Here in Washington, up Connecticut Avenue, past Dupont Circle, there’s a business with a sign that reads “Academy for Educational Development.” As near as I can figure, that means it’s the School for School School, and every time we drive by, my wife and I invent parallel names we’d like to see: the Union of Amalgamated Federations, for instance, or the Fraternal Brotherhood of Siblings.
On L Street, just around the block from THE WEEKLY STANDARD, another sign of twisted syntax hangs. There, above the doorway to a charter school that specializes in painting and sculpture, is emblazoned the motto: “Speaking to Access through the Arts.” You have to roll it around on your tongue a little to extract the full flavor of antinomian absurdity — a robust, nutty taste, with just a hint of flowering paranoia. “Speaking to Access through the Arts.” Several magazines have their offices down in this part of town, and I sometimes imagine the copy editors forced to scurry by everyday, pulling at their thinning hair and whimpering, “How long, O Lord, how long?”
But last week, driving up 16th Street, I saw a sign that struck me as less funny. The city’s department of recreation has posted outside its offices the notice “Customer Service is Recreation Priority One.” Listen for a moment to that sentence: “Customer Service is Recreation Priority One.” It’s not bad English, because it’s not English in the first place. What it is, really, is bad German: five nouns trying to sort themselves into sense, with only the little copula of “is” to help them.
Where did all the noun appositives come from? I don’t remember that it used to be this way, but these grammar-problem multi-word noun piles are everywhere nowadays. A little further up 16th Street sits an “Education and Life Quality Center.” “The Notre Dame University Press St. Thomas Aquinas series,” I read in a journal the other day. “The multi-nation land mines task force,” I saw in a newspaper last month.
It’s as though we’ve forgotten that English has prepositions: to, from, at, for, with, by, through — that huge set of case markers we had to develop because our language is basically a Germanic vocabulary jammed into a Romance grammar. Try explaining to a Spanish speaker why we need to distinguish not just in from on, but unto from toward — and forget about explaining what it means when we string prepositions together. The novelist David Carkett composed an example that’s worth offering any non-native speaker who boasts of his English: A little girl asks her father for any bedtime story except Winnie-the-Pooh — and when she sees him return with Winnie-the-Pooh, she cries, “What did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of in for?”
An easy language English is, no one ever said. You want epigrams? We got grammar squeezed down microscopic: “Of thirty years I gave ten years to rhyme,” the poet J. V. Cunningham wrote about his wasted efforts. “That thus time should not pass, thus passes time.” You want the grandeur that was Rome? We got Milton, who writes more latiny Latin in English than the Romans managed in Latin. We can even do that endless prose of Seneca, the sentence in which example is piled on example, apposition on apposition, imperceptibly shifting ground until anything connects with everything, and though you’re sure that somewhere there must be a flaw, still the sentence pushes on until it sharpens suddenly into a point — like an elephant, traced from tail to tusk.
But it’s all English. Even when it’s wrong, it’s still connected to the deep stream of the language. Mistakes sometimes get made leaving participles dangling. Other mistakes come from a writer forgetting that those participles, when used as nouns, need not subjects but possessives. But these are, in a sense, mistakes that the language itself tempts us to make — that are uniquely English errors.
More and more, however, we are surrounded by English that isn’t English, even when it’s grammatically plausible. “The multi-nation land mines task force” isn’t wrong, exactly, but it has lost touch with the language. It is how a non-native speaker, someone who knows English but doesn’t feel it, might compose a sentence — except, of course, that it was written by a person whose native speech is English.
No wonder hardly anyone reads poetry anymore. If you don’t hear something wrong in “life quality center,” you’re not going to get far with “sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.” We’ve reared up in America a generation of monoglots who are foreigners to their own language. “Customer Service is Recreation Priority One”: It’s enough to make one enroll at the Academy for Educational Development or join the local charter school in trying to speak to Access through the Arts.
J. BOTTUM
