Transition
Originally published, Sunday, November 29, 2009
Transition quite recently became a verb.
Parent has been one for a while.
Concerning used to be a preposition but sometime in the last 18 months or so
it turned into an adjective.
These changes make me feel as if the floor is tilting, though not as steeply
as some of the grammatical and idiomatic shifts of the past couple of
decades. People now say without embarrassment, “They invited him and I for
dinner,” or “The twentieth is Mary and I’s anniversary.” They declare that,
“Greedy bankers played a big factor in the global meltdown” and that “Each
applicant has to bring their resume,” and “No less than nine demonstrators
turned up for the protest.”
Of these surely the silliest is each/their, because a plural would so easily
resolve the mismatch — “All applicants must bring their resumes.” But that
resolution will not occur. Also, in the remainder of
my lifetime I don’t expect to be able to write the words passion, vision,
terrible, or awesome in their “true” senses. I accept all that. Part of me
doesn’t care much anyway; I’m not as upset as Madame the concierge in Muriel
Barbery’s remarkable novel “The Elegance of the Hedgehog.” She’s truly
horrified by what she sees as not simply imprecision or carelessness but as
actual abuse of language.
I do though remember with much love my aunt Isabel Wilson, a fine editor and
broadcaster who was never in her long life able to write a sentence starting
with But (as I did in the previous parag) or with And. She tried, but just
couldn’t leave those poor co-ordinating conjunctions out on the ice-floe
with no help at hand. So then I feel guilty because my standards have
slipped; I am part of the process of change, perhaps even of the general
deterioration. I haven’t parented my language well.
Like many writers who’ve been at it for decades, I use far less punctuation
than formerly. My diction includes fewer formal words. My paragraphs overall
are shorter, I think. Less, more, shorter, longer — for good or ill these
all have to do with writing fiction, which is supposedly what I do with my
life. I am however transitioning between the publication (end) of one book,
The English Stories, and the creation (beginning) of another, possibly
titled Red Girl Orange Boy.
So here I am. I hate this in-between place, this flux. I’m afraid to go
into my writing studio. The stories there, whether half-first-drafted, many
times drafted, sent out and rejected, or only present in the form of a few
scribbles in my notebook, could easily all be dead. And if I find one or two
in the morgue that have a pulse, I don’t feel confident about applying the
paddles with any skill. So I dither and avoid, and I daydream about grammar.
Yes, it’s concerning
