English As She Is Spoke
Once upon a time, the Times would have discreetly cleaned up the following quote.
The only role for the court is once the state legislature establishes what the rules are, the court can decide if the rules have been properly applied.
That's Bob Levy of the Cato Institute. Time was, of course, when Mr Levy would not have opened his mouth except to say something far more difficult to misquote. If you have ever been deposed, or read an accurate transcription of your remarks, you will almost certainly have had the awful feeling that you're a bigger dunce than you think you are. That's the price of the mushrooming informality that has transformed public life, draining it of seriousness and gravitas. Most of us no longer even try to speak as we would write. While observing a few rules - getting our personal pronouns right, and making sure that verbs more or less agree with their subjects - we give little attention to extended sentence structure. We signal our meaning with body language as we go along, with pauses or changes in tone. That's what punctuation is for, and punctuating spoken words is something of an art. Now, the "correct" version of Mr Cohen's sentence - at least as I'd fix it - would be, "The only role for the court is to decide whether legislative rules have been properly applied." But this entirely suppresses the lanky quality of Mr Cohen's utterance, and perhaps an important glimpse into his personality and mode of thought. To capture the syntactic complexity of what he said, this might be better: "The only role for the court, once the state legislature has established what the rules are, is to decide if the rules have been properly applied." That's easy enough to read, but we no longer expect listeners to follow us through independent clauses; hence the superfluous second "the court," and the ungrammatical "can." But by simply inserting a colon after "is," Mr Cohen's sentence can have its cake and eat it, too. Voilà: what looked like an observation becomes a declaration.
Mr Cohen's remarks appear at the end of an article by Adam Nagourney about dissension within the Republican party regarding the Schiavo intervention. As I've said more than once, Terri Schiavo's occupation of center stage has broken me down. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people who right this minute are in the same state that she's in, and the only reason for singling her out and focusing on her life or death is grandstanding on the right. Grandstanding is objectionable at any time, but against the backdrop of looming crises in currency and oil it is positively Neronic. As I write, the case is on its headed for a full-court decision by the Eleventh Circuit - which it may not get. What a mercy it would be if Ms Schiavo would quietly expire in the meantime. When I think of the electrons that have been spilt in this affair, I'm sickened.
The Schiavo case does, however, reinforce my conviction that the Democratic Party should expire, too. It has shown itself to be clueless throughout the proceedings, exhibiting no leadership that might direct attention elsewhere. I don't think that the powerlessness of the Democratic congressional contingent is a matter of mere numbers. It is a lack of focus. The Democrats appear to have no concrete plan for accomplishing anything; it's as if they're weirdly ashamed of politics. Whenever I propose to M le Neveu that the Democrats fold their tents and steal away, he asks me what I'd replace it with, and I've never had an answer beyond a call for new blood. Today, though, I had an idea. The seed for it was planted yesterday, when I scanned an article by Nir Rosen in the new Harper's, about the elections in Iraq - ordinarily a subject that I refuse to think about (on grounds of extreme prematurity). Mr Rosen writes,
Election specialists generally agree that national elections in post-conflict countries should be held as late as possible; instead, local elections should occur first because they restore the conditions necessary for a fair and safe federal vote.
Gee, why didn't I think of that? What we need in our still-conflicted country is a party that works vigorously at the local level for local office by trying to advance a liberal agenda up close. The local party ought to be activist, invoking federal authority as rarely as possible. The Democratic Party has never operated in this way. It has always been a top-down, boss-driven institution, with voters taking their cue from party hacks and union leaders rather than making up their own minds. The Democratic Party, in short, has never been a liberal party.
Some sabbatical this is. I did have my best French lesson ever, though, yesterday; I think that I'm more than halfway to where I want to be. And I'm having a ball with Fleshmarket Close. When will Siobhan Clarke marry John Rebus? When he asks?
