From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume IV

Introduction

This is the fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, and Volume III is here. If I were a famous writer, these posts would comprise passages from previously unpublished letters or lectures that I’d bring out just to basically print my own money. But since I’m only a blogger, I’m providing similar such collections for free because I think they capture moments in time (in this case my latter college years) that I think are amusing and/or universal. All of these below are from letters written to a friend, in chronological order, and the setting is the Berkeley area.

October 1, 1990

I really like the old ladies in my apartment building. It’s an old, very elegant building in one of the best parts of Oakland, with radiators that hiss and click all the time because the landlord keeps it as warm as a sauna in all the units, for the old people. They spend most of the time indoors, since they’re really quite frail and possibly afraid of the cruel, harsh society outside. Their perception of reality is based on precious few data: if they only make it outside once a week, and happen to see something unpleasant, they may assume that’s what happens all the time.

Case in point: today I was on my bike cruising down College Ave toward home, and some old geezer pulled out of his driveway without looking. A redneck type in a big pickup truck had to slam on his brakes, and started cussing real loud. The old dude seemed unfazed, and after the truck got by, the old guy kept backing out, and almost clobbered a taxicab coming up the other way. I was almost sandwiched in the middle since I’d been trying to pass. So I started yelling, in vain of course because the old fellow probably forgot both his hearing aids, and as I escaped by hopping my bike up to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, one of my elderly neighbors was standing there watching the whole thing.

I was struck by her look of fear because until that moment, I myself hadn’t really perceived much danger (my foul language and evasive action having been entirely automatic). So she asked what happened, and I tried to play it down, but it’s obviously made a big impression. As we walked toward the building, she said, “My god, you could have been killed!” Since the front door into the building lobby is awfully heavy, I opened it for her, and she said, “Thank you! I was so close anyway but you’re really never safe until you’re home, you know?”

So I try to be as polite as possible to my neighbors, to help them live out their lives in a tranquil and pleasant fashion. This one old lady, Ruth, obviously loves having college age people around; she seems to hang out in the lobby a lot and strikes up conversations. Once I encountered her on the stairs while I was descending at about a hundred miles an hour, and she had to step quickly out of my way. I apologized and said “excuse me” and everything, and she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mess with you,” but then, with a wink, added, “But if I were a few years younger, I sure would!”

Nov 2, 1990

I was trying to study Latin yesterday and it ultimately overloaded my brain. We’re having our second midterm Monday and I’m hoping not to eat shit like I did last time. We learn so much in there it’s not even funny. Well, we’re supposed to learn it, anyway. Recently the instructor said, “Okay, we’ve been going too slowly so now we have to speed up to catch up with the curriculum.” Yeah, right. We’ve already covered more in Latin 1 than I did in studying through French 6 at UC Santa Barbara.

Today the instructor gave us two entire pages of vocab and irregular verb formations (all tenses, and in both indicative and subjunctive) to memorize, along with three pages of exercises over this new structure. “This should only take you five minutes,” he says. Yeah, right … I’ve been at it two hours and I’m still not done. The other day we “learned” something even the instructor conceded was really difficult, and afterward he said, “You’re all very smart. It took me months to learn this.” I said, “And we get a day?” He replied, “Well, you’re Berkeley students.”

Dec 5, 1990

Thanksgiving with what’s left of my family was pretty fun, but I paid a price. On Saturday I drove straight through the night from Colorado to to Geoff’s place in San Luis Obispo and then had to take Greyhound back up to Oakland, and then I started on my research paper. This was at about 11:30 on Sunday night. I called my friend A— to see if she was still up; she was, as she’d just started on her paper too, for the same class. This paper was due the next day, and would be 80% of our grade … so this was pushing it even by our shameful standards.

I finished at about 8:00 the next morning, and rode to campus basically in a trance, after the back-to-back all-nighters. In class we broke into little discussion groups, and I fell asleep in mine, and I guess I must have started talking in my sleep because I woke up and everybody was laughing. This one girl was just shrieking with laughter and couldn’t be calmed down. The professor came over saying, “Hey, what’s going on here?” and everybody was laughing except me. I looked at the professor and shrugged: no, I have no idea what’s come over my group.

June 4, 1991

So this dipshit college kid comes into the bike shop with a broken front quick release skewer and asks how much for a new one. I tell him $9.95, and he rolls his eyes and asks if I think he can glue it back together. I tell him no fucking way, but he says he’ll try it anyway. I tell him to be careful since his front wheel is going to roll off, and that I’ll see him a little later. I should’ve clamped his head in the vise.

