By Arthur Salm
December 3, 2006

English, cobbled together over the past thousand-odd years from whatever languages were lying around or passing through, gets a bad rap: So many verbs are illogically irregular (sink, sank, sunk, but not think, thank, thunk or, for that matter, sink, sinked, sinked or think, thinked, thinked), and spelling wanders beyond the whims of caprice and into the realm of madness (cough, though, bough, through).

All of which, for my gelt, is pretty much beside the point, even slightly inaccurate: Every snafu in the glorious muddle can be traced back through the thicket of linguistic history, run to ground, cornered (snarling, sometimes) and examined. And while the crowning of English as the lingua franca of this age and probably the next may be a matter of blind luck/good timing – if the Internet had been invented in the 18th century, most of it would be in French – its flexibility and robustness make it well suited to the task. Mutts, after all, tend to be healthier than purebreds.

And besides, its idiosyncrasies make it enormous fun to play with. Language books marche through the bookstores and onto the bestseller lists, the most recent jackpot winner being Lynne Truss with “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a mostly pleasant, intermittently amusing if Anglocentric examination of punctuation. My main objection to the book – aside from a handful of disagreements on usage – was that Truss just plain got on my nerves; after a while, she made me all twitchy.

Kitty Burns Florey, on the other hand, rattles off crackling prose in a no-nonsense voice that is all the more delightful when she ventures into playful nonsense. And playful nonsense, in the end, is much of what “Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences” (Melville House, 155 pages, $19.95) is all about.

It was Sister Bernadette, Florey's sixth-grade English teacher, who taught her to diagram sentences, beginning simply with “The dog barked.” It doesn't take Florey long to demolish a pernicious myth: that diagramming sentences was deadly dull, tedious make-work, dreary drudgery foisted upon helpless children by frustrated fuddy-duddies.

“You took a sentence,” she writes, “threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences. Those ephemeral words didn't just fade away into the air but became chiseled in stone – yes, this is a sentence, this is what it's made of, this is what it looks like, a chunk of English you can see and grab onto.”

For me, the satisfaction in diagramming a sentence was akin to that of proving congruency in a pair of triangles. The thought processes involved in working through the solutions are, I suspect, similar: Just as you can stare at a (not-too-complicated) sentence and make it fall apart, the words milling about for a moment before slipping into their proper, diagrammed slots, so you can concentrate on two geometric shapes, with their given angles and segment lengths, and after a while have the proof lay itself out, step by step, like a computer printout in your head.

Florey's diagrammatic dissertation eventually – inevitably? – leads to the throwing against the wall, etc., of one of Henry James' most Henry Jamesian sentences. The result looks like one of those equation-filled blackboards theoretical physicists are always getting all chalk-dusted over, at least in cartoons. But it's an adventure and a half to put back together, even if it is something of a cheat: The semicolon that bisects it could just as easily have been a period, cutting the diagram (and the fun) in half.

Eventually – again, inevitably? – Florey gets to punctuation, and eventually, etc., Gertrude Stein and her assault on commas. (“Commas are servile and have no life of their own.” “ ... what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy without the comma.” The joke in that sentence, of course, is that the comma is employed, and perfectly well, as a question mark, which Stein thought even less of than commas.)

The eschewing of the comma was, for Florey, the gateway to Stein. “ ... armed with the knowledge that commas are slavish, enfeebling little suck-ups that are always 'helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes,' ” she writes, “I found I could read her work with enjoyment – with, in fact, a crazed delight.”

At which point at least some of us will want to say, well, hold on just a second there, kiddo. It's great that you're able to get Stein, but I, for one, am fond of commas. Sure, you go back over your writing and take out as many as you can, but those that remain earn their keep. Commas didn't harmonize with Stein's voice, or rather, their absence created a chamber in which her voice could resonate, much as Cormac McCarthy's does when stripped of apostrophes and quotation marks. But to pull that off you have to be Gertrude Stein or Cormac McCarthy.

(I was pleased to learn from Florey that Stein believed in balancing the inherently “unemotional sentence” with the inherently “emotional paragraph.” It reminded me, in a jolt, of an English professor who in one sentence explained a crucial difference between Emerson and Thoreau. “Emerson wrote sentences,” he said, “and Thoreau wrote paragraphs.” Yes. Of course. Add to that Stein's observation, courtesy of Florey. Thank you.)

“Sister Bernadette” gets even better. “I myself have always had an intense partisanship toward the colon,” Florey confesses, and I suspect many of us have punctuation pets. I find dashes invaluable – who doesn't like to digress? – while semicolons, used sparingly, can be powerful tools indeed; they imply, “If you think the first part of this sentence was important – and it was – wait till you read what's next.”

As for the exclamation point ... it is possible to use it without being sarcastic. See under “Moon, blue.”

Although slightly off course (who doesn't like to digress?) (it's always a good idea to have a few pair of parentheses within easy reach), Florey takes on ain't, youse/y'all and double negatives. Her attack, however, brings to mind flopping fish, a barrel and a gun. These words are colloquialisms – rather neat ones, at that – with no social-climbing ambitions. Leave 'em be.

In the end, Florey fesses up: “I'm convinced that diagramming was no help to me at all as a writer.” And in all likelihood no help to her, or maybe to anyone else, in grasping the complexities of English grammar. But diagramming sentences was fun, she says, and “it made language seem friendly.”

And it is, of course. Friendly. And fun. Which is also Florey's book, to a crossed T.

 Arthur Salm is editor of Books

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