what it is is

Haven’t written much about language here. Not that I don’t have plenty of opinions on the matter (look at my Blogger profile, and you’ll see I have language listed among my interests). I just haven’t felt any prompting to do so. And now that I do, and I begin thinking about all the related minutiae I could bring up, I realize that I must restrict myself to the one phrase that made me think of writing this. Else this entry would vastly balloon; after all, the subject of language and grammar has filled more than one book (most of these links are to classic or recent popular texts I have enjoyed).

The phrase that has piqued my pen is “What it is is”. I only recently began noticing this phrase. I don’t think it’s old, and I don’t think I’ve heard it used by anyone under 40, but I’ve been hearing it all over the place: in daily conversation, in lectures, in radio interviews. I figured someone else must have noticed this phrase and thought about it, so I did a quick Google search. Most of the links that came up are merely appearances of the phrase in one context or another. The first one, however, is a message from a linguists’ listserv. My favorite example contained there is a quote from a Crossfire transcript:

S: … isn’t the Bush policy a continuation of the Clinton administration's policy vis-à-vis Iraq?
B: No, what it is is it’s jacking it up on steroids and taking us into a war that I think we can win without putting our troops in harm’s way.

That response is jacked up on steroids, at least vis-à-vis “it”s and “is”s.

I was also planning to mention at the beginning of this post that I’m not trying to be William Safire (note: the biography should be updated; he is no longer a political columnist for the Times). When I did the search, however, I found a column of his on a closely related (but syntactically complete) phrase: “It is what it is.” He commented on the meaning, function, and curiously tautological structure of that phrase. I shall do similarly.

Part of what intrigues me about the phrase is that it’s filler, without actually being incorrect (as far as I can tell). “What it is” is a complete clause, capable of acting as a noun, although its use as an object is much more established than its use as a subject (e.g., “We want to know what it is.”) Hence it can certainly fill the role of giving the verb something to hang on to, but it does so more verbosely than strictly necessary (e.g., “Let me tell you about mathematics. What it is is the study of numbers and patterns”, instead of just “It is the study of numbers and patterns.”)

As for being “correct”, I place this property in relation to another phrase that jumps out at me: “The reason is because”. This phrase has generated a lot more ire and commentary. This is due to the flat-out grammatical incorrectness of the phrase. I don’t want to harp on the reasons here: those interested can go look at the links from the search. (It’s a conversation that’s been going on since the early part of last century, at least, based on the texts among those links.)

Now, I’m less of a grammatical prescriptivist than I might once have been. I hold that the function of language is to communicate, and so “good” and “bad” grammar are established on the basis of how well they aid communication. But communication, in some sense, can only happen by convention, and so we must allow for the conventions of meaning, both in denotation and connotation. My favorite example along these lines is “hopefully”. Look at that word. The “-ly” ending should tell you straight off that it’s an adverb. Its most frequent use nowadays, however, is as a replacement for the phrase “I hope that” or “it is to be hoped that” (e.g., “We’re planning on having a picnic tomorrow. Hopefully, it won‘t rain.” How could “it” (whatever is doing the raining, another interesting convention of language) do anything in a hopeful manner, whether raining, not raining, or otherwise?) And I’m perfectly happy to use the word this way, and to enjoy hearing others use it this way.

“Because”, on the other hand, is a logical connector. It has always been a logical connector between two otherwise independent clauses. “Hopefully”, in my previous example, has the benefit of sitting slightly outside the main syntax of the sentence. Putting “because” in the unfortunate position of being a relative pronoun (which is what “that” would be in its place) muddles the structure of the whole sentence. Is the meaning obscured? Not in the slightest. So I can’t get too upset with it, but I avoid it nonetheless.

