This Is the Way We Watch Our Words

My wife Debra and I were at a recent social gathering where a friend remarked that he “felt badly” about something. Then he immediately stopped. “Wait,” he said. “Should that be ‘felt bad’ instead of ‘felt badly’?”

“It’s ‘felt bad,’ ” Debra said. “‘Felt badly’ means that you weren’t very good at the act of feeling.”

“But ‘felt’ is a verb,” someone said, “and so you have to use an adverb. And ‘badly’ is an adverb, right?”

“Yes,” said I, unable to contain myself. “But ‘to feel’ is a copulative verb.”

Given that this was a well-educated group, most of whom worked with language professionally, I guess I expected their response to be something along the lines of, “Ah, yes, of course.” But instead, all heads turned toward me incredulously. “A what?” said at least one person.

“A copulative verb,” I said. “A verb like ‘to be’ or ‘to appear.’ It takes an adjective rather than an adverb.”

“But what about ‘I feel well’?” said the original speaker. “ ‘Well’ is an adverb, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said, “but it can also be an adjective — as in ‘I’m not a well man.’ When you say ‘I feel well,’ you’re using it as an adjective.”

I shouldn’t be surprised at the general unawareness of copulative verbs. They’re not the kind of thing that come up in everyday conversation. (Some Googling revealed they’re now more commonly called “copular” verbs, presumably because it sounds less dirty.) I’m sure that I would never have heard of them, except that the concept was drilled into me when I was in fourth grade.

Yes, fourth grade! I’ll grant that I didn’t have a typical elementary school education, but for some reason my teacher was so convinced of the importance of copular verbs that she taught us a song about them (sung to the tune of “This Is the Way We Wash Our Clothes”):

Act and feel and get and grow,
Be, become, stay, and seem,
Look, sound, smell, and taste
Are all copulative verbs.

Apart from allowing me to show off at parties, I have to wonder: Is this bit of knowledge an efficient use of my rapidly diminishing brain cells? I loved studying grammar when I was a kid, especially when we started learning to diagram sentences (also in fourth grade). Being able to precisely parse the structure of a sentence allowed me to write with increasing confidence and authority, a skill that got me surprisingly far in life.

But how important is it, really? So far as I can tell, kids in the 21st century study very little grammar — not much beyond learning the difference between a noun and a verb — and yet their communication skills appear adequate for most purposes. After all, when we use language, we generally don’t follow a conscious set of rules; we speak or write instinctively, based on example and habit. Even if no one at the aforementioned social gathering was familiar with the concept of copular verbs, they still most likely say “She looks young” rather than “She looks youngly.”

Knowing the rules can help when questions come up, but even those instances don’t seem to matter much. Smart, educated people can say “I feel badly” — and often do —without anyone questioning their intelligence or level of education. I’ve come to feel that the finer points of grammar are just something for language nerds to amuse themselves by, just as baseball fans argue about batting averages and RBIs. It’s a harmless activity, but it’s not going to contribute much to the progress of civilization.

Posted May 10, 2023 by Mark S
Category: Language
Read Me 4 comments

Holy Ravioli

During our two-month sojourn in London, Debra and I lived in a basement flat in an area called West Kensington, midway between Hammersmith and Fulham. “West Kensington,” so far as I can tell, is not an official designation, but merely the informal name of a neighborhood, and the neighborhood’s only connection with the actual Kensington is that it happens to lie west of it. In fact, West Kensington and Kensington are in entirely different boroughs — the former in the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the latter in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

I was indignant when I first heard the names of these respective municipalities. Why were we consigned to merely a “borough,” while Kensington and Chelsea got to be a “royal borough”? Were they somehow better than us? I imagined Charles III brushing up on his newly acquired kingdom, hearing “Kensington and Chelsea” read out from a list and saying, “Yep, that’s one of mine,” then hearing “Hammersmith and Fulham” and saying, “Hmm, never heard of it. You say it’s a borough?”

It turns out that the designation “royal” is given to boroughs in which the royal family maintains a residence, and that there’s nothing otherwise special about them. If Charles and Camilla were to establish a pied-à-terre in West Kensington, I imagine that it would suddenly become a royal borough as well.

