Monday, August 22, 2011

Postal Service Pettiness

According to my Quicken program, it was on March 5, 2011 that I purchased a roll of a hundred forever (currently 44 cents) stamps and a roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps for $61.00.  On Tuesday, August 9, I used two of the last few stamps on that roll of a hundred 17 cent stamps to mail two number 10 envelopes that weighed - according to my fifteen or twenty year old postal scale - between one and two ounces each.  They were mailed from Bedford, Pennsylvania, that afternoon respectively to Levittown and McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.
The following Saturday morning, August 13, the one addressed to McConnellsburg showed up in my post office box bearing a scrawled notation: "postage due 3¢".  I gave the clerk a dollar bill and a piece of my mind while she added three cents worth of postage to the envelope and returned my ninety-seven cents change. Apparently the envelope had been to McConnellsburg and back in the intervening four days.  Some fanatical bean-counter in the system somewhere a couple days away had decided to teach a postal regulation scoff-law (yours truly) a lesson and sent the thing back through channels.  The other one - same exact weight, same exact amount of postage - has never returned.
The clerk told me she thought the seventeen cent charge for the second and each succeeding ounce on first class mail had been changed to twenty cents around "tax day" (as she put it) - I suppose April 15 or whatever day this year tax returns were due.
I recall seeing nothing about that increase in postal rates.  Of course, that doesn't mean that there was no public notice given or that there was not some piece in the newspaper about that time.  But I genuinely don't remember seeing anything.  Nor has there been any notice posted in the post office, which I visit daily, since I have a post office box, about the three cent increase on the second ounce for first class mail.
Apparently I have been mailing things that weighed more than one ounce with at least three cents postage due on them since the middle of April.  It took me a total of about five months to use up the hundred seventeen cent stamps.  I am now the proud owner of a roll of twenty cent stamps (purchased August 11), which I have been using conscientiously.
My initial reaction was to feel ill-used by the Postal Service; however, now I am wondering whether a humble penitence would not be more appropriate.  After all, about four-fifths of my mailings of more than one ounce the last five months have been three cents short.  That would work out to a free ride of about two dollars and forty cents I have enjoyed at the expense of the Postal Service.  Maybe I should send them a check, or better yet, buy two hundred forty one cent stamps (or a hundred twenty two cent stamps or eighty three cent stamps) and just put them indiscriminately, if entirely unnecessarily, on envelopes until I've used them all up.
Still, I could wish the Postal Service had been as scrupulous about giving public notice of this rate change as it has been about warning potential armed robbers about the consequences of their intended crime, as in this poster prominently displayed on the door of my local post office:
There must be scores if not hundreds of drug or alcohol-addled, marginally literate, firearm wielding felons dumb enough to want to steal a bunch of junk mail, social security checks or rolls of twenty cent stamps who have been definitively deterred by this very scary, very red notice.  It certainly got my notice.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Contemporary Nonfiction - Latin used well; Latin used poorly

 I - Well

It was over the winter just past that I discovered David Foster Wallace, in the form of his essay for Harper's Magazine (April, 2001) entitled "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage," ostensibly a review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but actually a very winningly articulated discussion of the "usage wars," in which he seems to lay the groundwork for a kind of post-prescriptivism that would combine a friendly good sense with a sane respect for tradition.

He begins his piece with the tag: "Dilige et quod vis fac. - St. Augustine."  In a way this sums up his basic point about close questions of usage.  Who, however, would realize that?  The Latin is from the seventh of a series of homilies by this Patristic author on the First Letter of John in the New Testament.  In Latin the name of this collection is In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos Tractatus Decem.  Here is the section of this sermon containing this line:

Hoc diximus in similibus factis. In diversis factis, invenimus saevientem hominem factum de caritate; et blandum factum de iniquitate. Puerum caedit pater, et mango blanditur. Si duas res proponas, plagas et blandimenta; quis non eligat blandimenta, et fugiat plagas? Si personas attendas, caritas caedit, blanditur iniquitas. Videte quid commendamus, quia non discernuntur facta hominum, nisi de radice caritatis. Nam multa fieri possunt quae speciem habent bonam, et non procedunt de radice caritatis. Habent enim et spinae flores: quaedam vero videntur aspera, videntur truculenta; sed fiunt ad disciplinam dictante caritate. Semel ergo breve praeceptum tibi praecipitur: Dilige, et quod vis fac: sive taceas, dilectione taceas; sive clames, dilectione clames; sive emendes, dilectione emendes; sive parcas, dilectione parcas: radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum existere.

You can find a translation at the New Advent website.  It can scarcely be more conservative and traditional than to cite St. Augustine for anything these days, but of course, like most condensations of wisdom, there is undoubted truth in this nugget, even if, misunderstood, half-understood, or twisted by fanaticism, it could be advanced as justification for the worst sorts of wickedness. 

