THE UNDERGROUND
GRAMMARIAN

The Age of Outformation

IT is true that Jefferson saw some connection between the freedom of the press and the informed consent of the governed by which, and only by which, this land was to be governed. But nowadays "informed" does not mean what Jefferson meant by it, nor, for that matter does "the press," which was given more, in his days, to reasoned consideration than it is now.

In the current use of the word "information," there is no hint of the process of forming, of putting into harmonious and coherent order, not only in the light of some set of facts, but equally by the establishment of an ordering principle. By the gossip that passes for information in the press, and in our schools, always seduced by fads and a mania for "current events," only an unusual mind is likely to be informed. "Cluttered" will better describe the mind that is full of bits of news of this and that, a junkyard in which everything lies where it fell, where nothing is chosen out to be set where it belongs, and where every useless piece of trash decays and is forgotten under the new heaps of trash. There, the fate even of the occasional treasure is no different.

Take Harriet Tubman, for instance. A recent survey conducted by the Department of Ecudation revealed that an expectably large number of high school students had no clear idea even of the approximate date of the Civil War, but that a majority of the same students had heard of Harriet Tubman. Far from a bad thing, but that "heard of" is less than entirely encouraging. Whether those students understood some relationship between the war and the lady, by which they might also understand some principle, the survey, as no one will be surprised to hear, did not bother to inquire. In another age--ours, we confess--we had not heard of Harriet Tubman. We had rather heard of the invention by Sir Humphry Davy of the miner's safety lamp, and of the importance of substances called "naval stores." We had tests in which those, and countless other bits of unrelated "information," were the "correct" answers.

Where is Sir Humphry now? Where will Harriet Tubman be in fifty years?

Many supposed facts might be better thought of as phenomena, or ephemera. Facts, yes, but only by courtesy, as we might, if there is enough room on the program, list all the spear-carriers among the dramatis personæ.

Yes, there was last night yet another fire of suspicious origin in some abandoned warehouse, and yet another politician accused of devious dealings. Yes, certain selected portions of our "heritage" are just now thought, by certain selectors, to be more important than certain others. And yes, a certain kind of music, or of dress, or of religion, or of literature, or of thought, is just now considered important by those who think themselves the ones who can best determine what is important. But it is not by themselves, not just because they are, that such things inform a mind. They become meaningful elements of a larger structure only to a mind that is already formed. Some of those facts--will it not be many?--an informed mind will sooner or later stow in the attic, not because they are irrelevant, for the informed mind can always find relevance, but because they are redundant. After all, how many arsonists or crooked politicians do we need in order to contemplate the vanity of human wishes?

For the health and vigor of the mind's life, there is no indispensable fact. What, you have never heard of Shakespeare, or of the Treaty of Paris? You can not locate the Persian Gulf on a map, or the return key on a computer? You remember neither the Alamo, nor the Maine, nor Pearl Harbor? It matters not at all. Of all of that, Aristotle and Epictetus were uninformed, but only in particular; in principle, they knew it all. And so will many in coming ages, when all such things will at last have disappeared even from footnotes in obscure monographs.

It isn't truly information that we now peddle so industriously, and for the sake of which our schoolers now want to make lists. It is outformation. It leads the mind away from itself. It provides the illusion that the real reality is all out there, and that it comes in an infinite number of flying quanta, infinitesimally tiny packages, but, some of them at least, oh so necessary to "know"--just now. The mind might be at them forever, never to turn and come home, and the eye too busy counting photons ever to look for the light.

And so to Hirsch. His defenders--of whom none are more than mild--have made the points that a), he is at least doing something; b), that it would do no harm for the children to learn something about something; and c), that he is at least not an educationist but an English professor.

As to the last, pfui! We have some experience of English professors. They all have little lists, and Hirsch's is just a bit longer than most.

As to the first, a reader has already provided an answer. He's doing something? Sure, he's doing something. Tyrants are always busy. A bit rough, but it is also true that the educationists are always doing something, always cooking up a grant, always looking for an angle, always making excuses, and always thrusting innovatively. You would be always busy too if people were nagging you to get done that which you promised to get done without any clear idea as how to do it.

But it is because of the second that we have spent all this time getting to Hirsch. We have ourselves often whimpered about the astonishing ignorance of the young, and those social studies teachers of Minnesota who suspected that Mussolini might be something to eat. But the Hirsch business has had, for us at least, this great worth: it has led us to wonder whether we should have whimpered, and out of what motive, exactly, we did whimper. Was it out of the sort of arrogance, not rare in English professors, that says: Well, humph, you can hardly think yourself an educated person if you have never heard of... And then follows a list of the things he happens to have heard of. Sir Humphry included. If so, Hirsch has instructed us.

We don't learn about things in order to read; we read in order to learn about things, and to make a form in the mind. We can understand little about those things that we have only heard about, but if the mind has taken form, we may well be able to understand a lot about--and because of--a surprisingly small number of things, provided that we have done more than just hear about them.

The Witching Our

Pronominal and Participial Considerations
from our
Acting Adjunct Sociogrammatologist

SOME person whose name I do not know has sternly admonished me, saying, "Recognize that it is up to you and me to protect our young and needy. The politicians and the experts will not do it unless informed citizen action demands it."