September 10, 1991

I’ve finally got my health back after a bad bout of strep throat. But I still have this one queer symptom: I can’t open my jaws more than an inch because of the residual swelling down there. So I’m eating a bit more slowly lately. Like I had to eat this roast beef sandwich the other day, at which point I could only open my mouth about a centimeter, which was kind of embarrassing. A friend had me over for lunch and it turns out she lives in a sorority house now, where all the meals are prepared for you, so all I had to choose from to eat was the roast beef sandwich or a salad (which, as you know, is ideal for rabbits but not guys like us). So I’m there dipping this roast beef sandwich in the “au jus” and kind of smashing it into my lips and sucking it through the gap. Real suave.

I just got home from class. I was sitting in there listening to the professor reading her notes, and it sounded something like this:

It is easy to see to what species of entities Ullmann’s description does apply. Certain entities exist the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of their sensory appearances. For an ideal perception, entirely devoid of complications resulting from the interference of the imagination, the meaning could only refer to a totality of sensory appearances.

This comes out in my notes something like this:

Ullmann has some sensory perception thing devoid of complications from imagination interfering with sensory oh fuck this shit.

November 25, 1991

I went for a mountain bike ride in the morning before work yesterday. I wanted to leave early enough to have time, upon my return, to shower, eat, et cetera, so I didn’t invite my roommate Eric along. You see, by the time he shaved, shat, pumped up, put on his clothes, and filed a report with the bureau, the morning would be gone. The only flaw in my solo attempt is that Eric always carries the spare tube, patch kit, pump, and other survivalist gear. They would have been handy today. Imagine that the ride is basically a loop, of diameter d. The bike shop is exactly d away from where I had what we in the research and development program call a “happy accident.” A rock placed by the powers that be in a strategic location began an experiment in Reduced Inflation and Pressure (RIP) of the front tire. This led me to some impromptu analysis of the handling characteristics of a standard mountain bicycle with a front tire having absolutely no inflation. On the standard dirt sections, I noticed a remarkable change in the tracking of the front wheel. It wasn’t until the single track, however, that I experienced the most dramatic ramifications of the Handling Enhancement Characteristic Kinesthesia (HECK), a sudden increase in the muscular toning of the upper body due to special bicycle control requirements. Especially on rocks and large branches, the new technology provided a Divergent Arrangement of Multiple Navigations (DAMN). Because the feel was so dramatically different, I found it necessary to actually reduce my speed, although I expect that a little practice will see the RIP being a great improvement. A thirty second shower saw me open the bike shop only ten minutes late this morning. Happily, and amazingly, my American-made Sun Metal rim sustained no damage whatsoever!

April 20, 1992

I got this Chinese fortune cookie fortune that said, “His heart was yours from the moment he met you.” How much happier I would be with that forecast if I were a chick. If I were superstitious I reckon I’d lose some sleep. The newer Square Wheel location on University Avenue, where I work about half the time, is next to a Chinese restaurant, and another fortune literally blew in the door. It read, “To you maybe too greatness, especially love adventures.” It’s the best fortune I’ve ever gotten. But so far it hasn’t come true.

I just love it when things are lost in translation. My mom bought this “Electronic Mosquito Repeller” mail-order, and it has the greatest instruction manual. I offer you this excerpt:

Mosquitoes frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night, They are externely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the most annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito increase or “Electrified Mosquito Killer” are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. . . . According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitoes are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel It’ is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitoes to repell female mosquitoes away.

Under the heading “Applications” are six pictures of possible uses of the Mosquito Repeller. They are: Sleeping, Camping, Dating, Hunting, Livestock Farm, Farming. Where the manufacturer got these ideas is beyond me. Dating? I can’t get over that. Yeah, when I go on a date, my biggest concern is how to keep those damned mosquitoes away. The picture shows this young couple sitting on a park bench, with the guy in the process of putting his arm around the girl, about to bust a move. The Repeller is sitting on the bench with little cartoon lines to indicate its sound. My mom sent back the thing back because the noise was unbearable. I wish she’d given it to me instead, since I could have used it for my dating. Of course, if female humans are anything like mosquitoes, and become “very disgusted at the approaching of male,” I hardly think it would help.

