s Ivy education), an accoutrement out of Bobos in Paradise, like lining your shower with slate.

The trouble is, utility versus quality is a false distinction.  Any tool does its job better if it is well-designed and durable, no matter if it comes from Smith & Hawken or Wal-Mart.  People will tolerate bad grammar and the resultant blurred and blunted comprehension — and even take pride in its proving them the salt of the earth — who wouldn’t use a crappy hammer on a second nail; who have long since insisted on getting Blu-Ray and HDTV for their precision and clarity.  Language, too, is a technology that transmits images, along with ideas, emotions, information, and stories.  Why would you tolerate its being out of focus?  (For example, take Masnick’s “Grammar rules are mostly to make people feel elite, not to make them any clearer.”  He’s only writing a blog post, and we know what he means, so why carp?  BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING GRAMMAR NAZI, THAT’S WHY!  “Not to make them any clearer” is just not very clear.  It requires a bit of extra labor from the reader to be sure that “them” refers to people, not grammar rules, and that it is not really the people, but their expression of their thoughts, that is not being made clearer.  No, indeed it is not.)

It’s telling that Miller’s and Lynch’s examples of snooty grammar rules — don’t split an infinitive, don’t end a sentence with a preposition — have long since been abandoned and even scorned by the professional style manuals.  Chicago Manual of Style:

The traditional caveat of yesteryear against ending sentences with prepositions is, for most writers, an unnecessary and pedantic restriction. As Winston Churchill famously said, “That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.” A sentence that ends in a preposition may sound more natural than a sentence carefully constructed to avoid a final preposition. Compare Those are the guidelines an author should adhere to with Those are the guidelines to which an author should adhere. The “rule” prohibiting terminal prepositions was an ill-founded superstition.

Yes, grammar cops can be obnoxious.  (They’ve even terrorized people into new errors, like the “meophobia” that has led inexorably to “He gave it to Joe and I,” which is to say, “He gave it to I.”)  But it may take some of the sting out to look at us as grammar technicians, perfectionist Mercedes-Benz mechanics keeping the language inspected and tuned up, ensuring that the constant change it undergoes does not degrade, and even enhances, its performance and style.  It’s our shop talk to debate which mistakes matter, which don’t, and which, like the possessive “it’s” — or using “like” for “such as” — will eventually be embraced as improvements.

UPDATE: And maybe “who’s” in place of “whose,” too, as in this comment on Althouse:  “In today’s victim society, politics is all about who’s self-interest gets served.”  It sounds illiterate now, but it is in fact logical.  Apostrophe s signifies the possessive.  It’s even almost an ideograph of the possessive, with the apostrophe standing for the link between owner and owned, like a little hook to hang your pot on.

What will never be smart is sticking apostrophe’s promiscuously wherever you see a final “s”, including on plural’s.

Can Poetry Find New Life Online?

That’s the gamble being taken by the multimedia website PoetrySpeaks.com, which launched yesterday — not so much that poetry might be read again in the old way (the words “dustily perused” come unbidden to mind), but that it has untapped appeal for a postliterate, audiovisual, multimedia culture — that people might even pay for a poem in various formats the way they’ll pay for a song.  This strikes me as a very sharp insight:  poetry is music — word music — and it might catch the inner ear of musically imprinted people in a way that unstructured prose does not.  The launch press release describes PoetrySpeaks.com as both “a social network for poets and poetry lovers” and “a new business model for poetry”:

On PoetrySpeaks.com, poets will be able to manage their own information, blog if they wish, explain and display their body of work to their own choosing, and even post their speaking or performance schedules. [...] Both interactive and educational, visitors will be able to create their own “favorites,” plus connect to the poets via Twitter and other social networking sites.

PoetrySpeaks.com will also be a business and marketing engine for poets and poetry presses.  There are already three revenue streams, with several others identified and being developed. PoetrySpeaks.com sells individual poems in different formats (audio, video or text), as well as books, ebooks, DVDs and CDs, and tickets to online performances, slams or readings.

That combination of functions makes the site an agora — one of the most ancient human institutions, a place of inseparable social, commercial, and cultural exchange [wish I could use the German word "Geistlich," which covers both intellectual and spiritual], where performances, transactions, meet-ups, pick-ups and trysts are all going on in the same spacetime.  All our favorite ingredients fermenting together makes for a heady and fertile brew.  I hope the site takes off and helps poetry reclaim its rightful place among the musics that move us.

And in related news:  Reading poetry is a good workout for your brain.

