Less Than Words Can Say | Page 6

do the accepting and

the counseling ought to appear right after the comma, but they don't. In
the second, the people who do the dealing and the calling ought to
appear right after the comma, but they don't. In both cases the people
who do appear are the clients on whose behalf someone is supposed to
accept, counsel, deal, and call. Does that mean something about the
way in which those clients are regarded by this agency? They seem to
have been put in some kind of grammatical double jeopardy, which is
probably unconstitutional.
The poor lady, or chair, has inadvertently said what she probably meant.
Working for the government would be so pleasant if it weren't for those
pesky citizens. A waspish psychiatrist might observe that she has taken
those charging parties and has ``put them in their place'' with a twist of
grammar, thus unconsciously expressing her wish that they ought to be
responsible for all the tedious labor their charges will cost her and her
friends. She herself, along with the whole blooming EEOC, has
withdrawn behind a curtain of cloudy English from the clash of
charging parties on the darkling plain. ``Ach so, sehr interessant, nicht
wahr, zat ze patzient ist immer py ze Wort 'inshtead' gonvused. Es gibt,
vielleicht, a broplem of, how you zay, Inshteadness.'' And indeed, the
result of the dangling modifiers is to put the charging parties forth
instead of someone else, as though the word had been chosen to stand
out in front of the sentence as a symbol of the latent meaning.
Surely this lady, or chair, is an educated person, or chair, perfectly able
to see and fix dangling modifiers of the sort they used to deal with in
the early grades. After all, she has been hired as a chair, and for such a
position we can assume some pretty high standards and stringent
requirements. All right, so she doesn't know the difference between
``formal'' and ``formalistic'' -- big deal. When such a high-ranking
official of our government apparatus makes a mistake in structure, and
habitually at that, it's not much to the point to underline it and put an
exclamation mark in the margin. In a small child these would be
mistakes; in a chair they are accidental revelations of a condition in the
mind. To put the name of the thing modified as close as possible to the
modifier is not a ``rule'' of English; it is a sign of something the mind
does in English. When the English doesn't do that thing, it's because the

mind hasn't done it.
It would be fatuous for us to say that we don't understand those
sentences because of the disappearance of the people who are supposed
to do all those things. It is a schoolteacher's cheap trick to say that if
you don't get your grammar right people won't understand you. It's
almost impossible to mangle grammar to that point where you won't be
understood. We understand those sentences. In fact, we understand
them better than the writer; we understand both what she thought she
was saying and something else that she didn't think she was saying.
Many readers, of course, would ``understand'' those sentences without
even thinking of the problem they present, and they might think these
comments pedantic and contentious. Oh, come on, what's all the fuss?
A couple of little mistakes. What does it matter? We all know what she
means, don't we?
Such objections come from the erroneous idea that the point of
language is merely to communicate, ``to act your ideas across,''
whatever that means. Furthermore, such objectors may think that they
are defending a hardworking and well-meaning chair, but she is little
likely to be grateful for their partisanship if she figures out what it
means. They say, in effect, that her little mistakes are just that, little
mistakes rather than inadvertent and revealing slips of the mind. In the
latter case, however, we can conclude that she is merely a typical
bureaucrat with an appropriately managerial twist in the brain; in the
former we would simply have to conclude that she is not well enough
educated to be allowed to write public documents. Which of these
conclusions do you suppose she would prefer? It seems that we must
choose one or the other. Those are either mistakes made in ignorance or
mistakes made in something other than ignorance.
The mind, thinking in English, does indubitably push modifiers and
things modified as close together as possible. Can there really be a
place in the brain where that happens, a function that might be damaged
or dulled? It doesn't matter, of course, because there is surely a ``place''
in the mind analogous to the imagined place in the brain.

Whether by worms or world-views, it does