The Grammarians

by Cathleen Schine

  But Gravit was no longer listening. He was examining the ads for apartment rentals in The New York Times. “Laurel!” he cried out. “There is a one-bedroom across the street from my house. I will be able to wave at Miranda!”

  “Wave to Miranda, I hope.”

  “We’re talking about Miranda, Laurel. Wave at.”

  Laurel pictured the headmaster in his disheveled pajamas raising a dejected hand hopefully behind an unwashed windowpane. Across the street, his thirteen-year-old daughter, her hair animal-wild, her pink sweatshirt and leopard leggings flashing past the window of the brownstone her parents had bought so many years ago when no one in their right mind wanted a brownstone on that particular street, without a glance outside. Which one was ephemeral, she wondered: the waver or the wavee?

  “‘Ephemeral’ is a pretty word, isn’t it? It sounds like a pretty girl’s name. How is Miranda, by the way?”

  “Forceful.” And he snapped the newspaper open in front of his face the way her father used to do when he did not want to discuss something.

  Out of politeness, Laurel opened the book Gravit had given her. She read aloud: “‘Anxiety concerning the kind of English spoken and written by English people seems to have had its most vigorous early expression in the eighteenth century as an outgrowth of the striving for ‘elegance’ and especially attending the rise of the commercial middle classes into more prominence socially.’”

  Striving for “elegance,” she thought. Oh dear. “Striving,” she said.

  “Yes,” Gravit said from behind his newspaper. “I’m afraid so.”

  “‘The study of grammar was … deeply intrenched in the traditional prejudices of the public’,” she read. “So proper grammar is nouveau riche?”

  Was that what Daphne was fighting for in her columns? Overcompensating, ostentatious social climbers?

  “Well, Daphne would not like this guy, that’s for sure,” she said. “Proper English is just another vernacular? A social dialect? A class dialect? I’m not sure I like that, either. I mean, grammar is grammar. Some things are just wrong.”

  As children, Daphne and Laurel had memorized grammar rules and set them to nursery tunes. If there were no standards, what was left? The man was a nihilist. English as She Is Spoke, indeed!

  “I suppose he would be called a descriptivist now,” Gravit said.

  “Descriptivists versus prescriptivists? They both sound like brand-X Protestant religions to me.” Ah, yes, I was brought up in a strict prescriptivist family, she imagined a lapsed prescriptivist saying with a rueful shake of the head, but I have lost my faith. She said, “What is the point of describing language with language? The whole enterprise is so tautological, it’s practically mystical.”

  “Are you dismissing the entire discipline of linguistics?”

  “But for grammar, why not just get the rules right and move forward?” Rules were there for a reason, as she often told Charlotte, though when Charlotte demanded to know that reason, Laurel was sometimes reduced to saying, “Because that’s the way it’s done.”

  “That is certainly the view of the People’s Pedant,” Gravit said. “But doesn’t her column sometimes make you suspect that language is not very different from fashion or manners? Table manners, for example.”

  Laurel thought, Gravit is not someone who should be talking about table manners.

  “Using a fish fork,” he continued. “Even knowing what a fish fork looks like. That’s a sign that you grew up in a certain milieu. In a certain era. In a particular culture.”

  “Right, but—”

  “It’s not a sign of virtue or truth.”

  Laurel imagined the flag of a newly liberated country declaring its dedication to democratic values. Fishforkia!

  “But should points of grammar carry so much moral weight?” Gravit said. “All Fries is saying is that using, say, the possessive gerund is not a sign of virtue or of truth. Both the fish fork and the possessive gerund are signs, all right. But they’re signs of age, social convention, and class.”

  Laurel disliked the word “class.” It was too easy. It was always the answer to every difficult, unsolvable question. It carried its Marxist intransigence with it like a musty smell.

  But too bad, Laurel, she said to herself. Just because you are embarrassed by the months you spent chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” in 1968 does not negate the concept of class.

  “So that’s why people like Daphne’s column? Knowing when to say ‘continuous’ instead of ‘continual’ sets them off from the masses?”

  “Well, partly. Don’t you think? Of course, we’re all romantic, spiritual beings, too. We all want to transcend contingency in our lives. We are always searching for something universal. Even if it’s just rules of grammar. That’s another attraction.”

  “The universality of fish forks,” Laurel said.

  “Yes, well, you see the problem right there.”

  LE´SSER. adj. A barbarous corruption of less, formed by the vulgar from the habit of terminating comparatives in er; afterwards adopted by poets, and then by writers of prose.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  “The boy no doubt secured the services of some one falsely representing herself as his sister.” (78)

  Oh dear, thought Laurel. A young soldier with his “sister.” I’ve heard that before—just not as an example of the demise of the inflected genitive in modern English.

  How clever of Fries to use letters written to the Department of War. He anticipated corpus linguistics, according to Gravit. The man had no computers at his disposal, no body of recordings of everyday speech. But he realized he did have a corpus of everyday speech. He had letters—letters from people across the country, letters from every county, rural or urban, from every age and every social class. All the letters were sent to the one place that could expect such a flood of missives from such different sorts of Americans—the Department of War.

