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    The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes
    The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes
    The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes
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    The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    About this ebook

    This study investigates and encourages the inherent playfulness of language. By examining several case studies where the written word has gone astray, I intend this tongue-in-cheek discussion of errors to be both a fun exposition about language and a way to enjoy learning about effectiveness in communication.
    As children we think a single word can change forever how blossoms fall, or at least that’s what the poem told us. Later, we learn to depend on collections of words. We hope that their jostling Brownian randomness will somehow, eventually, encourage them to settle into a coherent meaning. Once we understand syntax, that words can form coherent structures, we know that more important is the order of their appearance if we want the heavy lifting we are demanding of them to be performed. For many, the final stop on this uneven path is a fascination with the forms, rigidly demanding the exact placement of the slotted word.
    Once the forms stretch, we realize that the endlessly plastic word can be twisted to suit nearly any shape. Deforming structure around it as if it were somehow unreal, the word is an arbitrary utterance cast adrift from intention and desire. By that point some are ready to abandon words entirely, and focus instead on what is known, the reliable physicality of the unworded phenomenological world, an image in a mirror, or going even further back, the glorious chaos that was the wordless real of their youth.
    Only after many years do we realize that we still rely on the single word, that we ask it to carry the burden of inevitable incoherence, collecting resonance as it tumbles across the page and time, squirming for space, a piglet at a teat, shouldering aside others in an urgent, interminable, demand for meaning.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateFeb 1, 2021
    ISBN9781987922967
    The Slippery Signifier: Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Book preview

      The Slippery Signifier - Barry Pomeroy

      The Slippery Signifier

      Accidental Grammar and Inadvertent Mistakes

      by

      Barry Pomeroy

      © 2021 by Barry Pomeroy

      All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

      For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

      ISBN 13: 978-1987922967

      ISBN 10: 1987922964

      This study investigates and encourages the inherent playfulness of language. By examining several case studies where the written word has gone astray, I intend this tongue-in-cheek discussion of errors to be both a fun exposition about language and a way to enjoy learning about effectiveness in communication.

      As children we think a single word can change forever how blossoms fall, or at least that’s what the poem told us. Later, we learn to depend on collections of words. We hope that their jostling Brownian randomness will somehow, eventually, encourage them to settle into a coherent meaning. Once we understand syntax, that words can form coherent structures, we know that more important is the order of their appearance if we want the heavy lifting we are demanding of them to be performed. For many, the final stop on this uneven path is a fascination with the forms, rigidly demanding the exact placement of the slotted word.

      Once the forms stretch, we realize that the endlessly plastic word can be twisted to suit nearly any shape. Deforming structure around it as if it were somehow unreal, the word is an arbitrary utterance cast adrift from intention and desire. By that point some are ready to abandon words entirely, and focus instead on what is known, the reliable physicality of the unworded phenomenological world, an image in a mirror, or going even further back, the glorious chaos that was the wordless real of their youth.

      Only after many years do we realize that we still rely on the single word, that we ask it to carry the burden of inevitable incoherence, collecting resonance as it tumbles across the page and time, squirming for space, a piglet at a teat, shouldering aside others in an urgent, interminable demand for meaning.

      Table of Contents

      Signification’s Many Eros [Sic]

      Linguistics, the Science of Semiotics

      A Case Study: Broken Signification in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker

      Ramming Reluctant Words

      Communication without Language

      There, Their and They’re: What Word Choice Says about the Chooser

      Nouns Used as Verbs

      Found Sentences: Misplacing People by Modifiers

      Found Sentences: Long Hours for Low Pay

      The High Today is Minus 8

      Found Sentences: How the Earth is Like an Orange

      Found Sentences: What is Bad for Society

      Found Sentences: Our Past and Present Future

      Found Sentences: A Response to the Signs

      Found Sentences: Going Back to Green

      Found Sentences: Earth is Like an Egg

      Found Sentences: Fresh Water Tears

      Racist Rob and Corrupt Politicians

      Found Sentences: When Plagiarism Goes Wrong

      The Return to Meaning

      Examining a Plagiarism Advertisement

      The Power and Downfall of Online Plagiarism Tools

      Appendix I: Sentences Used in this Study

      Appendix II: Bushed by Earle Birney

      Works Cited

      Signification’s Many Eros [Sic]

