Vale, Vocative

Texting has introduced a revolution in communication, and for some of us that is not always a good thing.  An article I read recently, for instance, demonstrated in detail the damage, if not quite full death, that the apostrophe has suffered as a result of the inconvenience to use the key combinations necessary on phones and tablets to punctuate possessives and other grammatical instances appropriately.  I have long lamented the eclipse of the apostrophe on road and street signs.  Look around.  You may not have noticed but now you will -- except if you are going to Martha's Vineyard, one of the few places that has received an exception by the bureaucratic authorities who make such subtle but momentous decisions.

As troubling as the loss of apostrophes is to me, there is another loss even more disconcerting personally.  It is the near total annihilation of the vocative.

A vocative construction, as its name implies, is used when invoking, calling, hailing, or addressing someone. (Ironically, for present purposes, the literary device of addressing someone not present is called an apostrophe, and it is to my mind no coincidence that both are on life support or have been dispatched to a new grammatical gulag system.)  For example, you might say, "John, where is my hat?"  In that interrogative, the vocative is the address to John, and it is marked off with a comma.  The same sort of construction occurs when we greet people, "Hello, John."  It is just a common affair. It happens every day.

But that is just the thing that is so troubling:  the loss of the vocative now also happens every day and everywhere.  I sampled the other week four people in the same context, and not one of them had heard of a vocative construction, much less knew that it is proper to mark vocative uses with a comma.  They just took for granted that what they did multiple times a day with their friends on their phones was the formally and grammatically proper way to write, if they happened to think about grammar as a system at all.

For someone such as I am who finds grammar for the most part an anchor in a seismically changing world, this development, including the grammatical ignorance, is unsettling. I see this everywhere, and it irks me.  It is not just in professional e-mails that begin "Hi Polytropos" -- without a comma.  It is not just that I find my cortisol levels rising whenever I log into Google, the splash page for which greets me "Hi Polytropos" without a comma.  I see it occasionally at more festive times, for instance, when a group of people want to celebrate someone's birthday, and they order a cake with a message inscribed in the icing.  This happens more than you might think, at least in my social experience.  Without exception, the last 7 cakes (that's all I can remember; I'm sure the streak is longer) have all used a vocative incorrectly in wishing someone happy birthday by name, the equivalent to "Happy Birthday Polytropos!" -- without a comma.

Now, I realize that you might think, "Heavens!  This Polytropos is a grammatical grouch." I dispute that, and you can read some of my other prior posts about grammar for explanations of why I think it is important (e.g., here and here and here and here).  But grammar has real life and death consequences. 

Consider, if you will, this tag line in an e-mail that I received not long ago from a favorite restaurant, which also happened to be the e-mail's subject:  "Let's eat everyone!"

Think about that for a moment.   "Let's eat everyone!"

Good.  Kind of revolting, huh?  This exhortation was meant to be an encouragement to fine dining.  The clause was, after all, that used by the talented chef who said that to his patrons after surveying their culinary preferences and the wine that they brought before he embarked on a seven-course tasting menu.  The e-mail that was meant to invite one to dinner out caused me to lose my appetite, and all because of a vocative -- without a comma.

When the restaurateur failed to mark off the vocative properly, what should have been the hortatory subjunctive, "Let's eat, everyone!" became an invitation to cannibalism.  Grammar has real life and death consequences.

You might say to yourself, "Well, I can sort of understand the need to mark off the addressee(s) in the case when preceded by a verb of a certain action, but surely it is negotiable in other instances, like greetings." But then you have created a rule, and you have re-written a grammatical rule, and you seem to invoke the following of that rule.  So, I might rejoin, why not just follow the rules that already exist for good reason rather than do gymnastics to create your own rules?

The grammatical descriptivist is the person who, generally, says that grammar is what people do with it.  But if the innate descriptivist becomes to some extent a prescriptivist (grammar is what convention has for good reason laid down ought to be done), then the principle of rules in grammar is conceded, and the burden of proof for deviating from proper practice is on the one who has inherited a grammatical deviation largely by technological change, social practice, and poor primary education.