  When most written language was formal, here were examples from people across the country, across social and educational strata, across race and gender and age.

  She flipped to a page discussing the use of a plural subject followed by a singular verb. (52): “My children is too small.” That made her smile, imagining a woman with her hands on her hips staring at a bunch of stubby children. But the next example brought her up short. “My children is on starvation.” The children who were too small were not too small for their mother’s vanity. They were too small to have to bear whatever had befallen them. These were the letters of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and wives and grandparents, the soldiers and their sweethearts and parents and children, the ones who came back and the ones left behind. All united by war.

  “But births was not recorded when James was born.”

  “The dirt floors requires continual work.”

  “All my uncles was in the civil war.”

  “The times is so hard.”

  The grammatical examples were all like that, sad and unique, because they were pieces of people’s lives, scraps of lives on scraps of paper.

  “It’s like a Woody Guthrie song,” she told Larry. “The indefinite pronoun with number distinctive form? It’s heartbreaking. And a preterit form used for the past participle in strong verbs? Listen:

  “‘My folks may have rote you.’

  “‘I hope I haint don any thing rong or rote anything rong in this letter.’

  “‘I have broke my health to have a home to live in.’

  “‘He was the best boy I ever had and has give me most help.’

  “‘He liyed about his self in the army and was took without letting me know any thing about it.’

  “‘I wish you would see what has become of my son.’

  “‘Everything I have wrote is the truth.’”

  Laurel could not get that out of her head: Everything I have wrote is the truth.

  “Because that’s the point of words, right? The truth.”

 
; “Unless you’re lying,” Larry said.

  In response, because she was angry at his stupid, unfeeling joke, if it was a joke, Laurel loudly directed two lines from the next page at him:

  “‘Maybe I hadn’t ought to write to you / But I was afraid I would do something I had not ought to do.’”

  Then, angry and hurt, she left him in the living room to finish the perfect dry martini in its icy glass with its three olives she had just made him.

  He followed her into the kitchen, offering a sip as a gesture of peace. She drank from his glass, more than a sip, but said nothing.

  “You’re not speaking to me?”

  She read from the Fries book: “‘I said he didn’t no / What he was doing and he didn’t and I have just showing you he didn’t.’”

  Larry looked at the page. “You changed the pronoun. It says ‘she’ didn’t know what ‘she’ was doing.”

  “That, too,” Laurel said.

  The grammar book haunted her. She often made Larry read strings of the excerpts aloud. She was filled with a vague guilt that got more vague, rather than less, the more she thought about why. She remembered her sister’s notebooks, all those words collected like butterflies, pinned to the page. They struck her now as morbid, even tragic. And her own contribution, the careful transcription of definitions from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition—the words she copied from the dictionary might just as well have been the handsome penmanship of a Victorian vicar inscribing the species of each dead bright-winged lepidopteran.

  She tried to talk to Daphne about it once.

  “Remember how we used to play with your word collection? We played with the words as if they were toys?”

  Daphne laughed. “The collection! ‘Oxters’! That was a fun one. You were very dedicated, writing in all the definitions.”

  She made Laurel’s task sound so dowdy.

  “And remember your skin collection?” Daphne said.

  Laurel had so envied Daphne’s little notebooks and pads full of collected words that she had tried to come up with something interesting she could collect. Briefly she had considered collecting peeled sunburned skin, watching to see what happened to it over time. But in the end, the idea of rotting skin in a box, even her pretty jewel box, was too frightening.

  “I never actually did it.”

  “Ah, life, fugacious life.”

  Laurel told her about the grammar book, about the desire to understand how people really spoke, about the snippets of sadness that would not leave her head, or her heart, once she read them. “It’s so sad,” she said. “All these people reaching out. Hearing their voices through the grammar.”

  “You know, you probably react so emotionally because you can picture them as poor and uneducated, and that’s because their English is so poor and uneducated. How can they ever succeed in the world and pull themselves out of their poverty if they can’t speak proper English? I mean, that’s his point, right? He was in education, right?”

  “No, that’s not his point. His point is, informal English is not wrong, and some of it stems from models older than ‘standard’ English, and he always puts ‘standard’ in quotes because there is no standard English, language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it, you have to know what is actually spoken.”

  “Oh. One of those.”

  “London, which was where the movers and shakers of the fourteenth and fifteenth century hung out, had a local dialect. If you wanted to sound like you were in the know, like you were one of the power elite, you dropped your Kentish dialect and started speaking in Londonese. Otherwise you sounded like a rube. And that keeps happening. What people call ‘standard’ English is really just the dialect of the elite.”

  “Okay, five hundred years later, here we are, Laurel. I have no interest in sounding like a rube. Neither do you. But at least the bad English in this book—and it sounds awful—at least it’s in letters from people with hardly any education. What I can’t stand is the way that stuff has crept into normal English. You can’t even call it Vulgar English the way your guy does. It’s become Standard English. Standard. No quotes. It’s depressing.”

