Bible, there are also fundamentals, withoutwhich Christianity would not exist-the deityof Christ, His substitutionary atonement, and theinspiration of the Bible, to name a few.

***A line can be described either by its slope (aratio) or by its inclination (an angle). Theseterms describe the deviation from the hori-zontal, but the word inclination also has a non-mathematical meaning. Without Christ, manis inclined to sin. The Word of God shouldshape our attitudes (inclinations).

***If you are given the length of two sides andthe angle measure opposite one of those sides,you can use the law of sines to solve the tri-angle. However, this does not always deter-mine a unique triangle. As a result, it iscalled the ambiguous case. Ambiguous meansopen to multiple interpretations. Somepeople say that you can interpret the Bible inany way that you want. However, there is noambiguity in the Bible.

***Use H = thing, S = season, T = time, andP = purpose to symbolize each of the following:

First half of Ecc. 3:1Second half of Ecc. 3:1

***A person is eccentric if his behavior deviatesfrom normal. Jesus Christ expects His disciplesto be eccentric, since living a Christlike life isnot normal in this world (Titus 2:14). Likewise,in mathematics, conic sections are eccentric ifthey deviate from a circle. Eccentricity is ameasure of this deviation. The eccentricity ofan ellipse (e) is the ratio of focal distance (c) tothe length of the semimajor axis (a): e = %.Since c and a are distances and c < a, the eccen-tricity of any ellipse is o < e < 1.

***The concept of limit can be used to illustratean important truth. Suppose you lived eightyyears and there was no life after death; your lifeon the earth would be 80/SO = 1 = 100% of your ex-istence. Now, let's assume that your life afterdeath was eighty years long: your earthly lifewould be 8o/i60 = Y1 = 50% of your entire exis-tence. If life after death were no years, your lifehere would be only 00;(80)720) = 0.1 = 10%. Now ex-tend it to eternity: x~~ 00;(00+" = O.In other words,this life is very insignificant in light of eternity.It is no wonder James said that life is "a vapour,that appeareth for a little time, and then van-isheth away."

[Remembrance 1SISTER BERNADETTE'SBARKING DOG

By Kitty Burns Florey, from the current Vocabu-la Review, an online literary journal. Florey is theauthor of Solos, published last August by Berke-ley/Penguin.

Diagramming sentences is one of those lostskills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut,

. that no one seems to miss. Invented, or at leastcodified, in an 1877 text called HigherLessons inEnglish, by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg,it swept through American public schools like themeasles, and was embraced by teachers as theway to reform students who were engaged in"the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue"(to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context).Bypromoting the beautifully logical rules of syn-tax, diagramming would root out evils like "it'sme" and "I ain't got none," until everyone wrotelike Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least JamesFenimore Cooper.

In my own youth, many years after 1877, dia-gramming was still serious business. I learned it inthe sixth grade from Sister Bernadette. I can stillsee her: a tiny nun with a sharp pink nose, con-fidently drawing a dead-straight horizontal linelike a highway across the blackboard, flourish-ing her chalk in the air at the end of it, her veilflipping out behind her as she turned back to theclass. "We begin," she said, "with a straight line."And then, in her firm and saintly script, she putwords on the line, a noun and a verb-probablysomething like dog barked. Between the wordsshe drew a short vertical slash, bisecting the line.Then she made a road that forked off at an an-gIe-a short country lane under the word dog-and on it she wrote The.

That was it: subject, predicate, and the littlemodifying article that civilized the sentence-all of it made into a picture that was every bitas clear and informative as an actual portraitof a beagle in mid-woof. The thrilling part wasthat this was a picture not of the animal but ofthe words that stood for the animal and itsnoises. It was a representation of somethingboth concrete and abstract. The diagram wasa bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It wasmuch more than words uttered or words writ-ten: it was a picture oflanguage.

READINGS 23

I was hooked. So, it seems, were many ofmy contemporaries. Among the myths thathave attached themselves to memories of be-ing educated in the Fifties is the notion thatactivities like diagramming sentences (alongwith memorizing poems and adding longcolumns of figures without a calculator) werepointless and monotonous. I thought diagram-ming was fun, and most of my friends whowere subjected to it remember it, with varyingdegrees of delight. Some of us were better at itthan others, but it was considered a kind oftreat, a game that broke up the school day.You took a sentence, threw it against the wall,picked up the pieces, and put them togetheragain, slotting each word into its pigeonhole.When you got it right, you made order and

[Notice]

ruFrom a circular sent on August 17 to WesternMichigan University staff and students from theuniv~rsity' s Building Custodial Support Services.