October 8, 1992

I’ve got a midterm in my Milton class tomorrow. As far as I’m concerned, Milton is a zit on the face of English literature. (Here I’m paraphrasing Turgenev, who was referring to Dostoyevsky, another writer I’ll be reading at length this semester.) If you ever have to write a paper on Milton, you can start it off with that quote from me. Footnote it by saying, “Dana Albert, Letter of October 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 1.” Whether or not you note the Turgenev origin is between you and your god. But actually, it’s probably best not to malign Milton, because you can usually presume that a grad student who is a T.A. for a Milton course really likes him … so you better brown-nose a little bit. Here, for example, is the first paragraph to my last paper:

When I first approached Milton’s “Sonnet 7” I found it a confusing, ambiguous mess given to complicated phrasing, difficult metaphors, and pronouns without antecedents. However, on second analysis, I find Milton to be the dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player hard core motherfucker who ever lived.

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From the Archives - Latin [Class] Is for Lovers

Introduction

Here’s a sad one, from my archives. Enjoy please enjoy.

Latin [Class] is for Lovers – October 19, 1990

I just can’t concentrate on my Latin homework anymore. It’s tempting to blame this on girl trouble, but that would be overstating the case, like saying you have car trouble when in fact your car was repossessed. I just have this empty space, this lack, where I thought I had a girl.

She’s in my Latin 1 class, a freshman. I’m a junior, but on the stunted, naïve side so it feels perfectly natural to be chasing after freshman girls. Besides, just like them, I only recently arrived here in Berkeley, having transferred from UCSB.

Latin class had been going fine before R— caught my eye and became a constant distraction. My god she is fly. Of course, there’s not a lot of mingling among classmates, not with a discussion-style language class of only fifteen students. I passively admired her for over a month before making any moves. (Well, I did rework an old sonnet in her honor, but never gave it to her or anything. I did get course credit for it in my Shakespeare class.)

From Psych 1 I learned that mere proximity can increase attraction, so I took to sitting next to R— whenever I could, which was most of the time. She always takes a chair right up in the front row, where you’re a sitting duck in terms of getting called on. So I’d take the invariably empty chair next to her. It’s a tough price to pay, getting called on twenty-four seven, but well worth it. This one red-haired guy seems to have had his eye on this same girl, but he has never gone so far as to sit in the lethal chair. I’ve had to really focus so as not to play myself. (This is a constant risk for me because I study far less than my peers. I loafed through my first two years of college, and old habits die hard.)

The instructor, Jonathon, is cool enough, I guess. He has this really soft, airy East Coast voice that sort of floats out over the classroom. He likes to remind us how easy everything is while he tackles some obscure grammatical structure most of us don’t even know in English. I think he’d single me out even if I weren’t sitting in the front-and-center death seat, simply because he likes my name. To be more precise, he likes what he thinks my name is: Dale. I don’t know how he managed to misread this on the roll sheet the first day, but he’s sticking with his mistake. And due to his mellifluous style of speech, he pronounces Dale “DAY-oh.” (Is it a coincidence that this is how we pronounce the Latin word “Deo,” which means “God”? I don’t know. It could be that he is making a little joke.)

Jonathan seems particularly prone to call on me when we’re learning some totally new grammar rule. Here is an actual quote from class: “Okay, as you can see, the past-contrary-to-fact construction uses the pluperfect tense of the subjunctive mood in both the protasis and apodosis clauses. This is really quite straightforward. Would somebody like to take a crack at the first example, please, DAY-oh?”

The only thing I have on my fellow students is that I’ve actually used my newly acquired Latin skills outside of class. This won’t help my grade in Latin, of course, but I might as well get some mileage out of it here: I read this rad Sir Thomas Wyatt sonnet for an English class. A guy sees this deer and is so blown away by how beautiful she is that he finds himself uncontrollably and shamelessly chasing after her, and after finally catching her, discovers something that makes all his efforts futile: 

And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”

The footnote in my Norton Anthology of English Literature has this to say: “Noli me tangere quia Caesaris sum (‘Touch me not, for I am Caeser’s’) was inscribed on the collars of Caesar’s hinds which were then set free and were presumably safe from hunters.” After studying Latin I can read the whole thing and could even tell you about how the negative imperative, or prohibition, uses a complementary infinitive, which is then followed by a conjunction and the name Caesar in the dative case to indicate possession when used with the subsequent present indicative first person singular form of the verb “to be.” But I won’t go into that because it’s boring.