The concept of a “royal borough” made me think of another designation that always mystified me: a “holy city.” Back in the days of the Iranian revolution, news reports often mentioned “the holy city of Qom.” We don’t hear much about Qom anymore, but there appear to be plenty of other cities considered holy by one religion or another, such as Mecca, Medina, Amritsar, Karbala, and of course, Jerusalem.

If we posit an omnipresent God who brought the universe into being, then I’d assume that everything God created would have to be equally holy. Unlike the British monarch, God isn’t known to maintain residences in a finite number of locations. So how can some cities be considered holy and others not?

An additional philosophical problem regarding holy cities is wherein the holiness resides. Is a holy city made up of individual holy items — holy buildings, holy trees, holy sewer pipes — such that if one of them were to be transported outside of the city, it would retain its holiness? Or is the holiness associated with a particular geographical boundary, such that an Amazon package gains or loses its holy qualities depending on whether it’s delivered inside or outside the city limits?  And how does the principle apply to human beings, who may autonomously engage in activities that can be more or less holy? If someone were to open a strip club in Jerusalem, would it ipso facto qualify as a holy strip club, or would it proportionally detract from the overall holiness of the city?

Clearly, the people who live in — or make pilgrimages to — holy cities aren’t bothered by such questions, leading me to wonder what they’re seeing that I’m not.

As a nonreligious person, I don’t really have a category called “holy.” But I do have one called “sacred” (in a secular sense) and I guess the two aren’t that different.  For example, I’d say that a diploma is sacred: It’s physically just a piece of paper, but you wouldn’t fold it up to fit in your pocket, or scribble notes on the back of it, as you might with any other piece of paper. For most people, a national flag is sacred. A work of art is sacred. For that matter, any object to which we have an emotional attachment can be said to be sacred.

All of these are instances of our ascribing meaning and value to an object that go beyond its physical worth or utility.  The meaning and value of a sacred object are not inherent in the object itself; they’re a product of our relationship with the object. I assume that what’s true of “sacred” is also true of “holy.” To call a thing (or a city) “holy” is a convenient bit of verbal shorthand for saying that we, for whatever reason, regard it and treat it as if it has deep significance, while recognizing that in the physical world, the thing itself remains just a thing. Perhaps only the king can decide that a British borough is royal, but any one of us can decide that a city is holy.

Posted January 11, 2023 by Mark S
Category: Language
Read Me 1 comment

Dear Me

An odd thing I’ve noticed, after consuming a steady diet of films from the 1930s, is that people in those movies often call each other “darling.” I’m not talking just about spouses or romantic couples. Grown children call their parents and grandparents “darling.” Siblings call each other “darling” (which, to me at least, feels kind of creepy). Even good friends can call each other “darling.” Outside of the romantic context, the “darling”-ing seems to confine itself to women. I don’t recall any instances of Army buddies calling each other “darling,” but I may just not have gotten to those movies yet.

I seem to remember my parents calling each other “darling” once or twice, but only in an ironic context. By now, “darling” has apparently died out entirely, replaced by “honey” or “sweetie.” (I’m not sure where “dear” fits into the chronology. Does anyone these days call anyone else “dear”?)

The whole culture of terms of endearment is mysterious to me, because I’ve never been able to use them. I’m not sure at what point in my life I’m supposed to have acquired the habit. Children don’t call each other “honey,” so what impels them to start saying it when they get older? And how do they decide which name to use? I’ve been called “honey” or “sweetie” by servers in diners, but I don’t think I’ve ever been called both by the same person.

For me, the only natural way to address someone is by the name they were introduced to me as. In nearly 35 years of marriage, the only thing I’ve ever called Debra is “Debra.” (She went through a “Debbie” phase in high school, so friends from that era are grandfathered in, but she made very clear when she met me that no one else is permitted to call her Debbie.) There are occasions when I’ll perceive that other people are addressing someone differently than I’ve been — for example, that everyone but me is calling Elizabeth “Liz” — in which case I’ll ask Elizabeth, “Would you rather be called ‘Liz’?” And if she says yes, then “Liz” is what she becomes. There’s no going back.

