This Month

As one obliged to rummage occasionally among the writings of educators, I believe I have discovered why the process of learning at their hands, or feet, is so painfully slow. The reason, and it irks me to have perceived it only at this late date, accounts for many hitherto baffling aspects of what might be called the academic lag. It is why reading assignments take so long, why lectures defy the note-taker, why the content of a course becomes so bulky, and why the bulk yields up so grudgingly its tiny treasures of information.

The reason, briefly, is the multinegative, the “I-am-not-unaware” school of expression. I discovered it quite by chance one evening when I realized suddenly that I had been stalled for upwards of fifty minutes in pondering the meaning of the following sentence in an untitled report (instead of a title the author had provided twenty-four lines of explanation of what the report was a bout): —

“On the other hand, and leaving aside the slightly ludicrous spectacle of American universities actually paying for foreign propaganda, however harmless, it is impossible not to recognize that the excessive emphasis on sentiment which results from our present practice does anything but militate in favor of the objectivity with which any field of study should be approached, nor does it render more easy the integration of foreign languages in the general scheme of American education.”

If the reader is not unimpressed by the traps which the author neglected to omit from this example of plus-andminus construction, I too am not unreluetant not to deny that such omissions would not have helped, not inconsiderably, my own comprehension of the sentence.

We are, in other words, in accord. We fail to misunderstand each other perfectly.

But at what point, in this by no means indefensible sentence that I could not forbear quoting, did — or do I mean did not ? — unreason set in ?

The length of the sentence is formidable. Reading it aloud, I experienced a tendency to run out of breath on reaching the words “present practice,” strain though I would to gasp my way further into the punch part of the mid-section. I felt like an operatic tenor trying to outstay the orchestra on his final note, and in reading aloud, just as in opera, such strivings are often damaging to the sense of a passage. Yet many a lead sentence in the New York Times is equally long, and I found that even study and reflection left me groping for the meaning in this case. I did not care whether it was a plus meaning or a minus meaning, up or down, good or bad: I simply wanted to know which.

I blush to confess it, but I next wasted a solid ten minutes on the word “nor.” On my first run-through, I had got all the way up to “nor” without quite realizing that I was already in trouble. “Nor” stopped me dead in my tracks. Come now, I told myself, you’re overtired, try it again. And once again I retraced my way from “On the other hand,” down through “present practice,” picked up speed through “objectivity”— I felt somehow that the author was not against objectivity even though I wasn’t too happy about militating in favor of something — but my attempt to vault “nor” was a total flop. I never even got off the ground.

Unwilling though I am not to trespass further on the reader’s attention with “nor,” I shall nevertheless get on with the fact: there is nothing wrong with “nor.” It’s exactly what the author wanted, it’s in the right place, in good working order. So, although I admit it without unregret, is the rest of the sentence. The fault was mine in attempting to read the thing aloud.

In joining up with a sentence like this one, the reader has no idea of where he is headed. He knows, to begin with, that the way is long, the going rough, and he finds himself clinging to every important-looking word as a kind of handhold: he can’t afford to let go of one until he has grasped another.

Thus it was that I reached, immediately after getting through the prefatory underbrush, for a pair of sturdy words—“impossible” and “recognize.” I managed to swing along from these to a clutch on “does” — certainly a solid enough word — and “militate.”

But in all this repeated trial and failure, a single error was balking me: somewhere in the first attempt, I had lost an essential “not,” the one right after “impossible.” How it happened — dropped, left behind, never packed at all — I do not know. It was lying right there in plain view in the fore part of the sentence when I finally retrieved it. Without the “not,” I was coming up to “nor” again and again with only a double negative under my belt, a plus sign, if you please, from which the “nor” could lead nowhere.

I held fast to the “not” as if to Ariadne’s thread, once I had regained it, and with three minus signs in hand to give me a firm negative at the take-off, I was able to breeze through “nor” without even breaking my stride.

Now that I have solved the sentence, I feel more at ease about the writing capacity of the college (Smith) language department whence the report came. I see no reason to doubt that its written material is not substantially inadequate.

CHARLES W. MORTON