Less boring, of course, is my own pursuit of R—. How has that been going, you might ask? Well, a few times we hung out after class, sitting on the lawn chatting. I’m trying out this new form of humor where I basically bag on myself. I’m told this is endearing somehow, and in any event it ties in nicely with the embarrassing behaviors that I stumble into anyway. For example, Jonathan was calling on me in class and—due to a combination of sleep deprivation and this strange college-induced narcolepsy I seem to suffer from—I actually started falling asleep right in the middle of being drilled. “DAY-oh, are you falling asleep?!” Jonathan asked, incredulous. “No, of course not,” I muttered, as the class erupted in laughter around me.

So after class, I admitted to R— that I truly had been falling asleep, which was inexplicable because being quizzed in Latin, far from being boring, is actually kind of terrifying to me. This seemed to really charm her, so I bit the bullet and asked if she wanted to have lunch sometime. She not only accepted, but enthusiastically. In fact, I think she may have even blushed. (Actually, that was me.)

We set our date for Friday after class. The next time class met (Wednesday) I was trying really hard not to play myself by being all perma-smile, and though I probably did a poor job (i.e., was too visibly stoked), she was very tolerant. She mentioned our upcoming lunch, which seemed almost too good to be true. I’d half-expected her to totally forget, or pretend to forget, which would have been awkward. (Yeah, I’m not a natural-born optimist. So sue me.)

On Friday I busted my ass to get to class early, but R— was a bit late. No biggie, of course. But all through class she seemed not only to have her gaze averted, but her entire body angled slightly away. It was weird. I was getting this massive bad vibe off her. I felt like the proverbial elephant in the room.

After class she couldn’t very well avoid me any longer; after all, it was time for our lunch. We walked over to Mario’s La Fiesta on Telegraph, because it’s close to campus, has great food, and is dirt cheap (so I could afford to pick up the tab, and if R— ended up being all modern and saying it’s lame for the guy to pay, I could say, “Come on, the whole bill is under ten bucks, it’s nothing!”). I’d never had a bad meal at La Fiesta, but this was pretty close. R— was just a total cold fish. Where was the laid back, enthusiastic chick I’d been so merrily chatting with earlier in the week? I couldn’t figure it out.

Finally (actually, after not so very long a time, between the chips-and-salsa and the main course) I couldn’t take the stony near-silence anymore and said, “What is up with you, anyway?” I know, I know, this is dating suicide, but what did I have to lose? I was already done for and I knew it. The truth came out: she’d had this high school boyfriend, and they were still really close and talked on the phone a lot. They’d decided when they parted ways for college that it was silly to try to stay together, so they were free to date, which was all well and good until she told this guy about our upcoming lunch. He got all sore, and petulant, and whiny (okay, I’m possibly extrapolating a bit here), and they decided to “get back together.” Never mind that he’s at BYU, which is hundreds of miles from Berkeley.

I was very suave about the whole thing. “So what you’re saying is that he loved the idea of dating hot chicks at BYU but it never occurred to him that you might be more successful at playing the field, and he hadn’t counted on his own jealousy and feelings of inadequacy,” I did not say. “Surely you’re aware that in Utah they practice polygamy,” I did not go on to point out. I did, however, say, “He should make you a collar graven with diamonds in letters plain, so there is written, your fair neck round about, ‘Noli me tangere quia Dickheadis sum.’” No, of course I didn’t say this either. In fact, this third thing I didn’t think up until later. At the time, I just sat there, biting my tongue. I was so, so disappointed because, even when stricken with the awkwardness of the situation, R— was so, so fly.

I went home and played some Simon & Garfunkel. Yes, I’m that nerdy … but it’s not like I had some girl over whom I needed to impress. Besides, I’d thought of just the song for my mood: “April, Come She Will.” It concerns a love affair that begins in April (when “the streams are ripe and filled with rain”), proceeds all summer until June when “she’ll change her tune,” and on into July when “she will fly,” and so on until September when “I remember,/ A love once new has now grown old.” Poor guy—but hey, at least he lasted six months. I only made it six days! And with this realization, I was moved to write my own song: 

Monday, come she may.
The day is bright and filled with sun.
Tuesday, she will stay.
We spend some time just having fun.
Wednesday begins cruel play.
She now seems cold and so withdrawn;
Thursday, my nerves she will fray,
For now I know that something’s wrong.
Friday, I’m pushed away.
At all my pain she is just annoyed;
Saturday, she has gone away.
A love once made has now been destroyed.

