"Meaning One Thing at a Time'

A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play time. In short, I loved diagramming sentences. I think Mrs. Whistler, my sixth-grade teacher, enjoyed calling on me to take a sentence apart on the blackboard and reassemble it in a manner almost mathematical – probably my first insight into logic. She appreciated the pleasure I took in diagramming, a pleasure not shared by most of my classmates. Whenever Hollywood gives us a professor furiously solving equations on the blackboard, I’m back in Pearl Road Elementary School.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, diagramming meant making grammar visible, pictorially displaying the parts of a sentence and relating them to each other using connecting lines. Subject-verb-object was no longer drily theoretical but as vivid as arithmetic. It was like furniture bought at Ikea: “some assembly required.” To this day I think of a sentence as an assembly of parts. Anyone can put them together but what is the optimal combination?

Clive James in Cultural Amnesia (2007) introduced me to Pedro Henriquez Ureña, the great Dominican philologist. “It is always encouraging to hear what you know by instinct,” James writes, “resoundingly formulated by an authoritative figure, so that you can draw upon the memory for a lifetime.” Most of us grow up thinking we understand the language into which we were born. And we do, but how does it work? How do we recognize confusing or ambiguous language? How can it be corrected? How do we recognize lies and incoherence when expressed in seemingly straightforward language? Grammar is more than academic. It’s an ever-present gift, often under threat, to be cherished and preserved. Here is the conclusion to James’ essay:

“Writers don’t read just for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can’t even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too easily attained.”