      As the chapter heading above, as well as the title of this book suggest, I am as drawn to language’s endlessly playful nature as I am linguistic mistakes or errors in signification. The wish to regularize grammar and punctuation, and to install rules about textual structure and language register, is an attempt to rein in language’s natural inclination to evade what we want to say. Instead of constraining language, we are treated to a jeering from the horizon of what is possible. Each utterance implicitly contains its converse, as well as a thousand other possibilities, and that frustrates any who will force upon language the accuracy of mathematics, and delights those who revel in alternative meanings, fresh ideas, and the multitudinous possibilities of lateral thinking.

      Communication has likely always been a proposition fraught with misunderstandings and ignorance. Only fistfuls of stone tools remain to report on our early development, so we can merely guess how we might have transmitted cultural knowledge. We must have communicated in some fashion, even if it were limited to gesture, but other than suggestive clues such as the existence of trade routes, we cannot confirm a particular date in our early development when we began to speak. Somehow, we told others about making rope—if we rely on the mute implications of a thirty-thousand-year-old fragment of twisted fibre¹—and twenty-five thousand years ago we were apparently explaining how to make pottery.² Later generations added more elaborate innovations to the craft and that likely demanded even greater linguistic sophistication.

      Studies of language diversity have led some to claim that language use is at least two hundred thousand years old,³ and certainly there are ways other than the spoken word to transmit cultural information.⁴ Early human development might well be crowded with people who lived their entire lives communicating solely by gesture and roughly drawn shapes on the cave floor. Doubtless they were also plagued by the same failures of communication and difficulty of expression that torment us now on the other side of the millennia.

      When writing began, five thousand years ago in Sumer, we mainly used it to keep records.⁵ Once the food in the granaries was counted, and the king had collected his taxes, the scribes turned to literary pursuits. They began to transcribe the stories that we’d been telling each other over cooking fires for tens of thousands of years, and supplemented that with their thoughts and guesses about the world around them. Although they were likely unaware of the possibility, such transcriptions would forever change the nature of information delivery.

      The suggestion that the written utterance was inalterable inevitably held it to a higher standard than the spoken text. If a detail in a campfire story went astray, then good-natured ridicule might be the worst one might expect,⁶ but accuracy of transcription when counting crops became crucial in the written text. This predilection continued into the writing of stories. The Christian bible tells us that In the beginning was the word, and although the bible is problematized by translation and editing, many Christians today still remain committed to the exact text of their particular translation and transliteration. As stories were laboriously transcribed by monks working by candlelight, the accuracy of their copy became an important way to discern the text’s validity.

      Those notions persist. Shakespearean scholars torment themselves and others over which version is authoritative⁷ and when his plays are performed directors are typically so precious about the exact wording that they rarely make changes to the lines.⁸ Not surprisingly, some of the first books to be printed in the post-Gutenberg era were grammar guides. They were meant to regularize the riot of spellings and structures that had always been in the language but which became more vexing as they crept into the written text.

      These valiant attempts, however well-intentioned, are ultimately doomed. Even ignoring the very real human tendency to be sloppy, language’s natural slipperiness combines with the fact that knowledge of grammatical rules is increasingly scarce on the ground. As well, the delight that many take in affronting others with the written word, and artistic manipulation of grammar and diction, labours alongside those for whom clarity of expression is merely arcane rules enforced by nerds who cannot get on with the business of living and expressing.

      Tom Waits tells us that Words are like music. Before you understand what they are they already have some value to them,⁹ and I would argue that their value only increases the more we try to grapple with them.

      For example, on a class paper my student claimed that Poverty is defined as the state of being extremely poor. With many online dictionaries engaging in exactly this type of tautology in their definitions, I wasn’t sure how to explain to them that their sentence delivered no more information than the word poor could accomplish on its own. In any event, that is not strictly true. Their sentence becomes much more engaging if we look beyond their intent.