I guess the song doesn’t totally fit because my little campaign didn’t erode gradually—it careened off the road in the span of little more than an hour—but whatever. I guess it’s also true that it wasn’t entirely my fault I crashed and burned, though I can’t help but think a savvier guy like Sir Thomas Wyatt would have known just what to do in this situation and surely would have gotten the girl in the end. Oh well … at least now I can sit in the back of the Latin classroom and maybe not get called on so much.

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The Trouble With English

Introduction

I have an English degree. This leads a good number of people to assume that I have above-average knowledge of grammar, and these people are not wrong. However, I think the link between an English degree and knowledge of grammar is a lot more tenuous than most people think. The number of college courses that taught me grammar was exactly zero. (Only one grammar class was offered and I didn’t take it.) I know a lot of grammar because I’ve studied other languages; such study requires more of a structural approach than kids take when learning to talk.

Having struggled with Russian, French, and Latin, I came to appreciate what was easy about them and what was not. My general impression has been that whatever difficulty I had, these languages are easier to learn than English (though French is impossible to pronounce). In this post I’ll examine just a few of the things that make English so hard: the absurdity of English spelling; the impossibly vague unwritten rules; and the challenges of pronunciation, slang, and jargon. Along the way I’ll offer up some examples of warped English sentences, mainly for your amusement.

Is English really that hard?

Yes, it is. Consider the following insert that came with an electric mosquito repeller my mom bought back in 1992. (Yes, “repeller” actually is a word, even though my word processing program flags it as a misspelling.)

Mosquitoes frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night, They are externely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the most annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito‑increase or "Electrified Mosquito Killer" are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. . . . According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitos are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel‑It' is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitos to repell female mosquitos away.

Beyond its laughable gaffs, that passage struck a chord with me because I once lost a spelling bee because of the word “mosquito,” which I thought was spelled “misquito.” (Another time I lost on “maize,” not understanding the clue “The Indians called it maize.” Had my pugnacity been fully developed back then, I’d have said, “Excuse me, but whether you mean Native Americans or persons from India, they’d have used a word from their own language for whatever they were talking about. That you couldn’t have meant ‘labyrinth’ is not at all clear and I deserve a new word.” But I digress.)

In the repeller insert, “they disturbed our sleep” seems ridiculous, but then, whom are we talking about, anyway? I’d have used a different verb and the pronoun—“they disturb your sleep”—but this formation is also easy to find fault with. To somebody new to English, the use of the present tense to imply habitual behavior is far from obvious, and “your” suggests that the writer of the insert has met the reader, which of course isn’t the case. The unwritten rules of our language seem so sensical, and yet they’re completely arbitrary. And that word I just used, sensical? Of course it’s not a word. How come things can be nonsensical, but not sensical? Because. Just because.

The absurdity of English spelling

As I note my children’s various misspellings I appreciate afresh how easy it is to guess wrong at the spelling of an English word. At school my daughter Lindsay was assigned to draw a monster than then write about it. She wrote, “He is Rushen.” When I first read this I thought, gosh, my daughter sure is stupid! But then I thought, wait, why does “R-u-s-s-i-a-n” make any sense? That ought to spell “Russ-ey-an.” Lindsay’s spelling actually makes more sense.

Now, my more patriotic readers might try to blame this crazy spelling on the Russians themselves, but of course they would spell it “русско,” which is pronounced “ROOSE-koh.” And it’s spelled totally phonetically: the “р” makes an “r” sound, the “у” makes an oo sound, the “с” makes an “s” sound, the “к” makes a “k” sound, and the “о” makes an “oh” sound. These letters always make these sounds; the Russian “с” is always an “s” sound, never a “k” or “z” sound, and so on. None of this “-tion” or “-sion” nonsense for the Russians; they have a letter, “ш,” that makes the “sh” sound. Latin is similarly consistent in its spelling; in fact, if you see two “u”s together (e.g., in the handy phrase “ignis fatuus”), you pronounce both the “u”s: “ig-nees fat-oo-oos.”

