Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (21 page)

Many of the people who were enthralled by Mr. Jackson's oratorical ruffles and flourishes in his first life as a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher responded to his bombastic style with high hosannas in church and popularized the tendency to call him “The Reverend” outside it. In some cases he was known simply as “The Rev.” The term is popular with the people who call doctors “Doc.”

The alarming thing about this now is that some network anchors and many of the reporters following Jesse Jackson's campaign have referred to him as “Reverend Jackson.” This does not make it right. Most newspapers don't make the mistake.

For homework today, I'll ask you to memorize the following excerpts on the subject from a wide variety of textbooks:

“Reverend is used as we use Honorable. That is, the article the is required and the title cannot stand immediately before a last name. Either the given name or initials must be used or some title of respect must take their place as in “The Reverend Edward Pusey or The Reverend Mr. Pusey.”

—
Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage

“Reverend is strictly speaking an adjective meaning deserving reverence.”

—
American Usage and Style

“To describe a clergyman as Reverend Smith instead of The Reverend Mr. Smith is a common vulgarism, so common indeed that it may soon cease to deserve the description.”

—Fowler's
Modern English Usage

“Reverend is not used without the first name or initials of the person to whom it refers. The abbreviation is used in newspaper and informal writing as Rev. James Shaw or Rev. J. T. Shaw. NOT: Rev. Shaw.”

—
Writer's Guide and Index to English

“The Reverend Henry L. Brown; the Reverend Mr. Brown (
never
Reverend Brown
or
the Reverend Brown).”

—
The Chicago Manual of Style

It's difficult to know where to draw the line when it comes to grammar. I'm not an expert, but I do use the language to make my living so it's always on my mind. The things that bother me most about misusing English are the things that confuse the meaning of something because they are illogical.

In most cases, clear writing or clear speaking comes not so much from knowing the rules of grammar but from clear thinking. Clear
thinking and good grammar go together. If you know what you think, the chances are you can write it down or say it grammatically so that everyone understands it. If you're not clear what you think, you won't be able to speak or write grammatically.

I don't mean to make a federal case out of the word
reverend
, but we shouldn't let the language deteriorate along with our water, our air, our bridges and our cities. It doesn't cost anything to maintain the language. To call him “Reverend Jackson” isn't just a grammatical error. It ain't right.

Too many people are taking a little psychology in college these days. A little psychology is bad for the psyche. We have more people explaining the psychology of things than we need.

Amateur psychologists find truth in curious places. Nothing that's right there where we can see it is a good enough explanation for them. I know it isn't fair to a lot of good ones, but I'm suspicious of professional psychologists. I think of a psychologist as someone who wanted to be a psychiatrist but couldn't get into medical school.

You find amateur psychologists at work everywhere, but all sports announcers must have taken Psychology 101 as freshmen.

“Scoring that last basket before the half will give them a psychological lift going into the dressing room,” the sports announcer tells us.

The team is behind 62–27 at halftime but the announcer thinks scoring those last two points is going to give them a psychological lift. The logical extension to the thought, which he means to suggest, is that the team will come out for the second half all revved up and go on to overcome the opponent's lead and win the game. This is the announcer's idea of how to make a dull game more dramatic. He's trying to hold on to his listeners until his sponsor gets a shot at selling them something.

“They've been here before,” the football commentator will say about one of the two Super Bowl teams. “They know what the pressure is like out there. They won't be as uptight out there as the Bombers because they have the experience.”

A rude expression often comes to my mind … for which the only polite substitute in writing is “Nonsense!”

If you did nothing but listen to the amateur psychologists reporting sports events, you'd think that it wasn't ever the team with the better players that won. You'd think the winners were always the ones who “had the psychological advantage.”

It never seems to matter to the announcer/psychologist that one basketball team has three very good players seven feet tall and two others who are acrobatic artists at getting the ball in the basket.

“They have the home-court advantage,” he says.