Subjects were found to read
 poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with 
prose. Preliminary studies using brain-imaging technology also showed greater
 levels of cerebral activity when people listened to poems being read aloud. Dr
Jane Stabler, a literature expert at St Andrews University and a member of the research group, believes poetry 
may stir latent preferences in the brain for rhythm and rhymes that develop
 during childhood. She claims the intense imagery woven through poems, and 
techniques used by poets to unsettle their readers, force them to think more
 carefully about each line. “There seems to be an almost immediate
 recognition that this is a different sort of language that needs to be 
approached in a way that will be more attentive to the density of words in
 poetry,” she said. [...]

To study readers’ reactions,
 the research group focused an infrared beam on the pupils of their eyes to
 detect minute movements as they read. They found poetry produced 
all the standard psychological indications associated with intellectual
 difficulty, such as slow deliberate movement, re-reading sections and long
 pauses. Even when they used identical content but displayed it in both a poem
 format and a prose format, they discovered readers found the poem form the more
 difficult to understand. Stabler said: “When readers decide that something
 is a poem, they read in a different way. As literary critics we would like to 
think that this is a more thoughtful way, more receptive to the text’s richness
 and complexity, but in psychological terms it is the same sort of reading
 produced by a dyslexic reader who finds reading difficult.” [...]

The group hopes to use
 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to watch how the brain reacts as people 
listen to poetry and prose. Early results suggest a larger area of the brain
 lights up in the scans upon hearing poetry by Byron than prose by Austen. The 
research has profound implications for the way English literature is taught in
 schools, and Stabler believes they should consider placing greater emphasis on 
teaching youngsters poetry.

Both rhythm and rhyme have been found to be
 intricately linked with making and recalling memories.

It’s hard not to have rap come to mind, as a postliterate return to humanity’s preliterate mnemonic reliance on rhyme (as the above article notes, “the only way rap artists can remember all those lyrics
 is because they have rhythm and rhyme”), and as a bridge from music back to pleasure in poetry.

Cross-posted at Ambiance

Hals- und Beinbruch! [UPDATED]

If I haven’t been around here for a while, it’s because I have a new compulsion:  a translation compulsion.  My brother’s crash course in reading scholarly German has lured me back into that Gothic thorn-thicket.

Und das hat mit ih-ih-rem si-ING-en

Die Lor-e-lei getan.

*     *     *

The fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

spontaneous joy and natural content

out of my heart.

Sorry, my brain has a line of verse for every occasion lately.  Yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So when not copyediting for a living, I’ve been wading into the dense passages of theology David had to translate, wondering how I would do it, admiring the persistence of Herr Heggen’s 45-year-old operating system installation, and trying to figure out how to give clues and tips to someone who’s lost in German — a trail of breadcrumbs through the Black Forest of the Brüder Grimm.

His exam was today.  And it was predictably grueling.  If he flunks, I flunk as a guide.

UPDATE: He passed!!  High pass!  A triumph for him, and for me, and a tribute to Herr Heggen!

Two things.

David has been an actor, so I wanted to wish him “Break a leg,” and it immediately echoed in my head that in German it’s Beinbruch . . . but it’s “Something-else-and-Beinbruch.“

I looked it up.  No need to suffer from middle-aged memory impaction now that there’s Google.  Who says there’s no progress??

It’s Hals- und Beinbruch. In German, you don’t just say, “Break a leg.”  You say “Break your neck . . . and oh, while you’re at it, a leg, too.”

I figured David would Grimmly appreciate that upping of the ante.  But better yet, then I came upon this:

It is sometimes said that the German expression is actually a corruption of a Hebrew blessing hatzlakha u-brakha, “success and blessing”, which may have been borrowed via Yiddish. Whatever its source, the most plausible theory is that Hals- und Beinbruch was transferred into the American theatre (in which Yiddish- or German-speaking immigrant Jews were strongly represented) sometime after World War I.

What could be more perfect for someone who is learning to decode scholarly German for the purposes of a doctorate in Jewish studies?

The other thing:

Coming across the word Zweifel, doubt, I remembered that in German Verzweiflung is despair — a higher octave, a compression and lethal concentration of doubt.  (Take any verb in German and add “ver-” or “er-” to make it first thumbscrews and then fatal.  Ertrinken means to drown.)  For us it’s desespoir — a loss of hope.  For them it’s too much of something — a busy mind, too busy tearing down, a good image for the obsessive negative rumination of depression.  For us it’s too little of something — the departure of Glinda the Good Witch, perhaps, with her gauzy gleam — dream, desire, illusion.  There’s something passive about it.  Hope leaves, what can you do?  A German, by contrast, can’t stop doing.  Doubting.

