Holding the Line
If you don’t pay a monthly water bill to the City Treasurer, you may not know that the great bureaucracy constituting our city government is looking out for the common interest with regular reminders to monitor the amount of water we devote to landscape. (The City’s lack of care to limit property development to what our water resources can sustain is apparently an unrelated issue best kept from the attention of the rate-payers.)
In the lower right corner of each month’s water bill is a space reserved for notices relevant to our water use. For about three years, that space has been devoted to the same question, framed in several ways.
From October 2004 to April 2005, the space contained the following sentence:
“Fall is a good time to tune-up and turn down the irrigation.” This was followed by the offer of a free survey of one’s water usage, available to anyone calling the phone number provided.
Having taken that message to heart when it first appeared, I gave it little attention thereafter, cutting the Water Department some slack for the grammatically inappropriate hyphen. My bill for May 2005, however, in the same space contained the following revised version of the question: “How much water does your lawn, flowers and trees need?”
“Ha!” thought I. “Somebody’s going to get a wrist slapped for that one.” I confess to letting the subject slip out of my mind between water bills, but when the same sentence reappeared on the June bill, I decided to keep an eye on that corner to see how long it would take for someone to catch and correct the grammatical error. July? Nope, same sentence. August? Nope. When the sentence reappeared in September, I couldn’t take it any more.
I called the Water Department, probably in off hours, and left a message, no doubt sounding like an overwrought eccentric. But I didn’t care. I had right on my side and was determined to hold the line. Amazingly enough, on the October 2005 water bill the sentence stood corrected: “How much water do your lawn, flowers and trees need?” Hurray! Chalk one up for the squeaky wheel and extend our lease on the English language!
The Water Department ran along grammatically in its bureaucratic groove, winter, spring, summer, and fall, with neither false hyphen nor agreement error in sight—until June 2007, when suddenly, there it was again: “How much water does your lawn, flowers and trees need?”
The error’s reappearance could not have been the result of the fresh copy of a newcomer. Everything else in that corner space was identical. No—someone had looked at the correct sentence, decided that it sounded wrong, and silently (as editors say) emended it, no doubt feeling “There, that sounds better; I’ve done a good deed today.”
No more second or third chances now. I gave the Water Department only one. When the bill came for July?—“does.” So I called. But this time I held the line (in the other sense) in order to speak to a customer service representative. When she heard my English teacher’s hysteria—“Here we English teachers are doing our best to teach our students grammar, and there you are sending out millions of ungrammatical water bills, setting a terrible example to any customers who happen to be paying attention, not to mention any of their children who might want to practice their reading on the monthly water bill, just as if grammar didn’t matter; how do you expect us to take the trouble to conserve water when you won’t even take the trouble to conserve the language? etc.”—she behaved with exemplary patience and offered me the direct phone number of the Water Department’s Supervising Public Information Officer.
I call, leave an equally passionate message, and—wonder of wonders!—he calls me back. Not only that, he sustains my objection and reports that he has given order that no water bill blurbs will henceforth go to press without being read and approved by himself. “We all need an editor,” he says. I agree, without adding that some need more editor than others. But I am confident that the friendly and obviously intelligent Supervising Public Information Officer is more than capable of correcting “does” to “do” when the subject of the sentence is plural, even in a direct question where normal word order is inverted.
Why am I telling you this? Not only because at times I feel like the only squeaky wheel in the city and want company. Not only because the Supervising Public Information Officer of the Water Department deserves credit. I want to illustrate the necessity and the possibility of holding the line.
“Holding the line” this time means taking a stand for grammar and civilization, even when the scale seems daunting. It’s not really cities we are up against, or even water departments. They are abstractions—real, but not to be conversed with. Actually we are up against potentially reasonable supervisors of imperfectly educated clerks who may respond well to reason and truth if they can be reached.
I know that the Water Department’s Supervising Public Information Officer is a public servant and ultimately answerable to the people, and no doubt he is paid partly for dealing with cranks like me. It might have gone harder with AT&T or Microsoft. Still, we have to hold the line (in both senses). Why? Because either lawn, flowers, and trees does need water, or they do.
If they does, then it’s good-bye to precise human discourse, the medium of communication about anything significant to the naturally social beings we are. It is by nature that animals preserve the grammars of their own forms of communication. But the nature of human beings is that we must hold the line by choice. And if we fail to do so, not only education, literature, and politics are at risk: Whom does us think am going to get them its water?
In the lower right corner of each month’s water bill is a space reserved for notices relevant to our water use. For about three years, that space has been devoted to the same question, framed in several ways.
From October 2004 to April 2005, the space contained the following sentence:
“Fall is a good time to tune-up and turn down the irrigation.” This was followed by the offer of a free survey of one’s water usage, available to anyone calling the phone number provided.
Having taken that message to heart when it first appeared, I gave it little attention thereafter, cutting the Water Department some slack for the grammatically inappropriate hyphen. My bill for May 2005, however, in the same space contained the following revised version of the question: “How much water does your lawn, flowers and trees need?”
