|
Free Speech The tics and twists of dialect and bad grammar for effect are one thing, however. Unconscious and unintended mistakes have pleasures of their own. Mixed metaphors deserve special mention because truly great ones hang like rude noises in the air. There is no way of taking them back, no form of rhetorical damage control. I recall a protest leader in San Francisco in the 1960s concluding a rabble-rousing oration with, "The path I am walking is the wave of the future." The speech did indeed send its hearers to the barricades, but a fair number of them were giggling, and not for the usual reasons. The problem with mixed metaphors and most fun forms of bad English is that they are not participant sports. The hearer or reader can only smile, laugh, or stand in awe at the author or orator's creativity in mangling the language. There is, however, an exception, and in recent years it has become my favorite crime against English. It is, in technical terms, a form of mixed modifier and what my elderly copy of The Elements of Style has in mind when its authors, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, caution that "a participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject." It is easier to hear what I mean than define it; the following is an example, slightly altered, from a style manual reprinted a few years ago in this magazine: "As a girl, he respected her." In an era of sound bites, constructions like that abound in sportscasts and on TV generally, as well as in their linguistic stepchildren, student essays. They require a tin ear for the language on the part of the person who writes or speaks them, and they batter logic in magical ways as the sentence winds toward its end. I treasure them because, unlike mixed metaphors or dialect humor, they allow the hearer or reader a large realm of creativity. There is even a game you can play with them in those moments when you want to be an active reader or listener, or when--to be honest about it--you aren't much engaged in whatever it is you are hearing or reading. The game goes like this. Stop the sentence right after the clause and the noun, and imagine how it might end, as opposed to the prosaic way it probably will conclude. Take the previous example: "As a girl, he...": a) accessorized badly; b) wobbled on high heels; or c) liked G.I. Jane dolls. Each is a much more interesting sentence than the one the hapless student wrote. In the last few months, I have had many chances to play the game, and here are some of them. Options a and b are my suggestions. Option c is how the student's sentence actually ended.
Although often deadly, America's
elderly...
Following his martyrdom,
Henry VIII...
As Annie Hall, Woody
Allen...
Besides being smart and funny,
I...
After 99 pitches,
the manager...
Even though they knew they were
being monitored, video recorders... One of the great things about the misplaced modifier game is that it is among the few participant sports in late 20th-century America that do not require special equipment--just a television set, a pile of student papers, or an interoffice memo. If you find that your friends, family, or employees are paying unusual attention to your pronouncements, you may already be playing it. "Guido Veloce" is a Johns Hopkins University professor.
RETURN TO NOVEMBER 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS. |