A Way with Words, Part 4: Gabriela Mistral's Spiritual Metaphor

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, better known as Chilean poet and educator Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this sentence in her prose poem "La oración de la maestra" ("The Teacher's Prayer"):

Dame el levantar los ojos de mi pecho con heridas, al entrar cada mañana a mi escuela. (Lift my vision from my broken heart as I enter my school every morning.)

I want to start with the subjectivity and difficulty of translation. I take literary liberties since ojos literally means eyes (I use vision), pecho means chest (I use heart), and heridas means wounds (I use broken). Not all translations agree with me. I realize that eyes can be used metaphorically, as in "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord," from Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Presumably, Howe's use of eyes alludes to the human spirit, but I feel, rightly or wrongly, that vision is a more expansive, or existential, term for Mistral's ojos where English is concerned. As for chest wounds, I believe the more common English term broken heart is as figurative as the author's intent. 

Now, what makes Mistral's sentence sing so universally is its ascendent humility and unqualified passion for the children she teaches. We have heard the apt expression "Don't bring your work home" and the equally applicable "Don't bring your home life to work." As students or parents, we do not want teachers to allow outside pressures, disappointments, and sorrows to influence the way they teach or treat their students. Whatever bad happens to teachers outside the classroom should stay there.

Mistral's way with words elevates common wisdom to a summoning of her God for granting her spiritual faith, hope, and charity in teaching her students. In doing so, she transforms a simple statement into an essential, transcendent prayer.

A Way with Words, Part 3: Yuval Noah Harari's Parallel Definitions

After taking Yuval Noah Harari's brilliant course, A Brief History of Humankind, now available on YouTube, I decided to read his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book brought numerous unexpected pleasures, including Harari's fluid, trenchant writing style. 

I am reading Harari's most recent book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, brings new surprises, both in content and style. Note these two sentences from page 119 of Nexus: 

To summarize, a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, processing strong self-correcting mechanisms. 

The premise of Nexus is that since the beginning of time, no one person can change much in our world; indeed, communities (or information networks) are necessary to disseminate, interpret, and act on data for society to flourish. As Dennis Duncan's mostly unfavorable review of Nexus in the New York Times puts it, "In a nutshell, Harari's thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data."

You can see why the two sentences quoted above from Nexus are essential to understanding Harari's proposition. Those sentences taken together sing because of their parallelism in both parts of the statement. The first part of the sentences describes the type of information network belonging to each form of government, and the second part reflects on each government's relationship with what Harari calls self-correction. Communities that commit to infallibility of a central guiding doctrine, whether  economic, political, or religious, do not take well to self-correcting. Such systems are intolerant of people questioning their doctrine. Contrarily, true scientific communities are by definition self-correcting. They have no infallible doctrine and continually seek to advance knowledge and human prospects, meaning they will be quick to overrule an existing standard if someone can disprove it and propose a more fitting doctrine. 

The second part of the 500-page book covers what will happen to self-correcting communities as AI imposes greater influence on the world. I'm not there yet, but I still delight in Harari's thinking and expressiveness. 

A Way with Words, Part 2: G. K. Chesterton's Paradoxical Wit

In "Tremendous Trifles," the first of 36 essays in G. K. Chesterton's 1909 book of the same name, comes this concluding sentence:

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

A quick read of that sentence would make you miss the deep and rich insight of Chesterton's point. A bit of background. In this essay, the author uses a parable of two boys, Peter and Paul, whose wishes are granted by a passing wizard. Paul wishes to be a giant to easily walk across all the wonders of the world in no time, and Peter wishes to be only a half-inch high to endlessly strive for distant horizons of mere meters. You'll have to read the rest of the brief essay (1,316 words) to find how things turn out for the boys.

Think of Chesterton's aphorism in two parts. He begins with the claim that we live in a world of abundance, sometimes overwhelming in its beauty, breathtaking in its excitement, boundless in the experiences it affords us; he ends it with an indictment of a human condition lacking in imagination, enchantment, and inspiration. Also, note his verb choice: starve. Is he talking about a matter of life and death? Indeed, if we think of our mind and spirit as life-affirming mechanisms. Finally, hear the rhythm he creates with his repetition of for want of and near-repetition of wonders and wonder, the s prompting such a prominent contrast in meaning. In doing so, he challenges us to examine our worldview. We do live the life of the mind, as Hannah Arendt put it. And Chesterton underscores this point in the last paragraph of the essay: "everything is in an attitude of the mind."

A Way with Words, Part 1: Albert Murray's Singular Vernacular

With this post, I begin a 10-part series on unusual diction successful writers have used to capture their readers' attention. Let's start by checking out the singular syntax in the first sentence of chapter 4 of South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray. It's an awkward start for a reader of "fine literature," but knowing where Murray's coming from, I wouldn't change a word. Here it is:

The old place you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad was Chehaw, from which you used to take the Chehaw Special on into the campus.

Before dissecting Murray's sentence, let's consider the topic of Murray's chapter, titled "Tuskegee." Few places figure more prominently in American history than this Alabamian city. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Muscogee people who lived there were displaced to Indian Territory. Tuskegee was a site of cotton plantations owned by white slaveowners. In 1881, Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, a historically black land-grant university now known as Tuskegee University. The renowned Tuskegee Airmen who piloted fighter planes in World War II, originated from that campus. Tuskegee was also the location of the unethical and illegal 40-year Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, conducted by the United States Public Health Service, resulting in the death of many untreated black citizens at the hands of duplicitous healthcare workers and scientists. The racist gerrymandering of Tuskegee into a 28-sided voting district disadvantaged the dominant black voter base, leading to Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a 1960 Supreme Court case that found the redistricting violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace took a hard stand against the desegregation of Tuskegee High School. Today nearly 90 percent of Tuskegee's 9,000 residents are black with a third living in poverty. This is the Tuskegee Murray was writing about. 