For some reason, incurable habit, no doubt, I am inclined to put aside for the moment the pressing social urgency that lies behind that admonition until I have given some thought to its pronouns. I think I know the identity of the "you," who can be none other than myself, but who is hidden in that "me"? Is it, I wonder, a man or a woman?

The difference is important. After all, if a man stopped me in the street saying, "It is up to you and me to protect our young," I would take one understanding from his words, but if it were a woman, I would take a very different understanding. The difference is again a matter of pronouns. In the first case, I would take one understanding of the "our" in "our young," but in the second, quite another.

And to the lady of the second case, I would surely exclaim: By God, madame, you speak the truth! I must admit that till this very moment I was quite unaware of the existence of our young, and likewise of their neediness, and for that I heartily repent. But now that I know of them, and know too, as you seem to suggest, that they stand in need of protection, let us go forth at once and protect them and supply whatever it is that they need. Surely, that is a duty laid on us not only by Nature and Custom, but also by our mutual consent--which may well have been given--to the very bringing of our young into this world, where, as you so rightly divine, there is but little in the way of protection to be expected from politicians and experts, who are, in any case, the last people to whom I would willingly surrender the protection of our young. Let us, therefore, not wait upon that uncertain day when "informed citizen action" will do, maybe, what you and I ought to be doing in this very minute! Let us rather go at once to our young, wherever they may be, and protect them!

But to the gentleman of the first case, I would reply otherwise, saying: Your sentiment, sir, is surely well-intended, and does you, I suppose, some credit, but I fear that you have made some mistake. Your young and mine are unlikely to be the same young. I will admit, nay, affirm, that in the case of your absence and my presence, I would indeed think myself bound to undertake, should it be necessary, the protection of your young, or any other young, for that too seems a duty rightly laid on us all by Nature and Custom, but I confess that I find your stern admonition at the very least premature, and perhaps even a bit presumptuous. Do you mean to imply that should the occasion arise when your young need protection and when I alone am nearby, that, except for your admonition, I would probably not protect them?

All this spluttering has been brought on, of course, by yet another request for money in a supremely worthy cause, of which we currently suffer no lack. This one has to do with neglected, deprived, underprivileged, and trapped in poverty children. (Keep your eye on those participles.)

My admonisher is surely sincere, and, although history does not suggest that it is out of a lack of sincerity that tyrants and other monsters are made, I do believe that he believes that the result of his admonition, somewhere down that long, long road of consequence, will be of some good to some child. And that may be so. In other words, I do not suppose him a man who designs to deceive. Why is it, then, that he talks like a liar?

He knows damn well that he and I--or even she and I, should that be the case--can not accurately point to any small human beings on Earth and name them "our children." The children he has in mind, however, are real children, and for every last one of them there are two people on Earth who can indeed call them "our children." Now here is what I wonder: Of those people, the parents of "our children," how many has my admonisher admonished? Of how many has he asked contributions to this worthy cause?

In certain breeds of do-gooder, there is a prissy fastidiousness that ill becomes the adherents of a Great and Worthy Cause. I would find an unsettling but exhilarating refreshment in a solicitation for contributions toward the Great and Worthy Cause of Horsewhipping Politicians (or Experts) Through the Streets, and I would shell out at once should anyone undertake to act on Mencken's plan for the improvement of education, to wit, the burning down of the colleges and the hanging of all the professors. But a man who claims that he wants to right a great wrong, while pretending through his pronouns that there are no wrong-doers, is a pitiable wimp, and not the kind of reformer on whom a contributor can depend. And when that wimp goes further, and suggests through those pronouns that it will be because of my neglect of duty should this great wrong persist among us, then he is a contemptible hypocrite as well. It is indeed true that I never raised a finger in defense of the infants slaughtered by Herod's soldiery, but while this fact may properly arouse certain feelings in me, remorse is not one of them.

Which brings me to the participle. Neglected, for instance. It could use a name. The Disjunctive Participle might do, since it always serves to cut away from some verb the subject that ought to go with it, but I will rather name it the Exculpatory Participle, for it always takes someone off the hook on which he richly deserves to hang and swing.

This participle is much loved by the more devious and cowardly of our do-gooders. It permits them piously to deplore this dreadful Society as a Hole in which some wives and children are daily beaten into insensibility, without requiring them to say anything that might diminish the self-esteem or violate the civil rights of the beaters. I have often wondered about this strange inconsistency, but I do believe that this contemplation of the Exculpatory Participle has led me at last to understand it.

Something like this must be the case: In a building overlooking DuPont Circle, there is a fund-raising outfit that gathers in money for the care and feeding of wives and children who have been once too often beaten into insensibility. Not a bad idea at all, in fact a good one, and some portion of the money probably does go to do just that.

Just down the hall, however, there is another fund-raising outfit, owned and operated by kissing cousins of the beaten wives and children's fund, and devoted to the gathering of money for the shaping up and the legal defense of the beaters of wives and children, which is also, I must admit, not entirely a bad idea. Now I ask you, Does the right hand bite the left?

