Watch Out!

“Can I ask you a question, Marc?” said Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of the owner of the café, who was being homeschooled in Language Arts, at the time. I thought I knew what it was about, since I had been overhearing the lesson.

Language arts, you see, is what used to be called grammar, which at least was straightforward and no-nonsense. But language arts? Mealy mouthed if I ever heard it….

“Do you know how to diagram a sentence?” asked Naïa.

“Of course I do,” I said. “I personally start every day by diagramming at least three sentences, randomly chosen from The New York Times. Should the sentences prove insufficiently challenging, I create them myself. Today, for example, I decided to diagram the sentence:

Europe—roiled by war, torn by turmoil, worn and weary by woe—lurched uncertainly, in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict of the 20^th century, towards an unsteady and tenuous peace, which, despite the watery goodwill of all concerned, seemed increasingly unlikely to be achieved.”

“You diagrammed that sentence?”

“Of course I did, nor did it take me more than 33 seconds,” I swore. It’s important to maintain the illusion that these things are important. “My mother was an ardent diagrammer of sentences. She once became so engrossed in diagramming a sentence that she unwittingly missed a trip to Paris. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence is rife with people who have neglected to eat or sleep—so immersed are they in diagramming sentences. I only permit myself three sentences a day, so as not to fall into the trap.”

Naïa was completely unconvinced. Lady, Naïa’s mother, joined us. I urged her to join me in diagramming a few sentences.

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it,” said Lady, in what I thought was an unnecessarily truthful—and deflating—remark. Surely Lady understands the necessity of hypocrisy in child / adult relationships?

“It’s totally stupid,” said Naïa, and I prepared to fight the statement to one of our deaths. It did occur to me, however, that it had been years since I had diagrammed a sentence. So what was it all about? And could I still do it?

Well, that was a week ago, during which I went to New York on the flimsy excuse that I needed to hear the world’s greatest singer.

“It’s the voice I want to hear at the moment of my death,” I told Lady, who asked me what the German baritone Matthias Goerne sounded like. And Lady, who may have sniffed something fishy in my ardor for diagramming sentences, called for proof. Fortunately, YouTube came through, and I played her Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume”. She got the point.

And so I flew 1600 miles northwest, and arrived in a city that was, according to The New York Times, colder than Montana. It was not, however, colder than Wisconsin at its worst—by which I mean that it was bearable. Just….

And Goerne? To tell you how good he was, and how completely he transfixed the audience, he stood dead still in his singing poise after he had finished the 20^th and last song of the song cycle Die shöne Müllerin. And the audience? Well, we all went into what my brother John called “negative silence,” meaning that no one even breathed, and for a space of thirty seconds. And I mean that “thirty,”—as in “one, one thousand, two, one thousand…”

At last, Goerne relaxed, and then the applause was thunderous.

“It was the best ‘shöne Müllerin’ ever,” said a lady next to me on the subway—and it was hard not to disagree. I might hear it as good, but never better….

Well, it was something I had to do once in my life—spend an inordinate amount of money on going thousands of miles away to hear a concert. And was it my guilty conscience that brought on attack of Montezuma’s revenge that utterly felled me the two days following the concert? On the third day I resurrected myself, had a nice weekend, and came home.

John and Jeanne live in the quietest building in New York. From their apartment, I could hear vague traffic sounds six floors below me. But anything else? Utter silence.

Alas, what was going on this morning when I woke in San Juan? Jackhammers, since now that the street has been re-bricked, it’s obviously time to re-brick the intersections, which hadn’t been done. And why not? Why not do the whole thing at once?

What, and limit the amount of disruption and noise? Are you crazy? Besides, if it’s two projects, then think of the exponential number of cost overruns and overtime and fraudulent-or-at-least-questionable design changes available to the contractor, the subcontractors, the suppliers, and who knows else? And so I did the trot, and turned to the café. Naïa was busy at work, still diagramming sentences. It was time to find out—what was that all about? And here, Dear Reader, is what a diagrammed sentence looks like:

Ummm? It was nothing like what I remembered, so I went to YouTube, to hear a presentation on diagramming sentences. And guess what? I understand it now—because I learned grammar on my own, and from having learned Greek and Latin. But if I were coming at it from a 12-year old’s perspective? Which is to say, Naïa?

I’d be sunk….

Look—sometimes making things too easy is simply to make things infinitely more difficult. Notice in the sentence diagrammed above that there are absolutely no grammatical terms—no transitive versus intransitive verbs, no direct versus indirect objects, no present participles versus gerunds, no prepositional versus adjectival versus participial phrases. But to diagram the sentence above? You have to grasp the concepts of all the terminology above. So why not come out, explain to kids what all this stuff is, and then figure out a scheme to diagram the sentence?

How about this?

It’s rudimentary, of course. “Forecasting” in the sentence above is actually a present participle doing time as an adjective, and “and” and “but” are conjunctions—but are they coordinating or subordinating? (Answer, they’re both coordinating….) Oh, and what to do with that “today’s forecasters?” Technically, it’s an example of the Saxon genitive, (Marc’s hat, or Naïa’s computer, or even Sam’s Club—all that “apostrophe s” stuff.) Of course, if it were “forecasters of today,” then “of” would be the preposition and “today” would be the object of the preposition. But as it is, doesn’t “today’s forecasters” sound like a compound noun, like “toilet paper” or “bowling alley?”

Of course, Franny would have wanted me to identify the predicate, which I dimly remembered from half a century ago. So I asked Mr. Fernández, who assured me: it’s utterly vital. So what is it?

Anything that’s not the nominative—which would be the subject and whatever modifiers and / or conjunctions and / or preposition phrases and / or clauses…

In short, anything including and after the verb.

Why bother?

“How was the concert,” asked Lady, coming into the café.

“Fucking amazing,” I said, forgetting that there was a 12-year kid sitting by—now populating her imaginary zoo with real-if-virtual animals.

“So glad you didn’t miss it,” says Naïa, “so busy you might have been, diagramming those sentences…”

World?

Watch out!