I avoid “what it is is”, too, but mostly because I’m amused by it and not sure where I stand on its rhetorical effectiveness. Let me finish by comparing it to certain structures in French. (When I learn that some superficially awkward or suspect construction has corroboration or analogue in French, I tend to relax about it.*) One of the first general constructions one learns in French class is how to ask what something is: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” or, more generally, “Qu’est-ce que… ?”. Translated verbatim, the first of these means “What is it that it is?” The latter appears in questions such the following, which one might hear upon entering a store or restaurant: “Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?” (“What is it that you desire?”). This last inquiry could be phrased more tersely as “Que désirez-vous?” (“What do you desire?”) without sounding right-out rude, but as a college professor of mine pointed out, it would seem affected or pretentious to ask “Qu’est-ce?” (“What is it?”). The phrase est-ce que (“is it that”) is the boon of French students everywhere who can’t remember how to invert subject and object in a question: it’s much easier to ask “Est-ce qu’il y a des devoirs?” for “Is there any homework?” instead of “Y a-t-il des devoirs?” Nor do I think anyone would bat an eye at a sentence beginning “Ce que c’est, c’est…” (“That which it is, it is…”). With French calling ceaselessly upon these phrases, which if consistently translated would sound like so much filler, we can certainly forgive the English equivalent.

It doesn’t seem that there’s actually anything to forgive. “What it is is…” is not only syntactically correct, it calls the listener’s attention to the fact that the speaker is trying to give an accurate representation or account of the topic at hand. In that sense, it’s almost a 21st century “verily”. And who can fault the return of that rhetorically necessary sentiment?


* For example, I think the French get right the use of personal pronouns in predicates of sentences. Louis XIV’s immortal “L’état, c’est moi”—translated verbatim as “The state, that’s me” and more justly as “I am the state”—exemplifies this phenomenon. The French say “c’est moi”, while we have somehow convinced ourselves that we should say “That is I”, because the verb “is” for some inscrutable reason means “I” should be in the nominative case. It would be just as reasonable to argue ourselves into saying “That am I” and properly make the verb match that presumptively nominative “I”. (Because that is clearly unreasonable, it follows by some logical principle/fallacy for which I have no name at this time that is unreasonable for us to say “That is I.”) It could not possibly be right to say “C’est je”—that sentence, if it can be called such, sounds incredibly tortured. Perhaps this difference between French and English in what is “standard” is due to our calling “me” a strictly object form of the pronoun, while the French call “moi” a pronom tonique, capable of multiple functions (including, to mention another grammatical structure we should allow in English yet still try to ban, placing greater emphasis on a subject: “Lui, il est sympa”—“Him, he’s nice”).

what it's like to be 30

No way can I actually give a satisfying description commensurate with the title (wouldn’t that be the subject of a novel?) Nor will I try to fully explain that I am aware how small and skewed is my perspective—how I do not understand the lives of most 30–year–olds, and I don’t think they would understand mine, and how my being 30 is in some ways like others’ being 25 or even others’ being 40. But recent days have led me to think much about where I am, to no particularly productive end, but I feel like writing anyway.

I feel like it would be nice to start all over again, to try out my life in a more focused and engaged way. To not worry so much about what people (particularly those in authority) think of me. To find something to be really passionate about. “If I had known then what I know now…” But, barring a real reincarnation, it might even be nice to start from here, and change everything. I’m thinking in particular of the opening lines from John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High”:

He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before.
He left yesterday behind him; you might say he was born again,
You might say he found a key for every door.

I’m not quite sure what the fourth line means, but the first two deliberately use paradox in an attempt to describe discovering a fresh new life. The third line takes the familiar Christian image of rebirth and gives it a different flavor. The hero of the song seems to restart his life as a hermit: “they say that he got crazy once and he tried to touch the sun.” No search for success or fame (not that those have ever been my preoccupation), no indication that he’s fleeing some deeply troubled time (again, while I’ve had some setbacks, I haven’t gotten in serious trouble). Just a feeling, a thought that there’s peace to be found somewhere. And he finds it; it turns out to be a pretty good life for this guy, in relative solitude and communion with nature:

Now he walks in quiet solitude the forest and the streams,
Seeking grace in every step he takes;
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake.

I don’t think Denver’s singing about himself, but about some idealized mythical mountain man who represents all of the good things Denver had found in the majesty of the Rockies. And he certainly captures what one would hope to find in leaving yesterday behind.