And should either one of these noble efforts actually do what it says it wants to do, and stamp out utterly the great evil that it so valiantly fights, would it not put both itself and its counterpart down the hall utterly out of business, thus throwing countless of America's most sincere people right out of jobs, and bringing to an end the whole enterprise of fund-raising and social betterment as we know it?

For the prevention of such hideous consequences, the Exculpatory Participle is sovereign.

Now neglect does not drift in the air like soot particles. It originates in some person. And, since neglect is not simply the absence of care and attention but rather the absence of care and attention in who should give care and pay attention, I have some trouble in measuring the degree of my own culpability in the case of "our young." For the health and happiness of some sad sick child in the streets of San Francisco, am I more, or less, responsible than Frank Perdue, for instance, or Mother Theresa, or Dan Rather? In those or any other cases, how is the "shouldness" to be weighed?

Reformers prefer (sometimes) not to consider shouldness; they want to avoid not only a High Moral Tone but even a Low One. But this puts them in a nasty bind. If you can't argue from "shouldness," then you can't say what everyone knows to be true, i.e., that the Prime Neglecters of children are their parents, in whom there is more should-ness than in me, or in Frank Perdue, or in Dan Rather. But Reformers suspect, and in this they are uncharacteristically correct, that you might as well preach to the sharks as talk to the parents. Neither will listen till their bellies are full, and when their bellies are full, all they can do is snooze at the bottom of the sea.

Some dyspeptic old-time philologist concluded that mankind developed language only when its affairs had come to that sad state in which any fool could see how useful it would be to tell lies. It is a tempting thought. No bee, I suspect, has ever come buzzing home to send its pals off on a wild goose chase so that it could quietly sneak back to where there really was some honey. In any species other than ours, it is hard to imagine any profit in mendacity. But it just won't wash. If our language is the medium in which we tell our lies, it is also the medium in which we tell that we are lying.

We usually guess that it is by checking the facts that we can know a lie from the truth, and in many cases, the more trivial generally, this is so. But as to the truly serious lies, lies so false that the liar himself is nothing more than an agent of falsehood, we don't need the facts. All we need is a not impossible combination of the power to read thoroughly and the will to read thoroughly. That may be a Great Power, but it comes, at last, from surprisingly little things.

A verb is just a verb. Little children can be taught to spot one. And a subject is just a subject. From seeing that, it is no big jump to noticing that some verbs , in whatever form, look a little lonely without a person standing by, like orphans who have mistakenly wandered into the father-son picnic. And a thorough reader asks: Well, who is this missing person, and why is he missing? Why has someone left him out?

This works the other way around, too. The power to write thoroughly is the power to stick to the truth. It takes no great study of philosophy, just a little grammar. If the values teachers would just require of their budding little writers that they attach a person to every verb that names an act that only a person can commit, and go looking for the antecedent to every pronoun they commit, it wouldn't be long before those values teachers actually learned something.

And furthermore...

WE have a footnote that we will pass on to our sometime sociogrammatologist when we can. The person whose admonition moved him, at last, to send us a piece may well have been a certain Marion Wright Edelman. She is a lawyer who is president of the Children's Defense Fund. We do not know, of course, that it was she who penned the words found in an unsigned solicitation for funds, but there is something about her language and thinking in general that makes us suspicious.

We read of her in the Christian Science Monitor. She was quoted as asking, of that little girl who was recently rescued from a well in Texas, "Why should she have fallen in that shaft anyway?" Then she answered her own question by saying that the nation was just not spending enough on child-care.

Now, as it happens, we know how it came about that that little girl fell into the well. Some damned fool neglected to throw a piece of plywood over it. That's all it would have taken. And it wasn't just any damned fool; it was a damned fool who had an immediately visible and indisputable responsibility for the safety of that little girl. And bad cess to him, or her, as the case may be.

Now here's what we wonder: If we spend enough money to root out and instruct every damned fool in the land to cover up all holes in the ground into which children might fall, shouldn't we also spend enough more so that each damned fool in America has a smoke-detector wherever children might burn? Well, of course. And then should we hire enough government agents to visit each smoke-detector when it comes time to change the batteries? Well, of course. Or should we, just maybe, see if we can come up with some way of preventing as many children as possible from growing up to be damned fools?

Around here, we happen to believe that might be done, and thus we are ready to call ourselves just as surely defenders of children as Marion Wright Edelman. A bit more surely, in fact, since we are ready to name those from whom we'd like to defend the children.

Edelman closes her remarks on the responsibilities of everyone with this extraordinary mind-boggler: "Until this society takes responsibility for all of its children, we make a mockery of all these pretensions about being an opportunistic society." Just brood on that for a while in the still watches of the night.

And then brood on this: How long would it take you, do you suppose, to explain to Ms Edelman exactly why her pronouncement, surely meant as sincere, comes out to be so funny?

If we got up an Edelman Defense Fund, what would we defend her from? Would it not be the same casual thoughtlessness that makes children children, by nature, and that also, by something that is not exactly the same as nature, makes damned fools damned fools? And how much would we have to spend on that?

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre;
nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.