I genuinely can’t emulate the casualness with which most people seem to use pet names and nicknames. It’s not that I haven’t tried. Years ago, I noticed that my girlfriend Marcia was occasionally called “Marsh” by her family and friends, but only in the most informal circumstances — as in “Hey, Marsh, look at this!” I decided that I would try to do the same, and even told her of my intention. But execution proved to be difficult. Every time I was about to address her, I had to ask myself, “Which is more appropriate for this occasion — ‘Marcia’ or ‘Marsh’?” Whenever I concluded that “Marsh” was the way to go, it came out of my mouth sounding so stilted and rehearsed that I was already cringing by the time I got to “sh.” After a few such attempts, Marcia and I both agreed that I should stop.

What’s especially strange is that I have no such problem when it comes to animals. Debra’s and my first cat, Brook, was almost never addressed as “Brook.” I could call her “Brookie,” “Brookface,” “Brooklyn,” “Broccoli,” or pretty much anything else without the need to reflect in advance. When I meet a cat or dog on the street, I hear myself saying, “Hello, Cuteface!” or “Hey, Beautiful!” as I drop to my knees to administer pets. Maybe it’s because the furry creature has no idea what I’m saying, so it’s impossible to come out with anything inappropriate.

Speaking of animals, another thing I’ve noticed in old movies is that people’s pets never have names that traditionally belong to humans. Nick and Nora Charles’s dog is Asta, Dorothy Gale’s dog is Toto, Susan Vance’s leopard is Baby, Gillian Holroyd’s cat (in “Bell, Book and Candle”) is Pyewacket, Roy Rogers’s horse is Trigger, and Friendless’s cow, in Buster Keaton’s “Go West,” is Brown Eyes. (Tom Mix had a horse named Tony, but that’s a rare exception.)

I’m not sure when it became fashionable to give people’s names to pets — the first instance I can remember is in the early 1980s, when David Letterman talked about his dog, Bob — but it’s time for that trend to pass. I have had cats named Brook, Timmy, and Mary Beth, so I’m as guilty as anyone, but I’ve since decided that giving animals human names is lazy and no longer cute. At the time I write this, there are adoptable cats at Oakland Animal Services named Beanie, Lentil, Clover, Hiccup, Rascal, and Acorn. I hereby advocate for more imaginative names like those.

Posted July 6, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Language
Read Me 4 comments

Say Uncle

A book review in the current issue of The Atlantic mentions that the Great Depression “shrunk international trade by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932.” This probably would not have made much of an impression on me, except that I’d recently seen an article in the Financial Times about the discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s wrecked ship, which noted that the ship was found “roughly four nautical miles from the position originally recorded by Shackleton’s crew before it sunk in November 1915.”

Shrunk? Sunk? Whatever happened to shrank and sank?

I may be a bit sensitive on this subject, since I was once scolded by a teacher for using snuck in a sentence. Today, if online authorities are to be believed, snuck is considered as acceptable as, and perhaps even preferable to, sneaked. Part of me wants to track down that teacher and get her to apologize.

I understand that language constantly changes, but I find the shift from sank to sunk and shrank to shrunk — not to mention stank to stunk — especially puzzling. Why the vowel change?

Could it be because the “u” sound in sunk is easier to say than the “a” sound in “sank”? Pronouncing that “a” vowel actually does require more muscular effort — try it yourself — but that seems like an unlikely explanation, since we still say “I sang” rather than “I sung” and “I drank” rather than “I drunk,” and we all still have ankles instead of uncles. (Well, most of us have ankles and uncles, but you get the point.)

My sense is that saying “it sank” or “it shrank” sounds prissy and affected, kind of like saying “It is I” rather than “It’s me.” If I were the sort of person who described things by analogizing them to unpleasant odors, I’d probably feel much more comfortable saying “It stunk” rather than “It stank.” Still, that doesn’t account for where that air of affectation came from, and why we’d say “The beer she drank stunk” rather than “The beer she drunk stunk.”

Of course, we’re dealing here with a language in which the past tense of blink is blinked and the past tense of think is thought — in other words, a language in which nothing makes any sense. In such an environment, having the past tense of drink be drank while the past tense of slink is slunk is hardly worth remarking on.

I think that what’s really bothering me is the simple fact of being old. Where I might have to wrestle with whether shrank or shrunk is more acceptable to my readership, the copy editor at The Atlantic (who, I’m guessing, is much younger than I am) has probably never heard of shrank, and therefore has no problem.