“Ha!” thought I. “Somebody’s going to get a wrist slapped for that one.” I confess to letting the subject slip out of my mind between water bills, but when the same sentence reappeared on the June bill, I decided to keep an eye on that corner to see how long it would take for someone to catch and correct the grammatical error. July? Nope, same sentence. August? Nope. When the sentence reappeared in September, I couldn’t take it any more.
I called the Water Department, probably in off hours, and left a message, no doubt sounding like an overwrought eccentric. But I didn’t care. I had right on my side and was determined to hold the line. Amazingly enough, on the October 2005 water bill the sentence stood corrected: “How much water do your lawn, flowers and trees need?” Hurray! Chalk one up for the squeaky wheel and extend our lease on the English language!
The Water Department ran along grammatically in its bureaucratic groove, winter, spring, summer, and fall, with neither false hyphen nor agreement error in sight—until June 2007, when suddenly, there it was again: “How much water does your lawn, flowers and trees need?”
The error’s reappearance could not have been the result of the fresh copy of a newcomer. Everything else in that corner space was identical. No—someone had looked at the correct sentence, decided that it sounded wrong, and silently (as editors say) emended it, no doubt feeling “There, that sounds better; I’ve done a good deed today.”
No more second or third chances now. I gave the Water Department only one. When the bill came for July?—“does.” So I called. But this time I held the line (in the other sense) in order to speak to a customer service representative. When she heard my English teacher’s hysteria—“Here we English teachers are doing our best to teach our students grammar, and there you are sending out millions of ungrammatical water bills, setting a terrible example to any customers who happen to be paying attention, not to mention any of their children who might want to practice their reading on the monthly water bill, just as if grammar didn’t matter; how do you expect us to take the trouble to conserve water when you won’t even take the trouble to conserve the language? etc.”—she behaved with exemplary patience and offered me the direct phone number of the Water Department’s Supervising Public Information Officer.
I call, leave an equally passionate message, and—wonder of wonders!—he calls me back. Not only that, he sustains my objection and reports that he has given order that no water bill blurbs will henceforth go to press without being read and approved by himself. “We all need an editor,” he says. I agree, without adding that some need more editor than others. But I am confident that the friendly and obviously intelligent Supervising Public Information Officer is more than capable of correcting “does” to “do” when the subject of the sentence is plural, even in a direct question where normal word order is inverted.
Why am I telling you this? Not only because at times I feel like the only squeaky wheel in the city and want company. Not only because the Supervising Public Information Officer of the Water Department deserves credit. I want to illustrate the necessity and the possibility of holding the line.
“Holding the line” this time means taking a stand for grammar and civilization, even when the scale seems daunting. It’s not really cities we are up against, or even water departments. They are abstractions—real, but not to be conversed with. Actually we are up against potentially reasonable supervisors of imperfectly educated clerks who may respond well to reason and truth if they can be reached.
I know that the Water Department’s Supervising Public Information Officer is a public servant and ultimately answerable to the people, and no doubt he is paid partly for dealing with cranks like me. It might have gone harder with AT&T or Microsoft. Still, we have to hold the line (in both senses). Why? Because either lawn, flowers, and trees does need water, or they do.
If they does, then it’s good-bye to precise human discourse, the medium of communication about anything significant to the naturally social beings we are. It is by nature that animals preserve the grammars of their own forms of communication. But the nature of human beings is that we must hold the line by choice. And if we fail to do so, not only education, literature, and politics are at risk: Whom does us think am going to get them its water?
posted by G.Rap | 11:33 PM
5 Comments:
I must first start off by saying that I have never posted on your blog before. More importantly, the reason I haven't commented has a lot to do with the exact thing that this post is about. Grammar has never been my strongest suit and I know for a fact that I am a huge culprit of the comma splice and run on sentences. I am responding, however, because you should know that you are not alone in this fight. Jenn has been fondly dubbed, by myself and other family members, the "Grammar Nazi." I thought you might enjoy that little fact and perhaps you and Jenn can have a little "grammar get together" sometime.
But do not fret. In my lame attempt to strengthen my grammar muscles, I have downloaded all the podcasts of my favorite NPR show. A show that I have always listened too even when I was a wee high school student: "A Way With Words." So perhaps, all is not lost.
You may now whip out your red pen and mark up my comment with all the grammar mistakes I know exist.
I appreciate that you have taken on this crusade. I often feel the same way and I am glad someone has done something about it. I have passed on this story to my English tutor colleagues and it will no doubt be one of my anecdotes when I begin my cautionary tale on the differences between how people speak and how people write, which is the opening of my lesson plan on grammar.
I found only one comma missing. Otherwise, pretty clean comment! So don't sell yourself short in the grammar department.
Sometimes I want to call "A Way with Words" "Away with Words" when they get too cutesy.
But thanks for letting me know I'm not alone. (I knew I wasn't really. I only feel like it sometimes.)
Jenn: Bravo! Keep it up.
You will be happy to know that "A Way With Words" has been done away with due to budget cuts. Not only did the show drive me insane, I also had the misfortune of meeting the main host, who was even more pretentious in person than he was on the air.
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