I’m at a strange place. I’m very nearly halfway through my time of being 30. Many people my age have a closet full of suits to choose from and lots of nice shirts and shoes. I wear mostly jeans and t-shirts (with the weather getting colder, I get to wear sweaters, too, which I like) and have to make sure I do laundry every two weeks or so or I just run out of clothes. On the other hand, many people my age (sometimes the same people) have gotten stuck in jobs they hate, and in which they don’t get to interact with or touch people. I can’t say I really like grad school, but I enjoy the people in my office, and teaching is almost always a rewarding experience. (Friday I taught numerical integration methods, and that wasn’t so pleasant.)

When I was younger, I thought I was special. Not in the Harry Potter sense (a more apt analogy would be Garion from the Belgariad series, but I’m not sure how many people would know that means someone who’s grown up on a farm and suddenly learns he’s destined to become a great king; what better-known story captures this narrative?), but in the sense of being a good kid. Good = special, right? My teachers would say I could do anything I wanted, and I figured at some point I would be struck by what I wanted to do. No such luck. To continue the comparisons of the previous paragraph: I’ve done more than a lot of people with my life, I guess, but not as much as the ones who make real masterful creations. (John Denver, for example, released his first greatest hits album before he was thirty; this example is to show that I’m not just thinking about mathematics, infamously referred to as a “young man’s profession”.) Surely it’s not too late, however, right? I may not be on the ball with getting a nice household put together, but I still have talent and I’m still young and can achieve… something… of merit.

I feel like I need something to slap me and get me moving.

This evening I went to a concert by a folk singer who had been at St. Olaf at the same time I was. She’s a wonderful performer; I could tell several of her songs really touched some in the audience, and a slightly different set of songs resonated with me and some of the things I’m thinking (and trying to write) about. (Her name is Ellis, by the way.) The first was “Doin’ Fine”, talking about being on a long, late drive, acknowledging the challenges, and finding ways to enjoy the trip. Later she sang a new song, “Who Am I”, about doubt (”if it were water I would drown in it”) and fear (“if it were fire I would be ash”) and reflections on how really great we might end up being if we could remember who were are (she creates the image of a star that’s forgotten the sky, or a river who’s forgotten the sea, and speculates that that’s why we feel such awe and joy looking at them). Less seriously, she sang a love song to coffee (“I cool you down when it’s hot; I heat you up when it’s not. I’ll treat you right, oh, you know that you’re the one”). As the resident coffee snob in certain of my circle, although far from the only coffee lover, I felt obliged to lay hold of this song.

No conclusion here. I can’t even really vouch for coherence. Just thoughts, and the desire to be writing again. I should be writing more. I have several topics that have been playing in my head. For a while I’ve been thinking about essays on angels and faith. I still need to finish the narrative of our trip to the convent. A couple of stories I started and missed finishing were about picking strawberries over the summer and the death of another dear man just recently. There’s still more time to write. For now, time for bed.

cum sancto spiritu, part 1

This past weekend was my first stay at a convent (community? ecclesiastical farm? it’s a little hard to describe succinctly). Hannah and I went with a couple of friends to the Community of the Holy Spirit in Brewster, NY, where we spent two very restful days and nights, in part to visit Suzanne, a priest we knew through Cornell. The Melrose Convent is an outgrowth of St. Hilda’s House in NYC and comprises six or eight women who work, farm, pray, and occasionally teach in a lovely, somewhat secluded spot. There is a school, the Melrose School, on the grounds, but no classes were going on, even on Monday because of Columbus Day. We very much enjoyed our time there, and over a few posts I plan to give a relatively thorough account of the weekend.

We set out from Ithaca late Saturday morning. The first couple of hours in the car we spent singing (what delight!), sharing favorite hymns and songs from our youth. Although Hannah didn’t grow up in the church, the rest of us had very varied backgrounds and could cross-pollinate a lot. Jessie teaches Sunday school and looks for good songs to teach kids. I presented my perennial favorite, “The Fruit of the Spirit”:

The fruit of the spirit’s not a cantaloupe (nope!)
The fruit of the spirit’s not a cantaloupe (nope!),
So if you want to be a cantaloupe,
you might as well hear it,
You can‘t be a fruit of the spirit, ’cause the fruit is:
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Jessie was raised Quaker, and taught us a song about Lucretia Mott to the tune of “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic”. Try it:

Thank thee kindly, friend Lucretia, (repeat twice)
Thy light still shines for me!

