Bad English

Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation

Ammon Shea (Perigee, 2014)

   The t-shirt that says "I'm silently correcting your grammar" has my name on it. I come by it honestly: I have linguistically sensitive forebears on all sides. My father winced at sentence adverb 'hopefully'; my maternal grandmother loathed the word 'tasty'; and I have recently felt utterly compelled to fix the number disagreement in the last sentence of the Lord's Prayer.

   But I really don't want to be a jerk about it, so I'm delighted to add Ammon Shea's Bad English to my 'language wars' shelf. Shea has taken a serious historical look at a the usage rants and grammar guides of the past century and a half. English, it turns out, changes so quickly that no guide can hope to be the last word. The peeves of the nineteenth century very often look strange to us now; the expressions that were then considered beyond the pale have either sunk out of sight or become commonplace and unobjectionable.

   Such a change doesn't even need centuries. Remember 'Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should'? "Here we have an extraordinarily clear line of linguistic demarcation. People either feel that using like as a conjunction marks one as essentially subliterate or they have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and fail to see why this would be a problem of any sort." There were many more of the first group around when I was little, and there are many more of the latter now. 

 

   We will always have doomsayers, and yet, says Shea, "English is not dying. It is behaving exactly as it should, which is to say that it is changing. All living languages change–it is one of the things that indicate that they are still in use by a large number of people. The problem is that, while many people accept that our language is subject to change, they want to dictate what sort of changes will take place and that is a very difficult thing to do."

   The rules and roadblocks set up by fourth-grade English teachers frequently have perverse effects, as either the teacher or the student remembers the rule but not the principle. Years of drilling students not to say 'Jimmy and me are going to the pool' has led to generations of people who say 'Between you and I.' Shea makes an amusing example of George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," which promulgates six reasonable-sounding rules, and breaks five of them with abandon. There must be some sort of rule about that...

   Shea is not out to stop you speaking English the way you want to. If you prefer never to split an infinitive or strand a preposition, more power to you; but don't imagine that you are defending rules handed down on stone tablets. And feel free to set a picket fence around unique and perfect, but you may also want to "accept that certain words... are used by some people in a less semantically exact manner than you would yourself employ and hope that they have some other redeeming qualities that make up for this lapse."

   Shea is being contrarian here, and a little argumentative; but I think I prefer that attitude to the certainty and superiority of the self-appointed guardians of the language. English is doing just fine; it can look out for itself.

Email edition 11/1/16

Cold Antler Farm

Any Good Books

October 2016

Cold Antler Farm: A Memoir of Growing Food and Celebrating Life on a Scrappy Six-Acre Homestead

Jenna Woginrich (Roost Books, 2014)

    "I didn't need something for a magazine shoot or a remodeled kitchen with steel appliances. I needed land, water, grass, and possibility. The little house was a blessing, a perfect fit. I didn't care about my furniture sitting level, but I did care about the pasture, barns, forest, pond, stream, and outbuilding crying for a caretaker. It became home the moment I pulled into the driveway."

    Jenna Woginrich is a writer who farms six and a half acres in the hills north of Albany, New York; or should I say, she's a farmer who blogs and writes books. Cold Antler Farm is structured around a year on the farm, from spring around to winter. That is, from seed catalogs to planting, to weeding and cultivating, to harvesting the garden. At all times there is firewood to split and stack, as heating a house in upstate New York is no small task. 

    Woginrich likes a fresh vegetable, but her first love is clearly animals. Mail-order chicks start out in the warm kitchen, but grow up to enjoy free-range lives all over the place, providing eggs and the occasional chicken dinner. A couple of pigs eat their way through the summer, eating their way from "the size of a cocker spaniel to a high school wrestler, 190 to 225 pounds." (Woginrich sells their meat on shares so she can afford their feed.) The sheep are smarter than their reputation would have it, with a weather eye out for a weak spot in the fence. After they've had their riot, in the lettuce bed or the neighbor's flower bed - oops, sorry! - they can be bribed with grain back into their proper quarters. 

    It's an isolated life, in a way, and a lot of responsibility. There are no farm-sitters, able to take on all fifty head of assorted livestock to give Woginrich a break for a weekend in the city. On the other hand, she has people she buys hay from, a guy who droves over from Vermont to shear her flock, and local butchers for her hogs and chickens. Her neighbors are generous with help and advice, and she's more and more able to reciprocate with help and hospitality of her own. 