Thinking about it some more, though, I realized that linking doubt and despair is in fact theological.  Like so many things we don’t give any thought to — like the fact that genus and species names are in Latin — it’s a living fossil of the overwhelming importance and omnipresence of God in every corner of our culture until less than a hundred years ago.  Despair was the loss of faith, and doubt risked it.  It was called acedia, and it was a sin.

So I look for a link for you, and what a surprise, I turn up a completely contemporary one:  this year, Kathleen Norris, aspiring contemplative, author of The Cloister Walk and more, published a book called Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life. Its starting point:  the deep apathy Norris fell into, understandably enough, after both her father and her husband died.  USA Today not only did an interview with her, but gave it a sidebar of quotes on acedia that Norris collected, from the Psalms to Chesterton, Kafka, and James Bond.

So there you go.

P.S. Zweifel has “zwei” in it — two. Doubt in German comes from there being two possibilities.  Maybe God exists, maybe He doesn’t.  It’s the tortured, busy, pre-quantum theory form of ambivalence where you still think it’s a matter of life and death that you decide, before you reach the befuddled peace of “neither/nor,” “both/and,” “maybe.”

Catnip!! [UPDATED]

It’s National Punctuation Day.

OK, so what’s your favorite punctuation mark?

I’ve been criticized at work for putting in too many semicolons — the essence of ambivalence!  It is the semicolon that classically belongs in “On the one hand; on the other hand.”

But semicolons can also add a firm extra layer of structure, stiffening the spine of sentences full of lists that are too long and floundering.

I guess I feel that semicolons are too irresolute and pusillanimous to be my favorite, though.

I learned a new appreciation of punctuation from reading Beat poets like [I refuse to use "such as" informally] Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, and Philip Whalen, who used punctuation as a kind of musical notation, to tell you how to read a line (even in your head), where to hurry or hesitate, when to breathe.

Don’t you think the Web has led to people using punctuation much more creatively, sort of as an alpinist’s stick for scrambling over the rocks of brevity at speed and without a spill?

Whatever else you do today, make sure to go here and have some fun.

UPDATE: Miriam at Lee & Low Books writes:

The semicolon is a good dancer, leading its partner through the steps of an at times complicated dance.

I love that!  A tango dancer, I think — a master of the sensitive, freighted pause.

Witness Spot Run. [UPDATED AGAIN]

When I came across this sentence in a piece I’m working on –

There he [1]witnessed a reindeer, of the Ocean Harbor herd, steer a little too close to the rookery of a feisty juvenile king penguin .

– I tripped over it and fell, hard.

Since it is after 4 AM (yes, I’ve had some sleep already.  Yes, it was over the computer, sitting up), rather than compose a long post I’ll just let you see my footnote.

---

[1] EDITOR’S NOTE (CE):  You can say “saw him steer,” but can you say “witnessed him steer,” or must it be “witnessed him steering”? My ear rebels at the former. Usage is divided on the question, and authority is silent (probably because I don’t know how to formulate the question).  I did stumble on a fascinating linguistics paper [PDF; HTML] that suggests that the word “see” has been “grammaticalized,” not only in English but in other languages as well, and that this reflects the “evidential” systems of preliterate times. Does this mean that multisyllabic synonyms for “see” can also be “grammaticalized” by analogy? My ear is protesting “No.” Anyone else?

The linguistics paper, by a University of Arizona professor, is technical; it revolves around a word the meaning of which I do not know:  “deictic.”  (Pause, and what would once have been the riffle-rustle of dictionary pages, but now is the swift snick of keys.)

• Main Entry: deic·tic
• Pronunciation: \ˈdīk-tik also ˈdāk-\
• Function: adjective
• Etymology: Greek deiktikos able to show, from deiktos, verbal of deiknynai to show — more at diction
• Date: 1876

: showing or pointing out directly <the words this, that, and those have a deictic function>

OK, it’s what I would call “indicative” if I didn’t know that has acquired another, technical meaning that I don’t know.