There was a time, around 400 years ago, when a writer using the second-personal singular pronoun might have to decide whether to stay with thou or go with the newer, hipper you. People at the time had strong feelings about the issue, but now it’s something we no longer have to think about, since you won out handily. I’m guessing that in another couple of generations, language questions that we’re fretting about — such as whether it’s OK to use they as a singular pronoun — will be similarly settled, and nobody will give a sentence like “They looked at themself in the mirror” a second thought.

In the meantime, living through transitions is disturbing. I’m irritated when I see “The economy shrunk,” and even more so when I see “They looked at themself.” Unlike the vowel shift from “a” to “u,” I totally understand and support the change in the use of they — but that doesn’t make me any less upset when I hear it spoken or see it in writing. Emotional reactions are emotional reactions, and unlike language, they don’t tend to change easily or readily.

Posted June 15, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Language
Read Me 5 comments

Spelling, Be

My boss in my first job out of college was a man named Bill West. He’d occasionally get annoyed when he’d give his name over the phone and the person on the other end would say, “Could you spell that, please?” Like, it’s Bill freakin’ West. What is there to spell?

I, on the other hand, have a last name that nobody can be expected to spell correctly on the first try. It’s Schaeffer, but in a world filled with Shaeffers, Shafers, Schaefers, and innumerable other variations, there’s no way for anybody to know what to do once they get past “S.”

For many years, when asked how to spell my name, I would patiently spell it out: “S–c–h–a–e–f–f–e–r.” Then it occurred to me that I could save a lot of time by just telling the person, “Put in all the letters you can.” That turned the problem into a game, which many people seemed to appreciate. (Among them was my wife Debra, who went a bit too far by coming up with the spelling Pschaephpherre.) Still, it didn’t seem fair to saddle a harried reservations clerk or receptionist with the task of puzzling out the correct spelling on their own.

After many years, I finally arrived at the most practical instruction: “Spell it however you want!” After all, unless I was engaging in some sort of legal transaction — in which case I would probably do it in writing — it really didn’t matter how somebody spelled my name. “Schaeffer, party of two, your table’s ready” sounds the same no matter how it was written down.

My wife and I have different last names, which occasionally leads to one of us being identified by the other’s name. Debra, for feminist reasons, is irked when someone assumes that her last name is Schaeffer, but she answers to it when necessary. I, on the other hand, have no objection to being called Mr. Goldentyer when the clerk at Safeway reads it off our loyalty card. (What I’m actually called in that situation is “Mr. Guh… Mr. Go… uh, Gol…,” but having a difficult-to-decipher last name is a problem that poor Debra has had to cope with much longer than I have.)

The point is that it makes no difference what people call me, as long as they and I both understand who is being referred to. My students at Chabot College, on the first day of class, would often ask how they should address me: Mr. Schaeffer? Mark? Professor? My answer was always, “Whatever you’re most comfortable with.” As long as a student treats me with respect — the same respect that I am careful to offer in return — the particular phonemes that come out of the student’s mouth hardly matter.

I would think that this indifference toward arbitrary labels would be universal, but it quite evidently isn’t. Most people, so far as I’ve seen, are offended when someone innocently misspells or mispronounces their name, or calls them something other than what they prefer to be called. I find this attitude mysterious. If someone addresses me as “Mr. Guh… Mr. Go…,” my natural response is to tell them, “It’s Goldentyer.” I see no need to snap, “It’s actually Schaeffer.” The name that this person associates with me has no effect on who I am.

The thing in my wallet that we typically call an “ID card” shows my name, my picture, my date of birth, and perhaps my gender. But those things don’t constitute my identity; they’re just handy labels that people can use to identify me. If someone gets one of those labels wrong, they’re merely making an error; they’re not changing anything about who I am. Most of the time, the error — such as a misspelling of my name — has no consequences. In cases where the error does have consequences — where I might be denied a right due to someone’s interpretation of my age, gender, or ethnicity — the fault lies in the way society treats people with different labels unequally. The labels themselves are insignificant.

Posted May 24, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Language
Read Me 3 comments

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Rose Avenue Logo

Go to roseavenue.com home page

Mark Schaeffer 2021
Vega Wordpress Theme by LyraThemes