    Cold Antler Farm carries a whiff of the excited amateur, in over her head; but on balance, you have to believe in Woginrich's dream, because she's putting in the work every day. And, with company or alone, she makes her own fun. She noodles on the fiddle, practices archery, and slips into a clear, cool pond on the hot summer days. She keeps a couple of horses, who earn their keep helping haul firewood out of the woods. Who knows what she'll try next?

Emailed 10/1/16

Off the Leash; Dog Medicine

By chance I picked up two different dog memoirs this month - it's rather fun, how different they are.

Off the Leash: A year at the dog park.

Matthew Gilbert (2014, Thomas Dunne Books)

Dog Medicine: How my dog saved me from myself. A memoir.

Julie Barton (2015, Penguin)

    Matthew Gilbert's Off the Leash is an anthropology of his local dog park, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Amory Park is an idyllic place, where dogs can roam and romp off-leash till one p.m. every day. Of course, there are a few mosquitoes in paradise, like the dog owners who won't clean up after their dogs, or acknowledge that they have an unusually aggressive one. If either of those characters sticks around for any length of time, the human pack will exert pressure till they either shape up or move on. 

    Gilbert was not used to being a pack animal. He's the tv critic for the Boston Globe, i.e. a professional couch potato; before he got married, he had not been a dog person at all. Partly under the influence of his dog park friends, he picks up the baby-talk ventriloquism that he had formerly scorned. 

    "It was crazy, of course, and shameless. The tangle of self and dog was intimate, psychodynamic, and pleasingly neurotic. Some people developed actual voices for their dogs, just as they'd translate their dogs' actions and facial movements into human traits." Oblique, side-by-side conversations make strangers friends.

    Gilbert tunes into his Labrador's friendliness and endless appetite for play, and it does him good. "Toby had made me a more contented, freer person, someone who lives and loves despite the outcome, someone who risks play and who no longer needs to forge excuses." Gilbert knows he is likely to outlive Toby, but the joy and love make it all worthwhile.

     Julie Barton was younger, and in far worse straits, when she acquired her Golden Retriever, Bunker. She'd moved to New York after college, following a boyfriend, and it was proving to have been a bad idea. Suffering a full-on nervous breakdown, she called her mother, who drove straight from Ohio to take her home. 

    A couple of therapists and some Prozac later, she became determined to get a puppy. A good idea, and the first productive idea she'd had in months, but it came with a wave of doubt and anxiety. How to choose? "He walked over toward me, then paused, still watching me, before coming closer and sitting down at my feet. He looked up into my eyes, his own mud-brown eyes nestled under expressive little eyebrow nubs, his tiny chin hairs glowing in the light, his orange-red paws caked with mud. In that moment, of course, I knew."

    Having a fellow-creature who needs her and cheerfully loves Barton opens up possibilities. Bunker goes with her when she starts a new life in Seattle. I don't want to say as much as I usually do about what happens from there on; Barton is a gifted story-teller, and it's her story to tell. Bunker remains a real sweetheart, and their mutual devotion remains Barton's lifeline to trust, health, and joy.

Barton's Dog Medicine is the deeper, better book, but if you're not in the mood for an emotionally intense experience, pick up Off the Leash instead.

Any Good Books

September 2016 email edition

Internal Medicine

Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories

Terrence Holt (Liveright, 2015)

Terrence Holt conceived of his account of internship and residency not as a memoir, but as a series of parables, "seeking to capture the essence of something too complex to be understood any other way." Not only are the patients composites of his imagination, the narrator is a transformation of Dr. Holt. "He struggles differently from the way I did, but in the end he learns things that it took me much longer to figure out." This narrator is good company. He sheds light on the uncertainty of the enterprise, both from a medical point of view – the same few symptoms apply to so many conditions – and on an interpersonal level: How do you keep listening to the patient who's been labeled a whiner, or whom you just don't like?

Part of the goal of training is to teach the young doctors how to appear confident even when they' are, inevitably, uncertain. "During those years, I always felt that I knew nothing. And no matter how much you did know, there was always more you didn't. In that vast desert of ignorance always lurked that one detail waiting to kill somebody." He's in a teaching hospital, so he is often without the complete medical record, because patients are being admitted by the house staff rather than their own doctors. Much can go amiss in this process; the history may be too complicated for the patient to remember or explain; she may be confused, demented, in shock or unconscious.