Did that refrain work O.K. for you? Then try making this scan to the tune of the verse:

Throughout the town of Philadelphia she hid the fleeing slaves;
For the freedom of her sisters she did cross the ocean waves,
And she asked Ulysses S. Grant to grant a pardon for the brave.
Her light still shines for me!

We worked on that over and over, marching around the kitchen as we made meals at the convent.

We stopped twice on the way to the convent. The first was for lunch. There was some debate as to whether we should stop at a familiar fast food outlet or press a little deeper to find a local restaurant. Realize that this was a car full of people who really like eating fresh food and supporting local business, and so the latter option was preferred. We ended up at Last Licks in Liberty (exit 101 off of highway 17). The friendly manager welcomed us and explained that everything was served on sandwiches—subs, hoagies, paninis, and the like. We all had a bottle of one of Boylan’s products (I had my first birch beer, which was a lot like a root beer, but independently very good); I recommend these, when you can’t get hold of Ithaca Sodas. There were quaint posters of olden-days Pepsi advertising (“Worth a dime, costs a nickel!”). The manager told us how he had just flown in from Florida and was just stopping by the store to check how things were going, when he learned that they were understaffed, and so he was working. When we told him we were from Ithaca, he said they had some regular customers from Cornell who would stop by on the way to Yankees games.

The second stop was at a fruit and vegetable stand. Hannah had made the proclamation, “It’s not really fall unless we do something to a pumpkin,” and so we had been watching for pumpkin stands. A hand-written sign on the side of the highway alerted us to the appropriate exit, and we pulled into the driveway of a house with an elderly man sitting under a tarp. He had a piece of corn in his hand, ready for us to sample (I have not been getting nearly enough corn this season), and told us a smattering of dirty jokes. He tried to convince us to buy his book of jokes. We managed to get away with just the pumpkin we were seeking and some corn, carrots, and broccoli (which became dinner the next night).

Once we arrived at the convent, we were promptly greeted with a wealth of treats and an invitation to Vespers. In fact, there wasn’t much time at all before the prayers began. We went into the small round wooden chapel, and we visitors spread ourselves out among the residents who knew what was going on. (We’d all been to evening prayers before, but the peculiarities of the prayer books at the convent required some guidance.) Much of the Vespers service is occupied with reciting psalms on a chant tone. One verse is chanted by the officiant to establish the tone, and thereafter the two sides of the chapel alternate chanting verses. For the first few psalms, I sat quietly, listening and not quite ready to break into the chant myself. There was only one other man there besides myself, and he had decided not to chant along. So my voice would have been the one to break the sound of the women. Now I love the sound of women’s voices (usually in harmony, which chant is not) but that’s not quite what was keeping me from singing. A true unison has a certain kind of purity. Splitting the octaves creates an essentially different sound (and I was not about to try to sing in the women’s range, particular since I’d been sick all week). So just as some people relax by popping in a “Chant” CD to hear the soothing baritone of monks, I was enjoying the piping clarity of women chanting together.

But within a few moments, I developed a strong sense that something was wrong—not just that I was isolating myself from my fellow congregants, or holding back from singing. I’ve studied chant, in the context of music history. I’ve listened to plenty of recordings, made available for the benefit of scholars and consumers. I’ve read about how it tried to strike the balance between emotion (rejoicing, mourning, awe, or penitence as necessary) and removal from the secular realm. About how composers expanded chants to reflect the text (even on the simple word “Alleluia”), then moved them from the meditative to the musical realm. Once I joined in, I realized what had felt wrong. Chant is not meant to be listened to. It has elements of song and elements of speech, but it isn’t either. It’s meditative, certainly, for both those chanting and those “listening”, but it’s nearly meaningless until you participate. It’s deliberate, ancient, immediate (be glad I’m not going off into another Kierkegaard digression here on the immediacy of music), transcendent, spiritual, physical, perplexing, focusing, and holy (in the sense of being set apart from other things in the world).

I’m making this point a bit strongly. There is real musical merit in, and real “outside” appreciation possible for, the hymns, antiphons, and sequences of the liturgy. But a psalm is mostly just intoned; from a melodic standpoint, it’s almost entirely a single repeated note, with a concluding burble up or down. Listening to it may put you in a trance, but I can’t imagine how it would help you worship. I don’t think I can explain more than that how important it is to join in chanting the mass, or service, or whatever, whenever it is possible to do so in place of just listening.