Now, for Murray's 29-word sentence, many stylistic flourishes appear: 

1. Informal pronoun. Murray wants all his readers to feel as though they were listening to him talking to them on a street corner. The tone he sets with this device is remarkably conversational, frank, even endearing. Murray uses the pronoun you twice in the sentence, disregarding rhetorical purists who would eschew such a tactic.

2. Phrasal Verbs. Now Murray twice drops the same phrase in this sentence. He could have written the more concise came instead of used to come and took instead of used to take. I doubt he employed this language because he was being paid by the word. Rather, he again wanted that down-home-in-Alabama effect. 

3. Double prepositions. The phrases in from and on into seem awkward at first read. Yet those phrases reflect the way people speak, especially from Murray's neck of the woods. He was a native of Alabama. 

4. Mid-branching sentence. Murray divides the base clause, The old place was Chehaw, by 11 words: you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad. I'm not sure how many people usually speak like that, but I do. The effect creates an element of suspense. 

I admit that I had to read Murray's sentence twice to understand it. But sometimes that effort in itself is one of the pleasures of reading. He could have written Chehaw was the old place one would arrive from Atlanta by railroad, followed by the Chehaw Special to the campus. This 19-word alternative, a 10-word reduction (35 percent) just doesn't sing off the page like Murray's original—and original he was. The way he wrote that sentence, man, I could taste those words.

One Way of Getting Started in Writing

To get started efficiently with any business message, writers need a single purpose. The document itself should have only one point, each paragraph that follows should have only one supporting point, and each sentence should have only one focusing point. Easier said than done? No. 

One approach to achieving this objective is to heed the advice of "A (Very) Simple Way to Improve Your Writing" by Mark Rennella in the Harvard Business Review. The article, an easy five-minute read, systematically breaks down the writing process for a practical method that successful writers already use, and developing writers should. WORDS ON THE LINE is loaded with nearly 20 years of similar suggestions.  

On Breaking Parallel Structure

I have written often in this blog about the value of parallel structure in creating fluent, clear, and concise phrasing. Just type the term parallel in the search bar on this page for numerous helpful tips and examples on the topic. 

I have also written about breaking parallel structure to achieve a desired effect in fiction and business writing, and I have shown how great writers like Joan Didion have done so. For another example of breaking parallel structure, simply in the name of plain language, here is a sentence from former US President Barack Obama in a tribute on X to Ethel Kennedy after her death:

Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a passion for justice, an irrepressible spirit, and a great sense of humor.

If you'd say that sentence seems understandable, I'd agree. But Obama breaks with the parallel convention, which would not have proven as good a sentence. He describes three Kennedy's attributes:

• passion for justice (noun + prepositional phrase)
• irrepressible spirit (adjective + noun)
• great sense of humor (adjective, noun + prepositional phrase)

 Note the inconsistency in the phrasing. Here are three alternative and consistent phrasings based on the context of the original sentence:

1. Noun + Prepositional Phrases: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a passion for justice, humanity through an irrepressible spirit, and a sense of humor. 
2. Adjectives + Nouns: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with passionate justice, an irrepressible spirit, and great humor.  
3. Adjectives, Nouns + Prepositional Phrases: Ethel Kennedy was a dear friend with a deep sense of justice, an irrepressible spirit for humanity, and a great sense of humor. 

I hope you agree with me that example 1 seems robotic and redundant, example 2 nonfluent and confusing, and example 3 overwritten and verbose. Obama's usage, on the other hand, seems ironically parallel, although it technically isn't. The three phrases he chooses are more common speech and, therefore, heartfelt and understandable.

My point: Use parallel structure but know when to break this rule.

 

Writers Must Change Their Language

"Writers are obliged, at some point, to realize that they are involved in a language which they must change." - James Baldwin, "On Language, Race, and the Black Writer" in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

Although James Baldwin began his essay with the sentence in the epigraph to assert a cause for racial justice, I would suggest that all writers should heed his advice, from novelists, playwrights, or poets creating an artistic work; to technical writers crafting instructions; to investigators authoring incident reports; to administrators composing policies; to auditors drafting workpapers; to managers positioning proposals; to lawyers finessing court briefings. Language changes, and writers are responsible to effect those changes as reasonably, precisely, and understandably as possible.

Words constantly enter our lexicon thanks to changes in our culture, workplace, and technology. We need new words, or at least word forms, to express novel concepts. As an example, think of smishing, which conveniently refers to a fraudulent text message posing as from a reputable source intended to capture personal information from the receiver. As new words arrive, we must be mindful of how best to use them in terms of their context. We would not want to say we were smished if someone pickpocketed us or scammed us in a three-card monte game. We have other words for those schemes; I would settle for robbed. On the other hand, I can imagine any of us comfortably—and accurately—saying, "She's ghosting her boyfriend for his incessant mansplaining." 

Writers also need to refine existing words to reflect the times they live in. As we moved toward gender-inclusive language, English language writers replaced terms like policeman with police officer and mankind with humankind. Sensitive to pejorative meanings of words, they prefer an inexpensive product to a cheap one, as the former denotes only price while the latter connotes poor quality. Managers might write about a project due date, which seems more neutral than the stress-inducing deadline.

Baldwin's insight about the writer's obligation reminds us that language is fluid, and as writers, we are the architects of its evolution.