The loss of certain punctuation and the erosion of both grammar and clear writing are, I think, largely the effects of the prevalence of texting.  It is also more than that.  It is a function of different discourse, one that is implicitly imperialistic.  It is also a function of not merely what people write but also what people read (or do not read).  It is, moreover, a function of lack of basic instruction about what is becoming and why.  When I explained to those four people mentioned above what a vocative is, why it is used, and why it is punctuated the way that it is, with examples, at least three of the four said, "Oh, well, I've never heard of that, but it makes perfect sense.  I see it now."

Maybe that is all it takes, small steps in our own circles, to resist the grammatically insidious domination of Google's login page, e-mail greetings, and cake decorators in our daily life. This is, indeed, a Resistance movement.  You can join.  It really does depend on you.  Otherwise, an invitation to punctuate might be corrupted further, not only in form but also in diction:  "Let's puncture everyone." One mistake might lead to more, and that's how grammar can be a matter of life or death.  We will then be saying "Vale!" to a lot more than the vocative.

Psychological Complexity in James's "The Aspern Papers"

I have long admired Henry James.  He was a college discovery.  I should say, rather, that he was an author whom I discovered while studying in university through a course assignment.  To some, such an assignment would have seemed onerous.  To me, it was felicitous.

Updating the "About" Page

Bordering somewhere between a housekeeping item and a bona fide posting, I note here that I have just updated the "About" page for this blog.  (You can find that page by clicking here.)

If you read (or remember) my first post, "Introducing a New Blog Experiment," or stumbled once late at night early in the morning onto the "About" page, then you might find this "About" update of interest.  You might want to read it also if you have time to kill or are incurably curious.  Otherwise, there is nothing to see here. Carry on.

"Ruthless Force": James on Whitman's War Poetry

In 1865, in first issue of The Nation, a young Henry James pointedly critiqued -- better, criticized -- Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps. James’s main points seem to be that Whitman’s poetry lacks both an appeal to more than feeling (i.e., the intellect) and taste (i.e., a sense of the aesthetic): “It is not enough to be grim and rough and careless. … it [his poetry] pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste … Mr. Whitman sits down at the outset and counts out the intelligence.”  Whitman’s poetry, according to James, also lacks a seriousness that the nature of the occasion, the Civil War, demands. Further, it fails to demonstrate a deep personal involvement in the war and the self-commanded eloquence to speak about it by “possessing this possession.”  James may have been correct that Whitman’s poetry does not have a pleasing aesthetic sense. James is picking up on something noteworthy about Whitman's unorthodox style, but that uncommon poetic aesthetic is part of the seriousness that Whitman’s grasp of the disruption to ordinary life occasioned by the Civil War reflects.  The jarring event that was the war called for jarring poetry to capture it.

New Eyes Seeing: Appreciating Chinese Poetry

The regulated verse that characterized Chinese poetry in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) can be simply elegant in its complexity and complex in its elegant simplicity.  I decided to try my hand.

There are at least two basic modes, or forms, of regulated verse.  

Mode One 

First couplet: introduces time, space, and theme (free)
Second couplet: elaborates theme of the poem (parallel)
Third couplet: turns the theme towards an unexpected direction (parallel)
Fourth couplet: the poet’s resolution or conclusion (free)

Mode Two 

First couplet: line one introduces one theme, line two introduces a second theme (free)
Second couplet: elaboration of theme one (parallel)
Third couplet: elaboration of theme two (parallel)
Fourth couplet: tie the two themes together (free)

One of the master poets was Du Fu (712-770 CE).  Another was his contemporary, Li Bai (701-762).  The following is an example of Du Fu's poetry in mode one, above, of regulated verse.

Minus the alternating tones of the lines, and end rhymes, immediately below is my initial attempt to pay homage at least to the beautiful successes of medieval Chinese verse.

