on reading

Anonymous asked: grammar book recs?

Good old Strunk and White  are always a good place to start. For me, I find grammar easier to learn if it’s tied to writing. In that vein, I’d recommend Martha J. Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar , which smuggles in a lot of grammar under the guise of writing advice. Much better than just sitting down and trying to memorize the difference between a direct object and a subject complement.

(The Kolln book, unfortunately, is a textbook, which means price gouging. For a cheaper but not quite as good alternative, try The Art of Styling Sentences.)

Finally, much like Strunk and White, Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is essential. It’s more a reference book rather than one you read all the way through, and it covers more usage than grammar, but it’s still the first thing I go to when I have any question about the English language.

Let’s ignore its repellant jingoism and just sheer ignorance for a moment and instead focus on the grammar of this recent Sarah Palin quote: 

Truly, it is a war on our religious liberties and that violation of conscience that he would mandate that is un-American because it violates our First Amendment in our Constitution.

Pretty incomprehensible, right?

Now, I don’t like Palin, but I don’t think CNS News is doing her any favors by punctuating the sentence this way. (Odd, considering CNS is a pretty conservative site.) Or rather, not punctuating it at all. I’ve not seen video of her saying this, but if I had to guess, she’s saying something like this:

Truly, it is a war on our religious liberties, and that violation of conscience that he would mandate—that is un-American because it violates our First Amendment in our Constitution.

I haven’t changed a single word, just added punctuation. The sentence is still not great—her use of “our” is pretty puzzling, among other, larger problems—but it’s at least somewhat comprehensible.

We have three different uses of that here: the first “that” is an adjective; the second introduces a restrictive clause; the final “that,” which I’ve rendered in italics, is clearly supposed to be a pronoun whose referent is the clunky phrase “that violation of conscience that he would mandate.” Her initial subject is so long that she feels the need to reemphasize, so she sums it all up with “that.” The traditional way of rendering this in English is to use a dash, though this habit of folding a long subject into “that” occurs more often in speech than in writing.

The original punctuation, however, gives us no clues on how to read it, and we default to assuming that the final “that” is introducing a restrictive clause, as the “that” before it does. This is what we’re conditioned to do when we see the word in the middle of a clause without punctuation around it: it’s not in front of a noun, so it can’t be an adjective, and there’s no punctuation, so it’s not this summing-up pronoun. Or so our brain thinks, anyway, when a writer doesn’t bother to punctuate properly. Palin is actually much more comprehensible (here, at least) than the writer makes her.

I might be wrong though. It certainly does work the way I’ve punctuated it, but who knows if that’s what she meant. Can anyone come up with another plausible read? This is almost like some grammatical challenge—extract some sort of sense from this pile of words. One other reading, for example, is to read all the “that”s as restrictive clauses, so that the war has a compound object: it is a war on both “our religious liberties” and “that violation of conscience…” (What follows, then, describes the violation; it would mandate and it is un-American.) Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to make sense, because it can’t be a war on both religious liberties and violation of conscience, because those two things are opposites. Which is why I think that “violation of conscience that he would mandate” has to be the subject of the second half of this compound sentence…

Must shower now: feel dirty for defending the grammar of a Sarah Palin sentence.

Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic is a well-told version of an obscure event in American history: the assassination of President James A. Garfield. It’s also full of almost literally unbelievable trivia and nineteenth-century weirdness. For example:

• After Garfield was shot, he was treated by Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. That’s not a typo. Bliss’s parents so badly wanted him to enter the medical profession that they gave him the first name “Doctor.” After he received his MD, he was Dr. Doctor.
• Dr. Doctor, despite the insistence of his name, was actually an awful doctor. He was too conservative to believe in the newfangled ideas like the germ theory and disinfectant, so when he treated Garfield, he insisted on sticking his unwashed fingers three inches deep into the bullet hole, just to check it out. Garfield wasn’t killed by the assassin’s bullets: in fact, no vital organs were damaged, and without treatment, Garfield probably would have lived. He died of an infection caused by someone poking their grubby hands around in his wound.
• Dr. Doctor also treated Lincoln after his assassination. To be fair, Lincoln was shot in the head: sticking your dirty fingers in that kind of wound doesn’t really help or hurt. Still, this makes Dr. Doctor into the man who has killed the most presidents in US history.
• Even before the assassination, Garfield had health problems. Chronic dysentery during his Civil War service severely damaged his digestive system. Doctors recommended removing parts of his intestines, but Garfield refused. Instead, they compromised: to improve digestion, Garfield for the rest of his life ate only “raw beef and stale bread.”
• One more medical horror: common American surgical practice involved heating the wound with a poultice. And what were the poultices made of? Of course, the most sensible thing to put on a gaping hole in someone’s flesh: cow manure.

I guess what I learned from this book is—considering “eat stale bread” and “if wounded, insert dirty fingers and cow shit” were actual medical treatments—the nineteenth century was a terrible time to be alive.

And also, if you want your child to be good at something, don’t name him after that thing. You’re trying too hard, he’ll develop a weird complex, get way too conservative, and end up killing a couple of presidents.

Anonymous asked: Happy Dickens's Big 200th!

My alma mater revealed its new mascot last night. Apparently they were banking on the Rick Perry campaign lasting a lot longer than it did.