Next in my exhibit of hopeless English spellings is the street name “Gough” in San Francisco. Nobody I knew when I lived in that city could produce a definitive pronunciation of this street name. It could rhyme with bough, through, cough, tough, or even the second syllable of “borough.” It could be “Gow,” “Goo,” “Goff,” “Guff,” or “Go.” All we can say for sure about “Gough” is that the second “g” doesn’t make a “g” sound. I mean, why should it, right?

My final evidence about the hopelessness of English spelling is the existence of the heteronym. A heteronym is a pair of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, like “tear” (that rolls down your cheek) and “tear” (to rend something). I know of seventy-eight of these double-words in the English language, most of which you can find on the Heteronym Homepage. (One they missed is “entrance,” the way in, vs. “entrance,” to put into a trance.) The only way to know how to pronounce an instance of a heteronym is by context.

We think of the English language as phonetic, but it barely is. Our spelling rules are really more like tendencies. In Lindsay’s classroom the teacher has posted a large collection of “word wall words”—that is, words that cannot be sounded out and must simply be memorized, like multiplication tables. Some people are better at this memorization than others—hence the many English speakers you encounter who are no good at spelling.

Impossibly vague unwritten rules

In the mosquito repeller insert was the phrase “very disgusted.” If this didn’t make you chuckle, what’s wrong with you? After all, we all know (once we stop and think about it) that “disgusted” is a word with a built-in sense of the absolute. Similarly, I know a fellow from Hong Kong who often uses the phrase “extremely delicious,” which I’ve actually adopted myself due to its delightful oddness.

Scanning a bulletin board at a Laundromat ages ago, I came across a handwritten ad for the services of a “reliable French young man.” I found it impossible, upon reading this, to prevent the song “International Bright Young Thing” from invading my head and lingering there. I can imagine that no native English speaker would let “reliable French young man” go by without at least a raised eyebrow. Surely you would immediately see that a more correct order would be “reliable young French man” or “reliable young Frenchman.” And yet nowhere in Strunk & White does it say, “Any adjective specifying nationality must be placed immediately before the noun it modifies.”

It’s also curious to note that it’s intuitively obvious that “French man” can be shortened to “Frenchman,” while “German man” cannot be shortened to “Germanman.” It really only works with French. From the standpoint of accepted linguistic forms, you can shorten Chinese man to “Chinaman,” but you never, ever should because it’s disparaging, obviously.

And even if we eliminate the “French” aspect of the Laundromat ad, there’s a right and a wrong way to order the adjectives. The phrase “reliable young man” sounds totally fine, but not “young reliable man.” The placement of adjectives officially matters in French: a word can have a totally different meaning based on whether it precedes a noun or follows it; “propre chemise” means “my shirt” whereas “chemise propre” means “clean shirt.” In English it’s assumed the adjectives can go in any order, but that’s not really the case if you want to sound like a native speaker, as the Laundromat ad shows. Is this subtlety taught in grammar class? I think not. Latin, meanwhile, offers not only the opportunity to put adjectives in any order, but every word in a sentence in any order. You could write a sentence on a piece of paper, cut the paper so each word is its own scrap, and rearrange the scraps any old way and the sentence would still make sense.

You might wonder why I capitalize Laundromat. Well, originally I didn’t. My spell-checker caught that. I looked it up, and it turns out to be a trademark, like Band-Aid. So we capitalize it, just like we capitalize Dumpster, Jacuzzi, and Lycra, even if we’re using the word to refer to a general thing, rather than a specific brand. Is this a hard-and-fast rule? No, we don’t capitalize aspirin, bundt cake, cellophane, escalator, or zipper, though they all derive from trademarks as well. Why don’t we capitalize them? We just don’t. (In the case of zipper, the B.F. Goodrich company sued—unsuccessfully—to protect its trademark. Whom did they sue? I don’t know. Look it up.)

One unwritten rule that continues to confuse my kids is that verbs of desire should be rendered in the hypothetical subjunctive. Now, before you take my kids’ side on this, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Instead of “I want a snack,” they should say, “I would like a snack.” And of course they should say “please.” In my household, “I want a snack, please” isn’t good enough. The “please” in that instance sounds tacked-on. “I would like a snack, please” is close enough to “May I have a snack, please?” that I’ll accept it. Why does the hypothetical subjunctive convey humility and politesse? Beats me.