      Some vague entity is doing the defining, we are told. Behind the subject—the poverty which is being defined—hovers another subject. That person doing the defining is nearly invisible in the sentence, even though the sentence gives them complete control over how poverty is constructed. As well, my student’s use of an intensifier suggests that being normally poor is not sufficient if one wants to be defined as living in a state of poverty. They need to be extremely poor in order to fit the definition. Because it is merely a state of being, as the sentence optimistically suggests, it need not last. The state of being extremely poor could easily shift, the sentence implies, and then the one who has been identified as poor might escape the grasp of such an authoritative-sounding vague definition.

      In this study, I am interested in pursuing such possibilities in language use. Although grammar, diction, and syntax are necessary fellow travellers on the way through this study, the main journey is about the tendency of language to wriggle from our grip. With the internet exacerbating language’s natural inclination to chaos, the field has become even more rewarding. A single evocative statement can have enough online resonance to ring across the globe as it is endlessly repeated and commented upon.

      When George W. Bush said, Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?¹⁰ he likely never thought he’d end up an internet meme or a warning to students to heed subject-verb agreement. Likewise, scurrilous YouTube and Facebook conflicts expose the ignorance and willful lack of interest in the language of those being confronted. With sentences as slippery as an eel on a mud flat, the online community deforms the meaning of words with the blunt hammer of ignorance, scatters punctuation like grass seed, and then defends their mercurial creation even while it squirms into a crippled coherence.

      Delightfully, when people online are accused of errors which complicate their message, their emotional response demands that they reply with misdirected prose and confusing vitriol:

      My English would win over a word contest w you on Any given day. Your assuming I’m illiterate n stupid You are what you say I am. My spell check n qwerty are in need of repair .much the way your brain is. Your rude your not adhering to the guidelines instructed. Doing edso to me evidence you would create drama in this family. Unacceptable.

      The writer above suggests that they are the equal of their online combatant, that their computer is faulty, and that those they address do not follow the grammatical and social rules of human interaction. Perhaps because we have long dealt with similar utterances, we are good at parsing such sentences. We read them in a doubled fashion. We interpret both what is said—in all of its incoherent rawness—and what we presume was meant.

      That doubled reading allows us to mix their intentions with their inadvertent resultant meanings until we have a stew of possibilities which is not suggested by either their reactive nature or lack of control over language. The irony of their claim is lost on few, but the idea that levels of illiteracy are decided by a word contest, that personal attacks amount to a proof of competence, and that some higher digital authority is in control of silly online banter, expose more about the writer than they might wish. Finally, the peculiar intimacy with which they address the offending party—inviting them into a family relationship—dislocates and personalizes the narrative even as their argument culminates with a moral condemnation.

      If this word salad were more coherent, it would waste several paragraphs delivering as much information and as many suggestive statements. The reader has a sense of the writer’s personality, ability, and educational background, even as he or she is flexing and stretching the words that have erupted onto the page.

      Another example which should be even more difficult to parse is a high school student interacting with their friends. They likely did not realize that by virtue of posting their statements that they had reached a wider audience, but I was struck by the clarity of their sentences despite the irregularity of their prose. They chose to manipulate some of the spelling and diction in accordance to what was fashionable at the time, and their grammar is a result of impatience and inability, but their pastiche of incoherence is still an understandable cultural snapshot from a particular time in the teenage world. Despite rebelliously flouting their teacher’s traditions, their message still hovers behind the words. Even in the face of a wish to obfuscate and posture, the reader’s ability to interpret meaning is resilient:

      i hav NO idea hoo took this pic on my camera.. it waz either taken by.. matt. or nick.. cuz gabrielz shoez R next 2 my head.. but that waz tha day i hella passed out N bardsley let me sleep tha hole period under a tree hahaha!!

      therez not much i kan put up here cuz.. itz jus gay 2 say wussup in public.. but hope everything werx out 4 tha better.. u better visit u punk!! mary N sarin.. no werdz kan xplain how grateful

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