Due to the reduction of budget and humanresources there has been a corresponding changein the building cleaning standards. Office, class-room, entertainment, and athletic facilities havebeen lowered from the Association of HigherEducation Facilities Officers Level 2 cleaningstandard to a Level 4 or 5. In order that expecta-tions from existing funded staffing be better un-derstood, the following is a description of Level5 appearance levels, excerpted from the Custodi-al Staifing Guidelines for Educational Facilities.

Level 5: Unkempt Neglect-Floors and carpets are dull, dirty, dingy,

scuffed, and/or matted. Gum, stains, dirt, dustballs, and trash are broadcast.

-Light fixtures are dirty with dust balls andflies. Many lamps are burned out.

-Trash containers and pencil sharpenersoverflow. Trash containers smell sour.

-All vertical and horizontal surfaces havemajor accumulations of dust, dirt, smudges, andfingerprints, all of which will be difficult to re-move. Lack of attention is obvious.

We thank you in advance for your under-standing and cooperation.

24 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2004

sense out of what we used all the time andtook for granted: sentences .. Gertrude Stein, of all people, was a great fan

of diagramming. "I really do not know thatanything has ever been more exciting than di-agramming sentences," she wrote in the early1930s. "I like the feeling the everlasting feel-ing of sentences as they diagram themselves."

In my experience they didn't exactly dia-gram themselves; they had to be coaxed, ifnot wrestled. But-the feeling the everlastingfeeling: if Gertrude Stein wasn't just riffing onthe words, the love-song sound of them, shemust have meant the glorious definiteness ofthe process. I remember loving the look of thesentences, short or long, once they were tidiedinto diagrams-the curious map like shapesthey made, the way the words settled primlyalong their horizontals like houses on a road,the way some roads were culs-de-sac and somewere long meandering interstates with manyexit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the clari-ty of it all, the ease with which-once theywere laid open, their secrets exposed-thosesentences could be comprehended.

On a more trivial level, part of the fun wasbeing summoned to the blackboard to show off.There you stood, chalk in hand, while, with a glintin her eye, Sister Bernadette read off an espe-cially tricky sentence. Compact, fastidious hand-writing was an asset. A good spatial sense helpedyou arrange things so that the diagram didn't endup with the words jammed together against theedge of the blackboard like commuters in a sub-waycar. The trick was to think fast, write fast, andnot get rattled if you failed in the attempt.

As we became more proficient, the tasks gotharder. There was great appeal in the Shaker-like simplicity of sentences like The dog chased arabbit (subject, predicate, direct object), withtheir plain, no-nonsense diagrams:

But there were also lovable subtleties, like theway the line that set off a predicate adjectiveslanted back like a signpost toward the subjectit modified:

d.oJ I wtAS \ +ired..,Or the thorny rosebush created by diagramminga prepositional phrase modifying another prepo-sitional phrase:

Or the elegant absence of the preposition when. using an indirect object, indicated by a short road

with no house on it:

The missing preposition-in this case to-couldalso be placed on that road in parentheses, but thisalways seemed to me a clumsy solution, right up

• •• • •.. : .-

•••• ••

•••••••... :.... :: ..I.. : .

drawers

•

•troullt:rs.l(1

shirt _ 8

lUI. • 6

coil _ 17

O\Tertoat_ 19

gloves • 2

70

70 Buttons, a drawing by Bernard Rudofsky, from the.Fall issue of Cabinet. Rudofs/<y was a Viennese archi-tect, designer, curator, and author of several books,including Architecture Without Architects. He diedin /998.

26 HARPER'S YlAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2004

there with explaining a pun. In a related situation,however, the void where the subject of an im-perative sentence would go was better filled, to mymind, with the graphic and slightly menacingparenthesized pronoun, as in:

Questions were a special case. For diagram-ming, they had to be turned inside out, the waya sock has to be eased onto a foot: What is the dogdoing? transformed into the more dramatic The dogis doing what?

