Tuesday, October 09, 2018


A WRITING LIFE

Jerry Harkins

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
                                                                                                          –Bishop Berkeley [1]

If a man says something in a forest and there is no woman around to hear him, 
is he still wrong?
                                                                                                                      –Jerry Harkins


I am a writer.  I have written everything from a dissertation on statistical modeling to short stories for high school kids learning to read.  I once made my living writing marketing and advertising copy about highly technical products and exotic financial services and speeches for favored politicians.  There was a time when I wrote a bi-weekly column of political satire but I quit because I couldn’t cope with the discipline involved and because the political climate lost its sense of humor. I have written a performance piece for talented high school students, a few serviceable poems, the lyrics for twelve hymns and, since my retirement, three novels and over a hundred essays.  Some of these works have been published but that has never been the point.  I write mostly for my own pleasure.

My Daddy used to say that everyone likes the smell of their own farts and I, for one, do like my own writing.  I enjoy re-reading old work, even things that have been comatose in the “pending” file for years.  I am a decent writer even though my writing retains hints of the grammatical and logical formalism drilled into me by the Sisters of Charity and the Jesuits. Whenever I write something like everyone likes the smell of their own farts, I glance over my shoulder to be sure crazy Sister Mary Agnes isn’t standing there with her yardstick raised over my head.  The doddering old bat might or might not object to the use of the vulgarism but she would whack you down for the count if you used  their instead of his or her.  “Jerome, by the time you reach the sixth grade, you should remember ‘everyone’ is singular and must be modified by singular pronouns. Always, Jerome.”  I could never bring myself to use a word like memorandums and I always use a plural verb with data.  Because data are a plural Latin word.  My hand would fall off if I ever referred to a single person as "they" or followed that pronoun with a singular verb.  They is...  Indeed!  Gender preferenes cut no ice with grammatical formalism.

English is blessed with an opulent vocabulary which  makes it possible to write with  a fair degree of both precision and concision.  In comparison, other Indo-European languages are impressionistic. As someone once said, you should do science in English and make love in French.  Still, English can be a blunt tool.  Why, I often ask myself, do I persist in writing in a language in which the phrase “known but to God” means exactly the same thing as “unknown but to God?” Or in a language whose rules were written be the Red Queen. 
The plural of ox is oxen,
The plural of goose is geese,
Which doesn’t explain why ax isn’t axen,
And mongooses aren't mongeese.

More outrageous  still is a class of words I call contranyms, words that can be used as their own antonym.[2] For example, a cakewalk is an intricate dance but is usually used to mean simple.  Seeded can mean either with or without seeds.  A stain is a color or a discoloration.  Dead usually means deceased but may also mean perfectly or positively as in the expressions dead on and dead to rights.  Transparent means both visible and invisible.  Sanguine may be hopeful or bloody.  Cleave can mean stick to or force apart.  Cool is often hot.  And while yes means yes in some precincts, more often it means maybe. Ditto for no.  Note the range of opposition in such pairs, from out-and-out opposites to subtle antagonisms.

It’s hard to choose a favorite contranym but “bitch” has to be near the top of the list.  It began life as a German word for a female dog and is still used that way by the Westminster Kennel Club even on prime time broadcast television.  Dogs, of course, are intelligent, loving creatures whose aim in life is to please human beings.  Nevertheless, the word came to refer to an overbearing, obnoxious human female often enough used in a libelous way by an overbearing, obnoxious male. From there, it was a small step to refer to a stupid error or a task that turned out to be more difficult than anticipated.  Used as the participle, bitching, it means smart, clever or excellent which, at least, bring us back to the characteristics of dogs.

I am not the first person to notice the eccentricities of the English tongue.  Cock, for example, refers to a male chicken who struts around the farmyard making loud, screeching noises.  As every woman knows, this translates directly to a common synonym for penis and by natural extension to the definitive set of male personality characteristics.  It has also come to refer to a cuckold and it bears a connection to Google.  The latter is a long story tracing back to a 1913 children’s book and a 1919
comic strip which is still running.  Barney Google – he of the goo-goo-googly eyes – was the ultimate cuckold who wound up divorced and “living with his horse.”  To demonstrate how these things work, the company called Google was begun by a couple of orthographically challenged engineer types.  They were undoubtedly thinking of googol which is the word engineers use for the number 1100 which, in dollars, is how wealthy they will soon be.  But, being males, they didn’t think of proofreading their work any more than they would ask for directions while driving.  Oh, yes, it is noted that roosters do not have penises.  Which may explain why they greet the dawn with the characteristic cry "Cock-a-doodle-do."

English is a losing battle.  Thus, any small victories that may come your way can give a lifetime of pride and pleasure.  Mine include a high school English teacher who once promised a grade of  A+ for the marking period for anyone who could come up with a correct English sentence using that as a relative pronoun.  I immediately piped up with Mark Antony’s line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “They that have done this deed are honorable.”  In the Middle Ages, the language of what is now Southern France was called langue d'oc– the language of yes – and the region in which it was spoken is still called Languedoc.  By a similar logic, English is the language of exception.  Where the French multiply rules in the mistaken belief that the universe is rational, English speakers multiply exceptions in the oxymoronic belief that the universe is governed by chaos.

