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Nancy Bauer

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I’m musing about language again. A few days ago I was told that many languages don’t have the present progressive tense.

Can people studying English as their second language ever learn to use it? It would be too bad if they couldn’t because it’s wonderfully evocative. (It’s often called an aspect rather than a tense.) The act is not over and not about to begin; instead, it is ongoing.

The reader is inside the action. Because English is such a flexible language, we can also use the progressive in ungrammatical ways. The McDonald’s slogan, “I’m loving it,” is brilliant. Ungrammatical, but brilliant. If I’m trying to reach a decision, I can say to my passenger, “I’m just thinking – we could go down the Green Road instead of the Blue Road.”I am conveying that the decision has not already been made. Participial phrases and gerunds also give us the sense of being in the middle of a continuing action.

The prologue of Sheree Fitch’s novel, Kiss the Joy As It Flies, gets much of its liveliness from its use of all those“ing”words.

I pick up a book at random, P.D. James’ The Private Patient, and come to the tape-recorded confession of the murderer. “I am speaking to Commander Adam Dalgliesh in the knowledge that this tape will be passed on to the coroner…. What I am speaking now is the truth….”

In a recent video, poet Richard Wilbur is telling an anecdote about his first New Yorker publication 60 years ago.

The editor, Katharine White (Mrs. E.B. White), informed him that he didn’t know the difference between which and that, having twice used which incorrectly. He responded that which seemed “like a rough, energetic word” and that seemed “smooth.”“I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake/The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell/And held in ice as dancers in a spell/Fluttered all winter long into a lake.” Leafing through his collected poems, I see that Wilbur continued to use which ungrammatically.

I have trouble remembering the distinction: that is restrictive, which is not. A non-restrictive clause is preceded by a comma, a restrictive clause is not.

Theoretically, Wilbur should have written “the late leaves down that frozen.” The leaves that turn red are from maple trees. The leaves from maple trees, which are deciduous, often turn red. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s essay about revising fiction, Cutting out the Whiches, inf luenced me greatly; I seldom use which so that I won’t have to cut it out.

I like neologisms. Learning new words makes me feel “with it.” Children delight in learning new words. I also like to learn old words that are new to me. Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam writes that Canadians use these words for underwear: gaunch, ginch, gotch, gitch. I have never heard anyone here use those words. I’ve heard Stanfield used for long underwear in the same way that Kleenex is used for any tissue. Our local CBC station classifies cold weather as a“two Stanfield day.”

A few months ago members of my family had a discussion about the difference between empathic and empathetic. I had a vague sense that empathic had a mystical connotation; an empath would be empathic.

I thought empathetic was a better word to describe the virtue of being attuned to others’ feelings.

I learned, however, that there’s no such distinction although empathetic is more widely used. Both are new words, created in the 1930s.

When I’ve finished a piece, I read it out loud to myself. I’m not sure why the spoken word seems different from the written word. Some poets help you understand their poems by reading them out loud.

And then there are poets whose poems become less intelligible. There is a droning “poet reading his poetry at a poetry reading” convention that is very off putting. But an attempt to overly dramatize can also be off putting. Japing, my husband calls it. It used to be that a poet would explain the poem before he read it, would perhaps tell the audience of its genesis.

This tradition has faded – too bad because I have always found it illuminating. The spoken word should include some helpful prose because you can’t go back to re-read the poem.

I was told that the monarch of the Netherlands unilaterally banished grammatical gender from the Dutch language. Many languages do have grammatical gender; a bridge is either masculine or feminine.

Scholars have examined how this use of gender affects the way the people speaking the language view the inanimate object. Spaniards describe a bridge with an adjective that could apply to a woman: graceful. Germans use an adjective that could apply to a man: solid. I wonder, do the actual structures of bridges differ between Germany and Spain?

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wb auer@nbnet.nb.ca.