But the whole business of “evidential” systems built into the grammar of language is utterly fascinating, because it dates back to a very important preliterate distinction we have utterly  lost:  that between direct eyewitness testimony and hearsay.  Imagine trying to be a fact checker as a hunter-gatherer.  Your knowledge of what actually happened, as opposed to self-interested propaganda and rumor with an agenda (can we make like academics and call it “agendized”?), depended on your having been there to see it with your own eyes, or, wanting that, on your trust in the character of an informant.  The reliability of the information would diminish exponentially with your degrees of separation from the eyewitness.  I was enthralled to learn, more than thirty years ago, that in quite a few languages (I believe Hopi was one and linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf was my informant) that distinction is “grammaticalized.”  That is, the statement “I know” would be modified grammatically depending on whether you really knew because you’d witnessed an event, or had only heard.  Imagine so-I-heard (which a preliterate friend of ours, described below, always inserted with a cautionary emphasis, deictic finger raised) being built into the undercarriage of your utterances!  Language itself once insisted on a distinction that we preserve only in law.

I flashed on Benjamin Lee Whorf when I met Brooklyn George, a semi-illiterate Italian friend my husband made once when he was working the door in an after-hours club as a favor to another friend.  Georgie might have been a gangster of some note had he not been a gambling addict.  Or he might’ve been something else:  he had a straight brother who was a high school teacher.  While Georgie could barely write out a sandwich order — somewhere I still have a slip of paper with the words B O L G A N A and P R O Z L O N E painstakingly printed on it, that J and I marveled over — it soon became obvious to me that he was fearsomely bright, even wise.  (So why was his life so screwed up, you may ask?  Um, have you ever known a brilliant person who applied that firepower to the living of his or her own life?)  He was given to gnomic utterances that had the profundity of Zen koans.  This was the guy who once said to J, “When I first met you, I thought you were stupid.  Then after a while I realized that I was stupid.” (Trust me, I was there.  I heard it myself.)

Georgie talked different from a literate person, and one of the biggest differences that got my attention was that he was always meticulous about distinguishing what he actually knew personally from what he’d only heard.  We literates and postliterates assume we “know” stuff we’ve read in the newspaper or seen on a screen!  When and why did we lose that visceral skepticism about hearsay?  When I saw the connection to Whorf and the grammar of Hopi, I realized what an amazing window Brooklyn Georgie opened into the way everyone lived and thought a few thousand years ago.

. . . OK, I just took off in a powerful rocket aircraft headed for orbit, rising over an incredible panorama of New York harbor predawn.  I forgot to fasten my seat belt, and as I reached uo to pull it down the G forces . . . woke me up to discover that my head was drooping sideways and my neck hurt.  It’s time to get horizontal.

UPDATE: Rereading this, I flashed on a line of poetry:  “I was the man, I saw it, I was there!”  Where does that come from?  Anybody?   Beat poetry, I think.  Google knoweth it not, which may mean I have one word wrong.  But in the process of searching for it, Googling the words “I saw it, I was there,” I discovered the power that direct witness still has for us.  Look.

UPDATE II:  Got it.  It’s Whitman, from one of the greatest portraits ever drawn of what true leadership is.  And it’s even more intimate than eyewitness:

I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless
wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch,
and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board,
Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them -
and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when
boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted
sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow – it tastes good – I like it
well – it becomes mine;
I am the man – I suffer’d – I was there.

Interlanguage Land Mines

Gestures don’t travel well between cultures.  If you flash a Brazilian the thumb-and-forefinger circle that to us means “A-OK,” he’ll punch you out for calling him an asshole.  Japanese people appear to waving bye-bye when they’re actually saying, “Come here.”  More examples invited.

The same is often true of words, to mortifyingly comical effect.  In English, “mist” is a wistfully romantic word.  It enshrouds the lighthouses and lonely sea widows on the covers of romance novels, bosoms heaving with longing.  Like falling in love, or like Vaseline on the lens of the movie camera, it softens harsh reality to a flattering blur.

But in German, as Chicken Little pointed out in the comments to my recent post on German, Mist means “manure.”

Animal crap.  And since the manure pile in a German farm courtyard was also the compost heap and all-purpose trash midden (I’ll never forget being told brusquely by a child in a German-Romanian farmyard, when I asked him where all his new puppy’s siblings were:  “Im Mist“), to throw something “an den Misthaufen” is to dismiss it, discard it, shitcan it on the trash heap of history . . . one word encompassing both our meanings of “dump”!

Mist.

Mist.

What does that do to the song “I Get Misty, The Moment You’re Near”? Does it mean romance is a load of crap?

Are we having fun yet?

When J’s German cousin Ada came to visit us in New York many years ago, we were puzzled that she shrank from putting sugar in her coffee. We kept the sugar in a pretty coffee can with a Christmas design. On the can was the word “Gift.”  In German, that means “poison.”