Or she may be lying, concealing something she's done, like the girl who swallowed a handful of Tylenol and damaged her liver. To assume she is lying leads to a certain cynicism that may lead directly to hardness of heart. It's always a breakthrough when the young doctor looks up from his lab results and sees a human being, but if they thought about that all the time, they'd be unable to do the work. "There is so much death and suffering and grief, and in the midst of it we still need to fill out forms, subject the sick to indignities and pain, try to eat and sleep and keep all these needy people at some kind of distance."

Dr. Holt has a chapter about some of the neediest, the patients in a mental hospital. He works a rotation in intensive care, where matters are somewhat simplified: keep the patients alive, with oxygen and antibiotics. (Or is it, kill them slowly?) And he goes out on hospice calls, where the patients are on the far side of need. But the families need something, and a doctor actually arriving with the nurse gives them a strange sort of comfort.

Three out of three people die, it's been said. Surrounded by family or alone, dimmed by morphine or amid the turmoil by a Code Blue, "in the middle of a scene with all the dignity of a food fight in a high school cafeteria. We can't cure everybody, but I think most of us treasure as a small consolation that at least we can afford people some kind of dignity at the end, something quiet and solemn in which whatever meaning resides in all of this may be – if we watch and listen carefully – perceptible."

If we watch and listen carefully. Here's hoping we can.

Any Good Books

August 1, 2016

The Shift

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives

Theresa Brown, RN (Algonquin Books, 2015)

      The oncology/hematology ward in a Pittsburgh teaching hospital is a good place to learn what nurses do. The Shift is a first person account of a nurse's day there, at the minute-by-minute level of alcohol swabs and sterile saline solution; Theresa Brown drives her narrative by such details, but she also makes time to think about some larger features of the environment, and the systems that sustain it.

       The patients and staff Brown discusses are composites, for obvious reasons, but I found it easy to forget that and enjoy their stories. From the fussy patient who wipes her own room down with bleach, to the cheerful one who stocks miniature Hershey bars for the nurses, to the barely conscious old man, they stand in for their respective tribes. Brown navigates between empathy and detachment, and divides her time between providing care and keeping records of it. If it isn't recorded, it isn't done (and can't be billed for.) "We need a menu that includes the option: spent time comforting patient with life-threatening diagnosis. But nothing that empathy-intense gets included in our required paperwork."

       Of course, she's not only dealing with patients and their families. Nurses constantly interact with each other. The bureaucracy may require that they sign off on each other's calculation; prudence may dictate that they call for help to move a patient, and sometimes all the call bells go off at once. Being able to rely on one another makes a huge difference; of course, it also means more interruptions. Thirty uninterrupted minutes for lunch, which is the legal mandate, just doesn't happen most days.

      Brown's fellow nurses are probably the easy part, because they at least understand what each other is trying to do. The hierarchy of the hospital includes doctors of all levels of experience. The most senior may be the least seen, other than morning rounds, when they are surrounded by fellows, residents, and interns, all doctors at different stages of their training. And then–"These poor medical students: They worked so hard to get into med school and then in the hospital no one gives them the time of day, in part because they have no real purpose, at least on our floor. They're supposed to be learning and I'm sure they are, but as far as we nurses know they can't do anything." Officially, nurses listen to doctors and not the other way around, but many a young doctor has had his day saved by a timely word.

      Brown has answers for some things I've always wanted to know. How can nurses stand to wake up a patient who may really need the rest? Why does discharge take so long? Why do they move a dying patient out of the oncology ward? We won't necessarily like the answers, but it's helpful to see how they are embedded in the systems at work. In the end, nurses are the point of contact between systems and human beings, and we're lucky so many of them are as smart and humane as this.

      In this one twelve-hour shift, Brown learns from, teaches, and advocates with a dozen or more other professionals. "As is so often the way in the hospital, we barely nod at each other and move on. Nurses and doctors–we come and go from our patients' lives and each other's with the anonymity of mail carriers, the efficient intimacy of the guy who reads the gas meter in the basement. That initial impression is what matters. Can I work with this person? Can I trust him?" Mostly, which may be all we can really expect. People are usually doing their best. And thank heaven for them.

Any Good Books

July 2016