Less Than Words Can Say | Page 4

These things happen
in the world where agents and doers, the responsible parties around
whose throats we like our hands to be gotten, first retreat to the remoter
portions of prepositional phrases and ultimately disappear entirely. A
too-frequent use of the passive is not just a stylistic quirk; it is the
outward and visible sign of a certain weltanschauung.
And now that it is your weltanschauung (remember the worm has been
gnawing all this time), you discover that you are suited to the life of the
administrator. You'll fit right in.

Therefore, we may say that it is not the worm in the skull that causes
deans and managers and vice presidents, at least not directly. The worm
merely causes the atrophy of the active and the compensatory
dominance of the passive. (Through a similar compensatory
mechanism, three-legged dogs manage to walk, and the language of the
typical administrator is not very different from the gait of the
three-legged dog, come to think of it.) The dominance of the passive
causes in the victim an alteration of philosophy, which alteration is
itself the thing that both beckons him to and suits him for the work of
administration. And there you have it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and a little
help from William of Occam, we understand how administrators come
to be.
You may want to object that a whole view of the world and its
meanings can hardly be importantly altered by a silly grammatical form.
If so, you're just not thinking. Grammatical forms are exactly the things
that make us understand the world the way we understand it. To
understand the world, we make propositions about it, and those
propositions are both formed and limited by the grammar of the
language in which we propose.
To see how this works, let's imagine an extreme case. Suppose there is
after all a place in the brain that controls the making and understanding
of prepositional phrases. Suppose that Doctor Fu Manchu has let loose
in the world the virus that eats that very place, so that in widening
circles from Wimbledon mankind loses the power to make and
understand prepositional phrases. Now the virus has gotten you, and to
you prepositional phrases no longer make sense. You can't read them,
you can't write them, you can't utter them, and when you hear them you
can only ask ``Wha?'' Try it. Go read something, or look out the
window and describe what you see. Tell the story of your day.
Wait...you can't exactly do that...tell, instead, your day-story. Recite
how you went working...how morning you went...no...morning not
you...morning went...how you morning went...The rest will be silence.
Only through unspeakable exertion and even ad hoc invention of new
grammatical arrangements can we get along at all without the

prepositional phrase, as trivial as that little thing seems to be. It's more
than that. Should we lose prepositional phrases, the loss of a certain
arrangement of words would be only the visible sign of a stupendous
unseen disorder. We would in fact have lost prepositionalism, so to
speak, the whole concept of the kind of relationship that is signaled by
the prepositional phrase. We'd probably be totally incapacitated.
Try now to imagine the history of mankind without the prepositional
phrase, or, if you're tired of that, the relative clause or the distinction
between subject and object. It would be absurd to think that lacking
those and other such things the appearance and growth of human
culture would have been merely hindered. It would have been
impossible. Everything that we have done would have been simply
impossible. The world out there is made of its own stuff, but the world
that we can understand and manipulate and predict is made of discourse,
and discourse is ruled by grammar. Without even so elementary a
device as the prepositional phrase we'd be wandering around in herds
right now, but we wouldn't know how to name what we were doing.
We're inclined to think of things like prepositional phrases as though
they were optional extras in a language, something like whitewall tires.
This is because we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on them except
when we study a language not our own. We study German, and here
comes a lesson on the prepositional phrase. Great, now we can add
something to our German. That's the metaphor in our heads; we think --
there is German, it exists, and when you get good at it you can add on
the fancy stuff like prepositional phrases. All we have to do is
memorize the prepositions and remember which ones take the dative
and which ones take the accusative and which ones sometimes take the
one and sometimes the other and when and why and which ones are the
exceptions. Suddenly