Then there’s pula:
In Finnish:   the national bread.

In Setswana, the language of Botswana:  rain; also the name of the currency. (I adore that; calling your money “rain.”  I can relate.)

In Romanian:  penis.

(Man-na from heaven?)

More examples?

What An Awesome Idea!

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. . . .

Today, everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.  [Yikes!!]

You can change all that.  Help save the words!

Specifically, save them by adopting them.  You can adopt as many as you want; you will then have brought them back to life, because they’ll be living in the household of your vocabulary and you won’t be able to resist using them, even showing them off.  Maybe you can even leave them to someone in your will, so they don’t die with you.

BRILLIANT idea — and from guess who(m):  Oxford Dictionaries, the Burke’s Peerage of all words, even those in the potter’s fields.  Beautifully designed website, too — though the flash (which works like a charm) demands Gutenberg-era patience while it loads.  It’s worth the wait.

You could adopt “prandicle,” a small meal (well, no you couldn’t — it’s mine now), or “sparsile,” a lonely star not included in any constellation.  (Got that one too.  Go find your own — and tell me what it is.)  Hundreds, thousands of words are right there on the homepage (that’s what takes so long to load), each graced with its own personality of script or typeface, scanned by a moving frame that allows you to click at random or pick one, meet it face to face, and learn its meaning.  Adopting = addictive!  You get a certificate of adoption, on which you vow to use your word, and you can order a T-shirt emblazoned with it.  You will soon be the Mia Farrow, the Madonna, the Angelina Jolie of orphaned words!  And the Imelda Marcos of T-shirts!

When I have more time I’ll research and link to the history of this project, which must be a joy to behold.

In the words of Save the Words:  “Word up!  Use them before we lose them!”

Hat tip:  writer niece, @rachmonroe

(A small p.s.:  Save the Words has a Word-a-Day feature.  This should be taken in addition to, not instead of, the classic A Word A Day.  Anu Garg’s site is simple and low-tech, but be not seduced by sizzle alone.  It’s finally the words that count, and what they do inside your head that’s the first and best magic technology.)

Visiting German [UPDATED AGAIN]

(New UPDATE:  Read my brother’s wonderful discovery-tribute to the German language, even though it does make him break out in flop sweat and armbands.)

My brother, back in grad school as he approaches 50 (and feeling alternately exhilarated and ridiculous), is taking a crash course in reading scholarly German, than which nothing could be more insane.  You could accurately translate every word in a passage of such German, painstakingly consulting an on- or offline dictionary (here’s an amazing one, by the way, which serves up all the alternative and idiomatic translations of any word you feed into it, complete with examples in vivo), and still not understand the logical links and interactions among those words engineered by German grammar.  If you misread number, case, or gender, or overlook a little track-switching word like nur (only) or nicht (not) or sondern (which always works in harness with nicht to mean “not this, but rather that”), you could go in exactly the wrong direction.

Fortunately, my brother has a sort of tutor — me — at his fingertips, and I in turn have the indelible memory of three years of drilling in grammar by an actual German German teacher in my high school, W. Gregor Heggen (wow, never Googled him before, amazing how many people thank him for things like helping them learn Irish), overlaid by some experience speaking and reading the language, to draw on.  (Hey, that was a lot like a sentence in German!)  I’m subfluent, and I probably have to look up almost as many scholarly-vocabulary words as my brother; but I have a basic grasp of the underlying track-switching system, the rails of relationship beneath the freight cars of vocabulary, that weaves the structures of meaning in German.   Getting just that basic grasp took all three years.  When our teacher took eight of us teenagers to Germany for the summer of 1962, starting with a one-month family stay in his hometown of Paderborn, we all soon started speaking German, but I was the only one who spoke it grammatically, because I was the only one with three years under my belt.  The idea of a crash course in German grammar boggles the mind.

I’ve seen three passages my brother had to translate, and they represented three very different kinds of German.  One was modern and brusque, written in short sentences almost imitative of Hemingway English.  One was pretentious and convoluted, exploiting to the full the German mind’s ability to put the forward progress of a sentence indefinitely on hold right before the consummating verb for an enormous, indigestible digression.  (It gives an English speaker a case of linguistic blue balls that makes you go “hmmm” about German sexuality.  It’s almost sadomasochistic, that withholding of the verb that alone will let you off the hook about what’s actually happening in the sentence.  The English speaker has to plod around the digression in search of the verb, and perhaps the German mind does this too, but much, much faster, scooping up the whole digression as it goes in one deft pelican gulp.)

