`A Picture of Language'

Miss Gertrude Martin, my fourth-grade teacher, taught us how to diagram sentences. I was already lazy and resentful of authority, but this arcane art appealed to my puzzle-solving nature. I liked its finiteness and certainty, its assumption that a scaffold of logic underlies language. Gratuitously anarchic writing – surrealism, Kurt Schwitters, the so-called Language poets – has always seemed like intellectual slumming. It’s also boring. Why write nonsense when making sense with language, learning its rules and how to bend them, is so much fun?

Miss Martin must have been born early in the 20th century. Unfortunately, she invited the nickname “Hatchet Face.” Her nose and chin almost touched, and she wore billowy flowered blouses and too much rouge. She was large and adamant but never unfair. She expected much of her 9-year-olds. I hear tough teachers likened to the pedant Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch, with his “plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world,” but Miss Martin was not like that. She may have believed that teaching was a species of highly demanding love. You wanted to excel for her, and one way I could do that was by standing at the blackboard and drawing schematic diagrams of sentences. Miss Martin comes back to me as I’m reading Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, by Kitty Burns Florey, subtitled The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. Florey’s first sentence grabbed me:

“Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss.”

That’s an admirable sentence – forthright, transparent, balanced like an equation. It also contains one of my favorite English words – “sackbut,” referring to the ancestor of the trombone. When I lived in Albany, N.Y., I always enjoyed driving along Hurlbut Street, which gave me the identical sense of lexical titillation. Miss Martin probably would not have approved. Florey was taught to diagram sentences in the sixth grade by the Sister Bernadette of the title, and immediately was hooked. The first sentence she diagrams is rudimentary, “The dog barked,” but it serves to illustrate the appeal of diagramming:

“The thrilling part was that this was not a picture of the animal but of the words that stood for the animal and its noises. It was a representation of something that was both concrete (we could hear the words if we said them aloud, and they conveyed an actual event) and abstract (the words were invisible, and their sounds vanished from the air as soon as they were uttered). The diagram was the bridge between the dog and the description of the dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language.”

That’s a beautifully concise explanation of why some of us enjoyed diagramming sentences, thus mingling art and math. It’s also a common-sense explanation of how language works. Florey goes on to give a history of diagramming, dating it to1877 and the publication of Higher Lessons in English, a textbook by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg. I hope her obvious fondness for the practice encourages its re-introduction into the American curriculum:

“I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams – the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic outlooks. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which – once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed – those sentences could be comprehended.”

Florey is a copy editor and writer. Her clarity of expression is admirable. Her sentences are always limber and never grow tangled. The first sentence I just quoted contains 61 words, and not one is extraneous or uncertain of its proper role. How much of her verbal dexterity can be credited to Sister Bernadette? Florey dodges the question a little by answering like this:

“In the end, I think the important thing was not what we learned from diagramming in Sister Bernadette’s class, but simply the fun we had doing it. Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn’t bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.”