Mostly we diagrammed sentences out of agrammar book, but sometimes we were assignedthe task of making up our own, taking pleasurein coming up with wild Proustian wanderingsthat-kicking and screaming-had to be cor-ralled, harnessed, and made to trot into thebam in neat rows.

Part of the fun of diagramming sentences wasthat it didn't matter what they said. The dogcould bark, chew gum, play chess-in the worldof diagramming, sentences weren't about mean-ing so much as they were about subject, predicate,object, and their various dependents or modi-fiers. If they were diagrammed properly, they al-ways illustrated correct syntax, no matter howsilly their content. We hung those sentences outlike a wash until we understood every piece ofthem. We could see for ourselves the differencebetween who and whom. We knew what an ad-verb was, and we knew where in a sentence itwent, and why it went there. We were aware of

dangling modifiers because we could seerr' them, quite literally, dangle.

~oday, diagramming is not exactly dead, butfor many years it has been in sharp decline. Thisis partly because diagramming sentences seemsto double the task of the student, who has to learna whole new set of rules-where does that pesky

. line go, and which way does it slant?-in order toillustrate a set of rules that, in fact, has beenlearned pretty thoroughly simply by immersionin the language from birth. It's only the subtletiesthat are difficult-who vs. whom, adjective vs. ad-verb, it's I vs. it's me-and most of those come fromthe mostly doomed attempt, in the early days ofEnglish grammar, to stuff English into the well-made boxes of Latin and Greek, which is some-

thing like forcing a struggling cat into the carri-er for a trip to the vet.

Another problem is that teachers-and cer-tainly students-have become more willing toaccept the idea that the sentences that can bepopped into a diagram aren't always sentencesanyone wants to write. One writer friend ofmine says that she disliked diagramming be-cause it meant "forcing sentences into confor-mity." And indeed language can be more sup-ple and interesting than the patterns thatperfect syntax forces on it. An attempt to dia-gram a sentence by James Joyce, or one byHenry James (whose style H, G. Wells com-pared so memorably to "a magnificent butpainful hippopotamus resolved at any cost ...upon picking up a pea"), will quickly demon-strate the limitations of Sister Bernadette'smethods. Diagramming may have taught us towrite more correctly-and maybe even tothink more logically-but I don't think anyonewould claim that it taught us to write well.And besides, any writer knows that the bestway to learn to write good sentences is not todiagram them but to read them.

Still, like pocket watches and Gilbert & Sul-livan operas, diagramming persists, alternatelyreviled and championed by linguists and gram-marians. It can be found in university linguis-tics courses and on the websites of a fewdiehard enthusiasts. There are teachers' guides,should any teacher want one; it's taught in ESLcourses and in progressive private schools.There's a video, English Grammar: The Art ofDiagramming Sentences, that features a very1950s-100king teacher named Miss Lamb work-ing at a blackboard. There's even a computerprogram, apparently, that diagrams.

Sometimes, on a slow subway or a boring cartrip, I mentally diagram a sentence, just as I oc-casionally try to remember the declension of hic,haec, hoc or the words to the second verse of 'TheStar-Spangled Banner." 1have no illusions thatdiagramming sentences in my youth did anythingfor me, practically speaking. But, in an occa-sional fit of nostalgia, I like to bring back thosegolden afternoons when

[T ranslation]

ENGLISH AS ASECOND LANGUAGE

From a guide intended to help foreigners under-stand the idiosyncrasies of British English, found bya journalist for The Economist earlier this year onan office wall in the European Court of Justice.

What they say: I'm sure it's my fault.What is understood: It is his fault.What they mean: It is your fault.

\X!hat they say: I'll bear it in mind.What is understood: He will probably do it.What they mean: I will do nothing about it.

shirl • I

lrouSoer!!.5

\C!l .4.

coal • 8

21

24 Pockets, the companion piece to the buttons opposite.Both drawings were indw:led in Rudofsky's 1944 Museumof Modem Art show, "Are Clothes Modem?" The press re-leiLIedescribed the project ill a "simulated X-ray examina-tion of the layers upon layers of useless buttons and pock-ets man considers necessary to preserve dignity. "

READINGS 27