Was Wallace familiar with the source - i.e., had he read Augustine in the original Latin - or was he aware of the quote from elsewhere - note that as a string in quotes the Latin sentence fetches some 227,000 hits on Google?  Or is the more pertinent question really what sort of readership had Wallace in mind. Consider the other sprinkles of Latin in the essay:
  • Not more than a couple pages later, we encounter the second Latin expression:  "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage has no Editorial Staff or Distinguished Panel.  Itʻs conceived, researched, and written ab ovo usque ad mala by Bryan Garner."  (p. 42)  
  • On the same page he appends a footnote [he loves footnotes] to the use of a cardinal number in stating the age of an individual: "(7. Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten.  I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.)" 
  • Another shot of Latin is not injected until page 46, again in another footnote: "19  Standard Written English (SWE) is also sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the inditement-emphasis is the same.    SEMI-INTERPOLATION    Plus note that Garnerʻs Preface explicitly names ADMAUʻs intended audience as "writers and editors."  And even ads for the dictionary in such organs as The New York Review of Books are built around the slogan "If you like to WRITE. . . Refer to us." (Yr. snoot rev. cannot help observing, w/r/t these ads. that the opening r in Refer here should not be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipse -- Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.)"  
  • Not until page 51 do we encounter a little more Latin, this time the title of a book, again in a footnote: "33  (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smithʻs cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Diologus of 1568.)" [note that unfortunately a spelling error has intruded - Diologus should of course be Dialogus - and note if youʻre interested you can get a reprint of the book from Amazon].  
  • The last bit of Latin appears at page 57: "Garner recognizes something that neither of the dogmatic camps appears to get: Given 40 years of the Usage Wars, "authority" is no longer something a lexicographer can just presume ex officio."  
I have provided links to Wikipedia explanations of all these expressions.  Note that Wallace never offers a translation or explanation (other than what may be gleaned from his immediate context).  But note as well that every use of a Latin expression adds something, ordinarily to the meaning itself of what he is saying, but in every instance certainly to the tone and style with which he says it.  Still remains the question what sort of person did Wallace expect would be reading this?  Certainly he was assuming a readership such that either he did not even consider using English equivalents instead of the Latin, or he considered and rejected the idea.

I pass over the fact that Wallace does not seem to have a solid grasp of the Latin abbreviation q.v. (quod vide).  He uses it on three occasions.  In each, as in footnote 33 page 51, he seems to really mean vide.  At least he does not use cf. when he only wants to suggest that the reader look at something else.

II - Poorly

In contrast to the deft and appropriate use of Latin in Wallace's article, consider this passage from another book I recently read, Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System", pp. 166-7: "When we define what matters in education only by what we can measure, we are in serious trouble.  When that happens, we tend to forget that schools are responsible for shaping character, developing sound minds in healthy bodies (mens sana in corpore sano), and forming citizens for our democracy, not just for teaching basic skills."  Here, the Latin is almost perfectly pointless.  It is nothing more than a sort of translation into Latin of the preceding English phrase "sound minds in healthy bodies" - I say sort of since it ignores the plural/singular issue so as to stay with the proverbial original.  It adds no twist or comment.  It is a mere redundancy.  It seems to have been added - and parenthetically at that - only as some kind of citation to ancient authority in support of the proposition that it is a good idea to have a sound mind in a healthy body.  For some 160 pages I had been following her arguments, thinking them pretty sound and pretty effectively marshaled, and only mildly annoyed by her habit of name-dropping, when this infelicity appeared.   It leaves me wondering why on earth did she bother dropping this Latin nugget into her sentence.  Recall that the author holds a doctorate in history, writes extensively on the history of education, and has filled a number of impressively named posts in government (Bush I and Clinton administrations) and private institutions.  This is all the Latin she could muster in support of any of the ideas in her book?

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Poe's preface to The Pit and the Pendulum

What's up with prefaces in Latin?

Consider Poe's 1842 story The Pit and the Pendulum, which he introduces with this pair of elegiac couplets:

           Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores,
           sanguinis innocui non satiata, aluit.
           Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
           Mors ubi dira fuit, vita salusque patent.


He adds this note: "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club at Paris." He apparently got the lines here.

This introduction sums up the entire story. The impia. . . turba. . .sanguinis innocui non satiata - the bloodthirsty Inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying religious heresy - can hardly not be equated with the Jacobin Club - the bloodthirsty revolutionaries dedicated to rooting out and destroying political heresy. This unholy mob has fed its longlasting insanity, but now the land has been made safe, the murderous pit has been eradicated and where once there was terrible death, now there is life and well-being. In short, the narrator will not die. There will be a rescue.

This might seem to imply that for the author the ending of the story has almost no importance [note that this notion derives some support from the very abruptness and brevity of the concluding paragraph of the story], that the key thing is to have his reader focus on the elegant effectiveness of his evocation of the dread, terror and despair of someone undergoing this sort of physical and psychological torture. Of course the ending is not without any importance. Probably it was also one of the objects of the author to induce by means of his artistry, not only the necessary suspension of disbelief for any work of fiction, but also a certain oblivion with respect to the already known outcome. In other words one wonders more at the power of the prose for having been duped by it into vicariously participating in the narrator's struggle for life in the midst of such desperate circumstances. Note that without this consideration, the whole conceit seems silly: since the tale is told by a narrator, obviously he must have survived the experience in order to be telling it. With the preface Poe puts the silliness on the table and says to his intelligent reader: "I know you know how it ends - I just told you - now come with me into the mind and body of this narrator and watch me recreate the experience."

Poe could assume a readership adequate to his Latin preface in 1842, a readership knowledgeable about the major events of the relatively recent (within the preceding forty or fifty years) upheaval in France. I doubt that this is any longer the case. Indeed it is probable nowadays that not one in ten thousand high school English teachers (nor one in a million of their students) can read and understand this Latin preface, or know a Jacobin from a jack-ass.

If only a very few actually "get" the preface and its relation to the story, what really is the point of teaching The Pit and the Pendulum in the modern classroom? Is there much left of the story without the preface besides overwrought 19th century guff?