Less Than Words Can Say | Page 5

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 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