Of course, to return to the question I posed five paragraphs ago, I write in English because I don’t know any better. Literally.  I am an American and therefore I don’t need to know any other language.  Cassius asks Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?”  The meat we Americans feed upon is English and it allows up to “bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus.”  It is a foolish conceit.  Yes, damn it.  Conceit!  You remember, before except after or when sounded like as in neighbor and aweigh.  Aweigh not away.  And except for the thousands of exceptions such as ancient, science, beige, being, seize and, of course, their.  God only knows how Sister Aggie would react to there own farts or even thier own farts.
Henry Higgins complains, “Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?” But that’s the wrong question. English cannot be taught, it must be absorbed from streets, schoolyards and rock concerts.  Consider the once common phrase “the bee’s knees.”  In the eighteenth century, it referred to something small and insignificant.  In the 1920’s, for some reason it was used to mean really excellent.  To a foreigner (before but see [3]), its meaning can only be guessed at by the context.  It has no more literal or even metaphorical meaning than the cat’s pajamas or warp speed which is the faster-than-light speed at which Star Trek spacecraft travel or the English language changes.
Lewis Carroll knew all this better than most people.  There is his famous passage where Alice and Humpty Dumpty are discussing the meaning of the word glory. “But glory doesn't mean a nice knock-down argument, Alice objected.  ‘When use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’  ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that's all.’”  (Neither had ever visited western Montana where glory refers to a breakfast drink of beer and tomato juice.  In eastern Montana, the same concoction is called a smile.)

The poor benighted oddball who is addicted to writing learns very early that it’s a tough row to hoe and that no sympathy is deserved or can be expected.  In the age of the emoticon and the 140 character twit (sic), none is deserved. To begin with, no one needs to read anything more complicated than a stop sign.  It took millions of years for communication to evolve from chemical signals exchanged by nematodes to the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, hundreds of years to evolve from Shakespeare to James Joyce, a few decades to produce Bob Dylan and a few years to move on up to Twitter.  The most famous advertising slogan of the 1960’s was:

At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce
comes from the electric clock.

Twenty years later, the most famous slogan belonged to Pepsi-Cola:

Uh-huh!

Now Uh-huh doesn’t actually mean anything.  Neither do most political speeches, newspaper editorials, religious sermons or Bob Dylan lyrics.  Meaning, as a function of the connection between words and the things or ideas they refer to, is obsolete.  It has been replaced by something simpler that requires no intermediation.  The connection is direct, immediate and subliminal.  As long ago as 1901, Pavlov conditioned his dogs to connect the sound of a bell to food.  Instantly they would begin to salivate.  Moreover, they became hungry regardless of when they were last fed.  A human hears four bars of a favorite top 40 song and immediately calls up Twitter even while driving 70 miles an hour in rush hour in a blinding snowstorm.  He (invariably) has become addicted to sharing his pathetic emotions with the entire world which is to say he “salivates” just like Pavlov's pooches.  His message is carried by words, abbreviations and emoticons which can be absorbed without conscious thought by the “reader.”[4]

The so-called “paperless society” has long been a myth.  In the United States, we produce nearly 100 million tons of paper a year, 700 pounds for every man, woman and child.  We also produce trillions of words to go on that paper.  The tax code and its official guides alone have 4 million words on 74,608 pages.  No one reads this verbal diarrhea.  Somebody has to write all this stuff but it’s not me.  I write for a lot of reasons:  to clarify my own thinking, to vent my frustrations, to confront hypocrisy, to challenge ideology, to ameliorate my fears.  But at the end of the day, I write because, like mountain climbing, it is fun to tilt at windmills.

Notes

1.  George Berkeley was a highly regarded eighteenth century Irish philosopher who married well and served as the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork from 1734 to his death in 1753.  He is best known as an empiricist and, God forgive him, a proto-phenomenologist.  He is said to have been a genial, generous and warm-hearted person who nonetheless made important contributions to both physics and metaphysics.  Berkeley, California is named for him even though the citizens of that town have never learned to pronounce the bishop's name.  It is Bark-lee.  The quotation cited here is a common variation of the good Bishop’s actual question which is almost incomprehensible.  It is thought that it was his considered opinion that no sound was made in the absence of a hearer because, as he wrote, “The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived.”  That’s the empiricist in him.  But on another occasion he  wrote, “…the tree continues to exist in the Quad when ‘nobody’ is there simply because God is always there."  It suggests that God always sees the tree but doesn’t hear it when it falls.  That’s the phenomenologist in him.

2.  Merrian-Webster calls these words contronyms but that seems to violate the Latin preposition contra.  Some grammarians use the term "Janus words" after the two-faced god of Roman mythology.  It's an inspired coinage but it fails to deal with the spectrum of opposition these words evince.

3.  Foreign is actually an exception to the exception. It derives from the Medieval Latin foraneus and the Old French forain both of which are pronounced like as in neighbor and away.

4.  If you don’t believe this, consider the instructions you received when you bought your last computer.  Long gone are the days when the box contained a thick manual.  Now you get a poster with line drawings and arrows.  There may be a few words but they are virtually irrelevant.  The only time you see a lot of words is when their authors do not want you to read them. All they expect is that you will click the “Agree” button at the bottom.  If you don’t, they won’t play with you.  On the other hand, the party of the second part (you) can make neither head nor tail of the deathless prose.  Something called “Our Privacy Policy” is similar.  They do indeed take your privacy very seriously.  The operative word is “take.”  There are lawyers who specialize in corporate privacy policy prose.  They are sometimes called Peeping Toms.