Then there are the words that only exist in certain comparative forms, as with my “sensical” bit above. For example, you can be overwhelmed, and underwhelmed, but never just whelmed. You can be overbearing, but not underbearing. You can understand something, and you can stand something, but you can’t overstand something. A library book can be due, or overdue, but not underdue. You can be incognito, but not cognito. I’m not the first person to point these out so I won’t dwell on them. I’d just like to make the point that we pretend this language is modular—that is, we can tack on prefixes and suffixes as we please—but it’s just not the case.

There are countless other unwritten rules, of course, but I just saw you checking your watch so I’ll move on.

Pronunciation, slang, and jargon

I group pronunciation and jargon together because they’re both examples of how a language can seem deliberately designed to stymie the outsider. All languages are guilty of this to a greater or lesser degree. Perfect mastery of a vernacular is like membership in an exclusive club.

I can’t say whether English is particularly hard to pronounce, at least when compared to the French who seem to speak without the use of their teeth or hard palette. The French somehow weasel out of most consonant sounds. They have a strange knack for beautifully speaking a language that sounds awful on a foreigner’s tongue. But English has its own difficulties, and not just the famous “th” sound that the French cannot make.

The most subtle (but undeniable) unwritten rule of pronunciation I can think of in English is the tendency to put emphasis on a specific word in a two-word phrase, consistently. (I describe this at length in my post about how to write a sonnet.) There is a right way to pronounce “hot,” and a right way to pronounce “dog,” and—this is the weird part—a right way to pronounce “hot dog.” You accentuate the first word, not the second: “HOT dog.” (The exception is if you’re expressing great delight and excitement: “Hot DOG!”) Another phrase like this is “boy scout”: always “BOY scout,” never “boy SCOUT.” Another is “TRASH can.” Another is “BIG time.” There are probably hundreds of phrases like this; they’re hard to come up with until you hear a foreigner get one wrong.

Obviously all languages have slang, but I suspect English could be the worst offender (or greatest innovator, depending on your perspective), because it is widely thought to have more words than any other major language. And the very existence of Cockney rhyming slang shows a willful desire to make language more complicated (but also more fun) through obscure word substitutions. (I realize that my assertion of English being more slangy is the most fragile one I’ve made, and quite possibly completely untrue. I’m baiting somebody to call me out on it.)

Slang would be no problem for newcomers to a language if the natives didn’t use it unconsciously. But we do. For example, I was watching bike race coverage recently and the Irish commentator (and bike racing legend) Sean Kelly kept using the word “ride” in a special sense I’ve only recently come to understand. “Ride” in this context doesn’t just mean to ride a bike; it means riding aggressively and pedaling really hard as opposed to tucking behind other riders and trying to conserve energy. Kelly is presumably speaking to a very wide viewing audience and may well fail to realize he’s using a highly specific connotation of a very general word here.

It’s easy for me to appreciate how subtle “ride” is in this context, but other cycling slang has become second nature, to the extent that I don’t even realize I’m using it. For example, I was talking one of my wife’s friends, a newcomer to cycling, and was surprised when she didn’t know what “drop” means, as in “I dropped him” or “don’t worry about getting dropped.” I thought everybody knew this.

The vernacular causes trouble when a writer is trying to educate a large and diverse population and, though trying to be clear, buries the reader in highly specialized terms. This unconscious use of jargon is what can make owner’s manuals and computer messages so hard to understand. Many a creator of such texts, through failure of imagination, sells short his audience. In the course of a single workday, I was nonplussed by three such puzzles. Here is the first:

What does “share” mean in this context? What would that look like? What would happen, on my screen, if I selected “Nobody”? Isn’t sharing with nobody the default behavior—i.e., what I was already doing? By the logic of this menu option, shouldn’t there be a button labeled “Simply exist”?

Check out this error message:

This was annoying because it popped up instead of whatever I had hoped would happen on my screen. (I can no longer remember what I was trying to do.) It’s frustrating, in such situations, to have as my only recourse a button to click that says “OK.” OK? No, it’s not okay! What are our children learning, through computers, about the meaning of the word “OK”? Perhaps this explains why, whenever I tell one of my daughters to do something, she says “OK” but does nothing. I always thought she was consenting to my command; now that I think about it, saying "OK" is just the non-PC equivalent of making my window go away so she can get back to what she was doing.

The last of the error messages was truly perplexing:

Whatever the difference is between the Outlook Address Book entries and e-mail addresses in contacts, it’s not obvious here. A colleague commented, “That is like saying, ‘Adding lettuce to a salad is prohibited.’” Amen.