New Eyes Seeing

The wise path has never yet been perfected;
The daughter now for the first time understands.

Phronesis peeks mysteriously from around the fence,
Kongzi wonders curiously even at age seventy.

As the light streams through the window she eyes the diamond's facets,
When darkness descends at sun’s setting the girl perceives the gray shades.

Through his teary eyes the aging man smiles approvingly, knowingly,
Searching still to convey earlier to her what a lifetime only partial gave him.

On the Finer Points of "Fine"

The word fine is one of those lexical units whose meaning, or meaning potential, is frustratingly multiple. It spans the range from signifying satisfaction to reflecting dissatisfaction.  It is a little bit like, as I noted previously, "fuhgeddaboudit" in the fine film Donnie Brasco.  In an effort to clear up my own thinking about it, which stems in part from personal communication failure, I want to look at the finer points of what we mean by fine.

When antonyms are, literally, synonyms

I normally do not post two entries on one day. Well, for that matter, I normally do not post -- if that means publishing more than 182.62 submissions per year. But today is a Friday, and so I make an exception.

Gene Weingarten has a playful but pointed column in The Washington Post about the, to his sense and mine, dangerous demise of the English language, or the culture in which it is employed: "Weighing in on 'literally,' but figuratively, of course." (And if you want background, try this article last month from the UK's Daily Mail.)

Now Weingarten thinks that it is absurd when words are redefined to mean the same thing as their opposites. I am the one who thinks it dangerous when literal means figurative.

Whether words refer to reality (so Augustine), or whether they have meaning in connection with the real activities, or forms of life, into which they are woven (so Wittgenstein), or whether it is some combination of the two, this much is clear. The plasticity that allows a word meaning X simultaneously to mean not-X reflects something significant -- and troubling -- from an Augustinian or Wittgensteinian perspective. Why? Because it signals how confused and confusing is the reality in which we live (Augustine), or the activities and forms of life that contemporary culture takes (Wittgenstein), or both.

Maybe the closest approximation I can think of to this plasticity is the explanation of "fuhgeddaboudit" in Donnie Brasco. In fact, this scene is not merely amusing but actually illustrates the point. Donnie's world, living simultaneously as a law enforcer and as a mobster, was psychologically confusing and his life confused. Ultimately, Donnie could not handle the tension, his personality was changing, his marriage was dissolving, and he could no longer play the part of both at the same time. This example of semantic confusion (and contradiction) could be broadly instructive -- for words, people, and social institutions.

Freud and Woolf on Art

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud argues that “[l]ife as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures” (CD 23). Art is one such “palliative,” one that features prominently in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Whereas for Freud art is merely one means of substituting pleasure for the pain of reality by escaping reality, in Woolf’s novel art also has a palliative function, but it intersects with and merges with reality to induce pleasure, satisfaction, and intimacy within it.

The Job of Grammar

Kyle Wiens has written a sensible article on the importance of grammar:  "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.  Here's Why." 

Yes; people like Mr. Wiens do exist in the real world.  I know folks who will shy away from doing business with people who make grammar mistakes in introductory e-mails.  These folks also do not look favorably upon job applicants who make the same blunders.

Mr. Wiens touches on the import of grammar, that it reflects something more fundamental about a person than mental skill, when he writes:  "Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English.  I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts."

That something more is both self-control and dependability.  These are ethical qualities.  Someone who does not write according to whim but follows conventions in order to communicate clearly with others in the same society typically may be relied upon to follow instructions and discharge one's duty.

Grammar sticklers care about more than just good grammar; they care about good character.

Reflections on the Grammar Wars

I have wondered at times if many people disregard proper grammar because they devalue clear reasoning.  

Upping One's Grammar Game

Not everyone values correct grammar as much as I do.  For those who do or who wish to up their game, see the well-done and practical "20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes" by Jon Gingerich.