The like awful English language

A love story

When I was thirteen I fell in love. It was pure and true, and had nothing to do with the monstrous crush I had on a skinny, swimming, crying-in-history-class-after-he-lost-first-chair-in-band-class trumpet player named Jeff, though that crush was so monstrous that I wrote his name upstairs under all the peeling wallpaper. When my dad finally got around to stripping off 50 years worth of haphazardly-applied falling-to-dust irregularly-peeling wallpaper, there you could see them, like termites, on the naked wallboard: little hearts with I Love Jeff declared inside.

No, the love I mean here is the love of semicolons, which I met through my favorite book, The World According to Garp. For example:

Garp shoved Benny so that Benny's rump slouched into the bar sink; the sink was full of soaking glasses, and the water sloshed up onto the bar.

The women looked helpless in their summer dresses; the loading of station wagons was hurried and miserable.

Through Garp, I also met the colon:

But Garp wondered: if he bought the condoms now, would they still be usable for graduation?

And discovered you could use BOTH in the same sentence, ALONG WITH A DASH:

One of them was Harrison Fletcher; his field was the Victorian Novel, but Helen liked him for other reasons--among them: he was also married to a writer.

Yes, I read about condoms when I was thirteen, and also about people biting the tips off penises when their husband accidentally rammed from behind the car in which they were fellating someone else. My father, a passable hippy, always said, "I will not censor your reading! Because with information you can DECIDE FOR YOURSELF!" and so I read this book, which had passages like: "The organizer tied several ribbons on the animal's organ, each colored bow an inch apart. The girl approached the animal, rubbing oil into her thighs and abdomen and coaxing the animal to lick her body." And then I was like Ew! No way! And it was probably a better deterrent to consummating sexual relations than telling me not to consummate sexual relations would have been.

Meanwhile, my mother -- whose feelings on censorship differ from my father's in that NO WAY CAN MY CHILD LISTEN TO THIS FILTH -- was taking away my little brother's George Michael tape, but it was too late. The fateful words, Sex is Natural, Sex is Fun, Sex is Best When it's One on One had already turned my brother into a homosexual.

In college, where I learned about new things like Rage Against the Machine, the Garlic Chicken Burger with Cheese Fries, and lesbians, a new extender of syntax came into my life: the parentheses. I was introduced to the pair of them through a virtuoso, Vladimir Nabokov, no slouch with the semicolon himself.

Finally, Ada showed Van a letter from Dr. Krolik on the same subject; it said (English version): "Crimson-blotched, silver-scaled, yellow-crusted wretches, the harmless psoriatics (who cannot communicate their skin trouble and are otherwise the healthiest of people--actually, ther bobo's protect them from bubas and buboes, as my teacher used to observe) were confused with lepers--yes, lepers-- in the Middle Ages, when thousands if not millions of Vergers and Vertograds crackled and howled bound by enthusiasts to stakes erected in the public squares of Spain and other fire-loving countries."

The sentences, they go on forever, playful and piquant and so loooooong. Seventeen years old and desparate to get my boyfriend to have sex with me or, failing that, to find a new one who would, I circumnavigated a whole book of sentences like this, then drifted hungrily to English class, where sunbeams bounced off the dusty blond hair of a boy who years later would take me to Italy. Culture was coming into my life, and it featured a complicated prose style.

My very favorite instance of parentheses is the narratively succinct "picnic, lightning" from this sentence in Lolita:

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know blah blah blah, sentence goes on for quite some time golden midges.

It's no wonder many papers I wrote in graduate school came back with comments like Good writing but WOW! LONG SENTENCES! YOU NEED AN EDITOR! This in spite of the fact that my other great love in college was Denis Johnson, whose beautiful prose could never be called bodacious.

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us.

***
I am taking a (required-for-the-taking-of-PhD-exams) German translation class, presumably because the ability to tell a German dative preposition from an accusative one will have a material and, one gathers, positive effect on my ability to indoctrinate future students into, uh, the study of English.

German is fun. The funnest part of German is the way modifiers work, or rather -- as my book calls them -- Extended Adverbial Constructions. Because in German you write Extended Adverbial Constructions, it means you're SUPPOSED to write, as I did above,

a skinny, swimming, crying-in-history-class-after-he-lost-first-chair-in-band-class trumpet player named Jeff

instead of something most English teachers might steer you toward, something more like

Jeff, who was skinny, who swam on the swim team, and who cried (like a little pussy, most of the class thought, though I didn't because I liked pussies, as long as they were Jeff) all during history class one day because he'd just got beat out for first chair trumpet in band class...

This quality among others, such as the fact that German writers are apparently allowed just to make up random compoud words like WeFeelingofConfidence or HatHairHating, gives it a bad rap, as my father reminds me every single time I mention taking a German class. "Have you ever read Mark Twain's 'The Awful German Language'?" he'll ask. "Ha! Ha ha!"

But German isn't so bad. Still, is it so supple as English, so capable of wrapping its legs around its own head?

One summer I went to a Nabokov exhibit at the New York Public Library. Wow, was it ever hot that day! Much like today.

I had an epiphany in the Nabokov room. In English, you can put prepositional phrases wherever you like. You can write

The idea was based from the first on the notion of ice cream

or you can write

From the first was the idea based on the notion of ice cream

or you can write

The idea was, from the first, based on the notion of ice cream.

It's amazing. And further, deftness lets you stick the phrase in the slightly surprising slot, the nevertheless grammatical result of which lends interest to your writing. It makes you look a pro. Every time I think of this, I think of a poker player rolling chips across his knuckles, and in this case the chips are the deftly-moving syntactical units.

There was meant to be a further titillating story about my affair with Stanley Cavell, whose appositives yield perfectly balanced sentences and who can turn content on a dime, if that dime is a word that means a perfectly clear thing in one clause but in the next opens out ass over teakettle onto its other meaning. But nevermind. That's not the point. Even if parallelism is totally sexy. My first e-mail to my husband K. contained mostly a compliment about his "elegant" prose in class. It was awesome. His sentences were so long.

The POINT here is that despite an abiding love of precisely slotted clauses and of the stately pleasure domes of sentences lifted out of the mud by the magical bindings of colons, dashes and parentheses, I totally love to use teen-girl faves like totally as my drumbeat. I love to begin sentences with Dude: and I love to soften up a slab of prose by tossing in a couple of "likes," with or without the coordinating set of commas. (Usually without.)

And I suppose probably some of it is a semi-conscious deliberate decision to take my prose down a peg or two, take the starch out of it, to bring in the readers and Fuddy Duddies of Formal Diction be damned. To let rhythm dictate when I'll violate rules, to tease out the music of how people really speak. (THOUGH I HATE THE SOUND OF THE SPLIT INFINITIVE, EVEN IF IT'S NOW "OKAY." DAMN YOU SPLIT INFINITIVE! DAMN YOU CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE!)

Not that anyone's complained, but it has seemed funny to me, an erstwhile teacher of grammar, to toss off titles like "I totally thought this would happen" or "What if, like, Sylvia Plath had a blog?" But you know what? IT TOTALLY SOUNDS GOOD THAT WAY.

However -- and I've probably told you this one -- a lovah once seriously said, to me, in bed, "You are the only woman down on whom I've wished to go." DOWN ON WHOM I WISH TO GO. Yeeeeeeah. Not sexy, which maybe explains also the difficulty with keeping erections. But then he ran off with my Amazonian, published, rich roommate (who looked terrific in mini-skirts), had eight interviews his first trip to MLA, got a tenure-track job, and lived happily ever after. So I guess that shows what the gods think of those who value grammar EVEN WHEN IT SOUNDS WEIRD.