Less Than Words Can Say | Page 5

it becomes depressing. How about we forget the
whole thing and settle for your stripped-down basic model German
without any of the fancy stuff? If you do that, of course, you'll never
find the Bahnhof. You'll be stymied in Stuttgart.
Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English
are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most

technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping
the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and
in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the
distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a
polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures,
things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other
things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and
its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an
attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
There's an example from the works of a lady who may also have a
worm in her brain. She is ``the chair'' of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. It's very short and seems, to those willing to
overlook a ``small'' grammatical flaw, almost too trivial to be worthy of
comment. She writes: ``Instead of accepting charges indiscriminately
and giving them docket numbers, charging parties are counseled
immediately.''
``Charging parties'' are probably faster than landing parties and larger
than raiding parties, but no matter. She means, probably, people who
are bringing charges of some sort, but there are many kinds of prose in
which people become parties. It's not really meant to sound convivial,
though: it's meant to sound ``legal.'' What's important is that the
structure of her sentence leads us to expect that the people (or parties)
named first after that comma will also be the people (or parties)
responsible for doing the ``accepting.'' We expect something like:
``Instead of doing that, we now do this.'' That's not because of some
rule ; it's just the way English works. It both reflects and generates the
way the mind does its business in English. We, the readers, are
disappointed and confused because somebody who ought to have
shown up in this sentence has in fact not appeared. What has become of
the accepting parties? Are they hanging around the water cooler? Do
they refuse to accept? Are they at least hoping, that no one will
remember that they are supposed to accept? We can guess, of course,
that they are the same people who make up the counseling parties, who
have also disappeared into a little passive. It's as though we went
charging down to the EEOC and found them all out to lunch.

Well, that could have been a slip of the mind, the mind of the chair, of
course, but later we read: ``Instead of dealing with charging parties and
respondents through formalistic legal paper, the parties are called
together within a few weeks...''
It's the same arrangement. Who does that dealing, or, since that's what
they did before the ``instead,'' who did that dealing through
``formalistic'' paper? Wouldn't they be the same parties who ought to
do the calling together? Where have they all gone?
A schoolteacher would call those things examples of dangling
modifiers and provide some rules about them, but that's not important.
What's important is that those forms are evocations of that imagined
world in which responsible agency is hardly ever visible, much to the
comfort of responsible agency. Since that is the nature of the world
already suggested by the passive voice, you would expect that this
writer, or chair, would be addicted to the passive. You'd be right. Here
are the bare skeletons of a few consecutive sentences: ...staff is
assigned......cases are moved......parties are contacted......files are
grouped...and prioritized......steps are delineated...and time frames
established......discussions are encouraged...
You have to wonder how much of a discussion you could possibly have
with these people. They're never around.
Admittedly, it does these bureaucrats some credit that in their hearts
they are ashamed to say that they actually do those things that they do.
After all, who would want to tell the world that he, himself, in his very
flesh, goes around grouping and prioritizing?
The dangling modifiers go well with the passives, and, in suggesting
the nature of the world as seen by bureaucrats, they even add something
new. The passives are sort of neutral, verbal shoulder-shrugs -- these
things happen -- what can I tell you? The danglers go the next obvious
and ominous step and suggest subtly that those charging parties have
caused a heap of trouble and really ought to be handed the job of
sorting things out for themselves, which, grammatically, is exactly
what happens. In the first example the people who