Review/Summary of Wallace's "Tense Present"

Ok, as I have not yet actually finished reading "Tense Present" I cannot speak for the article as a whole, but being only 10 pages into the article I felt compelled to say something already. What Wallace is talking about (so far) is questioning who comes up with the definitions that we "normal people" look up in the dictionary and take as concrete, and asking who appointed them or who the hell are they to tell me what this word means. The problem in doing that is that he, himself becomes (by his own admission) just as SNOOTY as they are, but quite a bit more pretentious in my opinion.

One thing that I have yet to come across is his reason for attacking the people who come up with the definitions. Is it that he came across a word that he didn't agree with? Does he not think that a cup looks like a cup or that a giraffe should be called a moose instead? He's right, no one appointed these people to come up with the definitions (unless you're going back to the time of Samuel Johnson, who was infact paid to write the first dictionary of the English Language), but the bigger question is who is he to condemn these people for trying to create some sort of understanding amongst the chaos that is the English language? Why is he so important or feel like his questions are so important that he needs to go and piss in someone's coffee? So far the entire article comes off as his way of trying to substantiate Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage and, in my opinion at least, is one step short of Wallace strolling up to Garner and actually phallating the guy.

Insert pause here - I'm reading again....*Play Jeopardy Music*

Ok, I still haven't completed the reading yet, but I think I've got his main point. And that is that the English language is being diluted to rediculous amounts. And therefore, who's to say what the definition of a word is, since in about 5 years we will probably have about 15 more definitions for that word. My problem here is that, even though we must understand the way a word is being used to discern where it would go when diagramming a sentence, this article is more for a Linguistics class rather than a grammar class. We're not discussing why this word is or is not a noun due to its modern usage, but more or less bitching about language as a whole. And in doing so, seems to have as much of a political agenda as the people he's ranting about.

I do however agree with Wallace when he says that some R.M. (rural midwestern) terms are more suited for casual conversations, than their SWE counterparts. For example, he uses "Where's it at?" (R.M.) and "Where is it?" (SWE). The R.M. terms just seems to fit better when having a conversation between friends. I can however, see what he means with this article about language getting out of hand, as I too, have wanted to cave in the head of a teenager that once told me to "Chillax." Which I'm guessing is the equivalent of combining "chill out" and "relax" but just makes that person sound retarded. But again...is not that a question to be dealt with in a language class instead of grammar? Maybe I'm wrong, but I see small things that help (in relation to grammar) and the rest of the article just seems sophistry.

Yesterday (A.K.A. The Day After)

Yesterday
(A.K.A The Day After)

When you lose what you know is truly perfect
You lose every sense of direction that you have
Because all that you are left with are thoughts of yesterday
Yesterday then became the worst day of your life
It consumes your everything, and your mind
It becomes an obsession replaying in your head
You then lose all that is truly you
It died when the perfect was gone
It's left and now it's done
It over and now it's no fun
I am hoping to find a place where peace can ease my mind
But no matter where I go there's only these thoughts
These Thoughts of Yesterday

The Meadow

The Meadow

I lay here letting the sun shine down on me
Don't really feel much like moving
Thoughts of you float through my head
As every cloud I see reminds me of you
I wonder what it is that you ever saw in me?
And how it is that I was ever so lucky?
There's nothing extraordinary about me
If I had an ounce of compassion left
Then I might feel sorry for myself
Having lost something so special
You were so far beyond me
But I decided that just once I would reach for the stars
I failed miserably
But you surprised me
By coming down from your perch in the heavens to sit with me
And even though I failed to reach the star that is you
I felt like the happiest person in the world
Knowing that once, just once
The brightest star in the sky, came to me

Mulroy

After reading Mulroy, I tend to agree and disagree with certain things. For instance, I agree with Amanda Dill's point that grammar is not something that you can just teach a kid in the 6th grade and expect them to retain that knowledge because by the time they reach college, numerous words, phrases, contexts, and rules will have changed.

Also that in some ways grammar is just too obtusive to the writing process. While grammar is important it does tend to get in the way sometimes. I don't think however, that it is so unimportant that it should be removed from the corriculum altogether. But methods need to be tweaked to place more emphasis on writing rather than learning for learnings sake.

The Upstream Swim

THE UPSTREAM SWIM

It swims upstream towards the place it instinctively knows how to reach
It'll take any route to get there, be it rivers or creeks.

Swimming through and around the obstacles that impede
This one doesn't travel in a school, so there's no one to lead.

All alone swimming against the current
Every rock in its way, a silent deterrent.

Each new rock thrown in by a careless passerbye
Is just another problem to overcome enroute to the place where it'll eventually die.

Swimming past a predator's paws
Sporting razor sharp claws.

And avoiding a snout full of teeth
Hungry and savagely looking for a fish to eat.

Arriving at the falls, it has to get creative and fly
Out of the water, into a foreign enviornment where if it stays to long – it'll die.

After it reaches the destination a little late
There's still a ready and willing mate.

And after the moments ecstasy
It rolls over exposing to the sun, its belly

And motionless it floats back down the stream the way it came
Into the waiting snout of a predator thinking – "Alive or dead…it's food just the same."

And after we experience the moment of ecstasy and finish with the lie
We too will lie belly up – only in a box, while our loved ones cry.

My experience with grammer (thus far)

My experiences with grammar are not as bad as one might think, given the background on the education of my family as I was growing up. Neither my mother or father had finished High School, though my father did return to college to get a dgree in English the semester before I started college.

Only one of my uncle's was a High School graduate. None of my aunt's had finished. But I learned to speak well enough that by the time I got to any Language Arts classes, I didn't have any problems passing them. Now that is not to say that my parents were not learned because they were both incredibly intelligent and most of what I had learned up to that point had come from them.

In my Language Arts classes, my teacher's enthusiam did little to lull me out of my apathetic state of mind. I know how to read and write, and I'm also an excellent speaker so why do I have to learn what an adverb is and where in the sentence it is supposed to go? It's rubbish! or so I had thought.

My second oldest brother started college in the last semster before I got my Associate's in English. He was put into a basic grammar class and would frequently ask me to look over his paper as I was an English major and a member of Phi Theta Kappa (the English Honor Society). I would tell him things like "you need a comma here" and he would answer with "why?" A question to which, with my limited grammatical knowledge would prompltly answer "I don't know...because you do!" I knew I was right but I couldn't articulate why. Suddenly my 3.9 GPA felt, to me at least, like a big fat zero.

That was part of what made me decide to take a grammar class when I transferred to East Central University. Grammar seemed to be one area where the knowledge that I had, though sufficient, just wasn't enough to satisfy me. I didn't like the feeling of knowing where things go, but lacking the reason why.

So here I am, in a grammar class at ECU, actually looking forward to taking a class and learning about something I could not have cared less for only a year ago.

Though I do think grammar an important part of our language and writing skill, I do feel that at times it only works to cripple one's creativity. For example: in a poem I had written about a year ago, I had capitalized an entire word in the middle of the sentence. This was done purposely and meant to emphasize the word, but the professor asked that I correct it. But to the mind of this particular poet...it was correct.