  “You’re so cold, Daphne. Jesus.”

  “I have standards, that’s all. And I’m sorry, but you’re reading me grammatical mistakes from the nineteen-twenties. It’s not like it’s literature.”

  Which gave Laurel an idea. Which made Laurel think. Which changed Laurel’s life.

  LA´TED, adj. [from late:] Belated; surprised by the night.

  —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

  Personal, tragic fragments of family dramas, economic hardship, physical disaster and decline. The genitive of possession transforms itself into dispossession: The boy’s father is in the insane asylum; I am forced from my mothers by my stepfather.

  Genitive pronouns become glimpses of the most intense need: I am crippled in my limbs. Get this boy back or break up my home. Help Save Our Crops. He is my youngest boy. Suggestive, eloquent, incomplete, full. The grammar fades almost entirely and Laurel no longer sees the words, she hears the voices of the letters calling out. These are splinters of poetry.

  This was his second time to leave home.

  I am not able to pay his way here to assist me in my last days.

  He lied about his age on account of his minority.

  5 yr’s his limit to live.

  His pictures show that he is very thin.

  * * *

  Laurel spends time at the library, the main branch on Fifth Avenue, the cathedral of words. At a long wooden table she reads an essay by Richard Rorty in the London Review of Books. (She has begun to read literary quarterlies, too, little magazines of poetry and stories.) The essay is about Freud and Nietzsche and Hegel and Plato and all of Western thought, and it begins with a poem by Philip Larkin, and Laurel cannot properly explain it to Larry when she gets home, but she feels extravagantly alive when she reads it, as if the gods had breathed life into her: inspired, literally. She has written down one sentence: “We are doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency.”

  And Laurel begins to write.

  “Write about what you know,” Larry says. “Isn’t that what they tell you?”

  But Laurel does not write about what she knows. She writes about what others knew, what others said, in the phrases of mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and widows and wives, phrases that improbably survive, like lines of Sappho, from letters collected by the Department of War. “He ran off and joined the army to keep out of trouble and he had to drink to keep from going crazy … so he lied to enlist … I had to borrow to get him home … his pay is not sufficient to properly care for me … he does not make enough to properly support me and his mother … I am writing to assure you I desire to arrange my affairs.”

  Laurel reads the lines again and again. “I kneed him, I am 50 years old, with 5 little ones to support, with bothe knees all to pieces with rheumatism…” The voices became softer, sadder. “After a Mother & Father suffer to raise a Boy … I am asking for your help to locate my son … Please leave my son come home … I hate to let it go so bad … Help save our crops and help rase the twoo little boys…”

  The misspellings strike her as painfully eloquent, not mistakes at all, but cries of the heart, documentation of upheaval in a family, in a social order.

  “Say it soft and it’s almost like singing,” she says to Daphne.

  But Daphne does not hear the singing. She hears condescension and nostalgia from Laurel. She hears Marie Antoinette parading around in a peasant dress. She hears sentimentality. She hears her sister lost in a folly of maudlin romance.

  “Leonard Bernstein it ain’t.”

  * * *

  Laurel is not discouraged. She is simply secretive now. She quits her job. She goes back to the public library on Fifth Avenue and reads
and writes. She reads this example of what Charles Fries calls the subjective genitive: “‘Knowing that we couldn’t get along without the Boys help’ (context shows that Boys is singular—a son).”

  And she writes a crude poem:

  THE BOYS

  In war, a mother writes a letter

  or a father

  or the war itself writes the letter,

  “knowing

  that we couldn’t get along

  without the Boys help.”

  Without the Boys.

  Without the Boys help

  we couldn’t get along,

  You know that as well as we do.

  In war

  (context shows that

  Boys

  is singular—

  a son)

  But she is on her way. She appropriates contingency. The voices call out the way poetry calls out, quietly, insistently, demanding to be heard not just by Laurel but by others, too. The voices in the grammar book speak to each other and to her, and now they will speak to whoever reads what she has written.

  This is what words do, she realizes. They call out from the page and force you to listen. No, they allow you to listen.

  Laurel’s poems of appropriation become whole worlds of appropriation. The boy’s father is in an insane asylum; I want you to get this very plain; I never had occasion to use Geometry—Laurel listens to the voices of the grammar ghosts and hears their plaintive fragments as stories. Help take care of him, if you will kindly think of me, I am very much in need of him at home, I am now asking of you, there is three of us.

  The acknowledgment and appropriation and writing take time. Years. Five years pass. One of her stories of appropriation is printed in a little magazine, and then another in another little magazine. Five more years pass. Her daughter is a teenager. Her husband is terrified of his teenage daughter. Laurel writes a story with a title taken from one of the lines in Charles Fries’s book—“It Takes 6 Days for a Letter to Get to New York”—and the story is printed in The New Yorker. The Grammar Ghosts, a collection of stories, is published. Her work is called “sampling” and is compared to hip-hop. And her sister is not speaking to her.