After dinner, we got set up in the guest house, known there as the “longhouse”. We had our own kitchen, stocked with fresh organic goodies (from eggs to raw milk to cookies), a sunny sitting room (directly adjacent to the school; apparently previous residents could hear homeroom or French class going on), and several private rooms to disperse to. Suzanne provided us with her Eddie Izzard DVD collection (which we didn’t manage to watch, however; as a first inkling of what the community was like, if you’ve never met nuns before, the sister who was showing us around the house also declared herself a big fan of Izzard).

We returned to the main house and looked around as dinner was being prepared. Hanging in the hallway was the following prayer. Now, the deliberate vagueness of the authorship, along with the style of writing makes the purported source of this text somewhat suspect. In fact, I searched the internet once I got back and could get no more information; the prayer was always presented in a vacuum (or list of other inspirational texts), except on a couple of occasions when attention was drawn to some anachronisms in the writing. So I include it as an example of how the nuns at the Melrose Convent see themselves and their calling, not any sort of historical document. It’s also still full of useful things for all of us to think about:

17th Century Nun’s Prayer

Lord, Thou knowest better than I know myself that I am growing older and will someday be old. Keep me from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion. Release me from craving to straighten out everybody’s affairs. Make me thoughtful but not moody: helpful but not bossy. With my vast store of wisdom, it seems a pity not to use it all, but Thou knowest Lord that I want a few friends at the end.

Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on my aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by. I dare not ask for grace enough to enjoy the tales of others’ pains, but help me to endure them with patience.

I dare not ask for improved memory, but for a growing humility and a lessing cocksureness when my memory seems to clack with the memories of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be mistaken.

Keep me reasonably sweet; I do not want to be a Saint—some of them are so hard to live with—but a sour old person is one of the crowning works of the devil. Give me the ability to see good things in unexpected places, and talents in unexpected people. And, give me, O Lord, the grace to tell them so.

AMEN

Dinner was a veritable feast. Apparently excited about having us as guests, the nuns had prepared several courses, and had sent out specially for hot dogs (they don’t usually eat meat). Hannah and I were, as expected, exceeding happy about the presence of kale. (Over the summer, as we were picking up vegetables from our CSA farm, we would ask with increasing intensity, “Are we getting kale this week? We really hope we are, because we really like having kale.” The first time we did this, the farmers responded in perplexity, “We’ve never actually had a reaction like that from anyone about getting kale.”) And here before us was a new yummy way to prepare it! (They call it “killer kale”.) We also had homemade ketchup, mustard, and tomatillo salsa; “apple leather”, the real version of what Fruit Roll-Ups always dreamed of being; fresh grape juice and grape jelly made from wild grapes in the area; a mix of beans from the garden; and other courses. Apparently when you make all your food fresh from the garden, living with a vow of poverty isn’t so bad.

Lots more I could share about the humor of the sisters and the stories that came out about convent life (such as tales of mass hysteria, or the three nuns who got in a fist-fight), but this is getting a bit long. Moving on to the evening…

Back at the longhouse, we sat around reading for a while. Hannah was reading poetry by Elizabeth Bishop. I was reading hymns (because there was no piano in the house for me to play them on). For some reason, “Lead On, O King Eternal” was going through my head:

Lead on, O King eternal,
The day of march has come;
Henceforth in fields of conquest
Thy tents shall be our home.
Through days of preparation
Thy grace has made us strong;
And now, O King eternal,
We lift our battle song.

I was reading from the Pilgrim Hymnal, of which I have four copies but hadn’t examined too carefully yet. Christian hymnody has plenty of texts with battle imagery (with good Scriptural reason), and many of them are collected, along with other exhortations to fortitude, in the Pilgrim Hymnal’s section on Courage. But I was struck by the end of the second verse, which I’ll use to close this entry (as always, the whole text of the hymn is available at Cyberhymnal). In a way quite consistent with the verses I linked to above (q.v.), it emphasizes the means of winning the battle to be our acting in love:

For not with swords’ loud clashing,
Nor roll of stirring drums;
With deeds of love and mercy
The heavenly kingdom comes.