Owner’s manuals can be even worse. (I’m not even completely satisfied with the term “owner’s manual.” Who is this mythical “owner”? Why can’t they just call it “Your manual”? After all, they go on to refer to you as “you” throughout the manual anyway. It’s not like they say “The owner must gather information about his machine…” and so on.)

When you’re reading about how to set up your new PC device, you can’t just ignore what you don’t understand—you have to grasp what you’re reading or you’ll never get anywhere. You’re depending on the comprehensibility of that manual. So it was when I set up my new printer.

(A quick note about my printer. It’s not an expensive one. The manufacturer probably lost money on it in the short term. It’s really just a delivery mechanism for very expensive ink, according to the “first time’s free, kid” revenue model perfected by Gillette. Note also that I do not have a lot of ink stashed away here: only what came with the printer. You’d be much better off breaking into the home of someone who blogs about his iPad.)

So. The printer. I was quaking with fear at the setup process, because the last time I did this, for my mom, I failed. Nothing worked right, and the manual and help menus were worthless. Printers are a bitch. (Imagine that sentence, “printers are a bitch,” from a learning-English point of view. It’s not “printers are bitches.” It’s not “a printer is a bitch.” It’s “printers are a bitch.” How can multiple printers be one bitch?)

The manual I got is actually pretty well written. The setup process is pretty complicated, but the directions didn’t generally lead me astray. But there were some very perplexing bits. For example, in the part about removing the countless bits of orange tape securing everything for shipping, there was this note: “The tape and protective materials may differ in shape and position from what they actually are.” Wait. So you mean to tell me that as intimidated as I already am about this printer, there will be shape-shifting going on? “See this tape? It’s tape, right? No, look now—it’s a flower!” (I suspect they meant to say, “The tape and protective materials may differ in shape and position from what is shown here.” But if this is the case, why didn’t they just say so?)

The next troublesome point: “A USB cable is necessary to connect the machine with your computer (USB connection only).” Normally, context can help with these things, but it’s a wireless printer. Ignoring for a moment the parenthetical part, the basic statement is that the cable is necessary. (The fact that the printer doesn’t come with this cable is immaterial; printers have never come with cables, due to the “gouge them” revenue model.) Anybody could be forgiven for being misled by this statement into thinking the cable is necessary, especially since the parenthetical bit only seems to reiterate the rest of the statement. This is the kind of tautology you could get lost in for days. If you called the help desk for advice, the conversation could get really weird:

[Consumer] “It’s a wireless printer but it says here ‘A USB cable is necessary to connect the machine with your computer (USB connection only).’ Does that mean I need a USB cable?”

[Help desk] “No, the USB cable is only necessary when you’re using the USB cable.”

[C] “But I don’t have to use the cable?”

[HD] “No, you don’t have to.”

[C] “So why does it say I do?”

[HD] “You only need to use it if you’re going to use it. If you were going to use the cable but didn’t connect the cable, you wouldn’t be using the cable.”

[C] “Which would be a problem because…?”

[HD] “Because it was your intention to use the cable.”

[C] “Was it?”

[HD] I don’t know—you tell me!”

Of course this hypothetical dialog is completely unrealistic because the help desk person, regardless of his or her nationality, wouldn’t be nearly this articulate.

The last confusing bit is this: “Additional computers on the same network It enables the computer to use the machine.” I have tried and failed to figure out where this one went wrong. My first theory is that there’s simply a period missing before the word “It.” But this can’t be, because the first sentence would have no verb—and no object, for that matter. So maybe the word “It” was put in by mistake? No, because then the subject (“computers”) wouldn’t agree with the verb (“enables”). So “It” must belong, but what’s the antecedent? Impossible to tell. And logically, what would additional computers have to do with enabling “the computer” (whichever one that is) to use the machine? Besides, computers don’t use machines—people do.

My (very patient) wife suggested that the point here is that multiple computers can share the machine over a network. Great point, but this point was already made, earlier on the same page: “If the machine is already connected to a wireless/wired connection, it can be used from additional computers on the same network.” Despite the needlessness of “already,” and the strange yin/yang of “wireless/wired,” and the use of “connection” where “network” makes more sense, this is a pretty clear statement. Why follow it up with the totally muddled one? I can only assume that the technical writer here is paid by the word.

I only wish that I were paid by the word—I’d be rich now. And on that note, I shall end this post mid-

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