The third was a rather famous passage by the composer Arnold Schönberg.  Here it is in German, and here’s an official English translation — which is a lot like and no smoother than the one my brother accomplished with a little remedial nudging from me.  You’d think the Arnold Schönberg Center could have found a better translator, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is that it is untranslatable.  Rarely have I read anything in German so purely German, in that nearly every word of it falls either into a space between two English words or a space that encompasses two or three English words.

Take, for example, Geist, a cognate of “ghost” in English.  (That remains a minor and archaic meaning in German; there’s a separate word for the spooky meaning of “ghost,” Gespenst.)  In some contexts, it will be translated into English as “spirit;” in others, as “mind” or “intellect.”  But in German, it encompasses both.  They are not two different things.  We need at least two words to approximate the German word — poorly.  What does that mean?  It means, I think, that in English we think of mind as a tool, mechanism, or process that assembles or manipulates parts of ideas, while spirit is sort of featureless and above all that.  Mind is a factory, if an advanced one; spirit is a mist.  But in German, you think with your spirit.  Ideas are not something you assemble, they’re something you apprehend.

And here’s another one:  Wesen.  Literally Wesen means “being” — it even shows up doing scutwork in the grammar, where gewesen means “been.”  On a loftier plane it means the suchness of a thing — what in English it takes four lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins to say:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

UPDATE: Or, as Dr. Seuss put it –

Today you are You/that is truer than true./ There is no one alive/ who is Youer than You.

For a one-word equivalent in English, we have to say “essence.”  While this is in fact the exact Latin equivalent — esse means “to be”! — it’s come to have a different connotation in English; it’s sideslid into the less essential realm of perfumes, oils, and flavorings, which were originally called “essences” because they were a thought to be a concentrate or emanation of the very being of a substance — the way it “selves — goes itself.”  In German, however, that kind of essence isn’t called Wesen — it’s called Geist.  As in Birnengeist, a very concentrated clear pear brandy.  Which brings us around to “spirits.” … and on and on.

Not to study at least one second language is a pity.  Other languages shine a different light on the world, showing up things that are really there that might remain dark in our language.  (There’s sometimes a leap of recognition when you learn a word in another language — it has lit up and pinned down one of the many, many phenomena we all feel but don’t have names for.)  They also shine a new light back on our language, helping us to find fossils and wellsprings that have been buried under the sediments of usage.

Other examples?

A Hole in English

English is so stripped-down, so shorn of grammatical clues, thingamabobs, and “this end up” arrows, that if you didn’t study Latin, German, or Russian, you’d never realize that English too had a dative case (indirect object) and an accusative case (direct object). To illustrate:  in “give [to] the dog his food,” the dog is the indirect object; in “walk the dog,” the dog is the direct object.  In German, the language in which I discovered these things, the dative “to the dog” is “dem Hund,” and the accusative dog to be walked is “den Hund.”  Once you have grasped this distinction in another language, you can feel it in English even though it’s not marked.

We manage to make our meaning clear by word order, juxtaposition, and context, and the words not fixed in their particular role of the moment by case endings seem freer and more mobile, like Americans.  (Chinese, I’m told, has even less grammar and makes no time, case, or number changes in its words at all; they are simply strings of unaltered nouns and uninflected infinitives, modified only by their proximity to each other.  Can anyone confirm or correct this?  Randy?)

But there is at least one grammatical hole in English that gapes like a missing tooth.  You can tell it’s there because people have tried repeatedly to fill it.  None of the tries have attained to official status; they’re all dismissed as uneducated or slangy, regional or generational dialect.  Nonetheless, we keep using them, like temporary patches grown permanent, because we need to fill the hole.

That hole is the second person plural pronoun.

We’re supposed to say “you” when we mean one person and “you” when we mean a bunch of people, and damn it, that just doesn’t work.  So we’ve had:

yous(e) – Brooklyn

y’all -  South (“all y’all” for a really large group)

you guys – urban youth (applied to both genders)

Which of these do you think is the best solution?  (I think it’s “yous” — which simply pluralizes the pronoun by applying a universal rule.  Ironically, this is considered the most “uneducated”-sounding of the three.)  Should one of them be made official?  Do you have yet another, new candidate for English’s second person plural pronoun?  Or must we just keep on scraping by, stumbling into the hole?  It’s frustrating not to have a word there!

Usage Find of the Day.

“They have begun to sew the wind.”

And soon will rip the stitches out of the whirwind?