“State has the edge,” the announcer tells us, “because in thirty-two of their last fifty-one games since they started this series way back in 1939, Central Western has been able to win on the road only nineteen times.”

I don't know what he's saying. I just nod and figure State has the edge if he says so.

“Johnny Podolak's whole family is in the stands today cheering him on,” we're told. “This could be a big factor in the game today because you can bet Johnny will be up, emotionally.”

And, “Ed Werrgeles is playing against his old teammates this afternoon. This is going to give him a big psychological boost because you know he's got to be out there proving to them that they made a mistake when they traded him.”

The psychology behind things was very big during the Olympics. It was either a psychological advantage or a psychological disadvantage to come down the hill first … or, possibly, last. She knew she had only one person to beat or he knew they'd all have to catch him now. The psychological pressure was on them.

Some of the Olympic performers who failed “weren't motivated,” according to the announcers. “Motivation” is an important word with sports reporters and so is the athlete's “concentration.”

Dan Jansen, the speed skater whose sister died the day before the 1988 Winter Olympics, competed twice and fell both times. The announcers attributed his falls not to the condition of the ice but to “a lack of concentration.”

You can be sure that if Dan had won, the announcers would have been saying the tragedy “gave him added incentive.”

Depending on what's going on in the world at the time, the diviners of the psychology behind things move from one event to the other. They explain politics, world events, sports, crime and marriage in psychological terms. Nothing is ever quite what it seems to the layman. It isn't the better team that wins. It's the team with “the psychological advantage.”

Considering all the talk about illegal immigrants, not many of us know much about immigration. I got through high school without being certain of the difference between “immigration” and “emigration.”

The process of giving a person from one country official status as a citizen of another is called “naturalization.” It's sort of a funny thing to call it. You'd think it might be called “unnaturalization.”

Those of us born here in the United States know how lucky we are. I'd hate to be outside trying to get in. The requirements for naturalization are so complex and vague that there isn't anyone who can tell you what all the rules are. I tried to find out and ended up with three fat volumes of double-talk law, very little of which I understood.

Do you, by any chance, know where most people came from to get here? There are some surprises. Here are some of the numbers on immigration to the United States from 1820 to 1981:

—The most immigrants came from Germany, 6,998,000. A relatively small part of that number can be accounted for by Jews who fled Nazi Germany.

—Italians were second, 5,310,000.

—There were 4,693,000 Irish immigrants and almost as many Canadians. I don't think of Canadians as immigrants.

—There were 4,319,000 immigrants from Austria.

—I was surprised to see that 3,395,000 people came from Russia.

—England accounted for 3,198,000 immigrants but that doesn't include two of my grandparents. They came from Scotland.

—The only other country exceeding a million was Sweden.

—The big surprise to me was France. During those years there were only 757,000 immigrants to the United States from France. I find that amazing when you think nearly 7 million came from Germany.

—There were 594,000 people who came from China but that statistic has to be qualified. While many Chinese came here before we had strict immigration rules, all Chinese were barred from entering from 1882 until 1943, when we opened that golden door again to them.

In another few years these statistics will change. The pattern of immigration has changed drastically already. Few people are coming to
the United States from Europe today. Great numbers are coming from Mexico and Central America.

The mystique of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island is a thing of the past, of course. Anyone coming here now flies. No one comes in by boat unless they're running drugs, and more people are sneaking across the Mexican border every year than ever came in legally past the Statue of Liberty in a year.

The laws for entry into our country are not only complex, no one agrees on exactly what they should be. Congress has a new bill pending but it's brought up a major argument. Some people don't want to let anyone new in; others want to let everyone in.

Do you know the people who object most to the aliens who are sneaking in this year? It's the aliens who sneaked in last year. Last year's aliens are the ones who'll lose their jobs because the new ones will work cheaper in worse conditions.

It's an old American tradition to resent the people who come here after you do. I had a world-champion mother but she always felt a little superior to the Irish. She was probably a little embarrassed to have fallen in love with my father. In the small town in upstate New York where they both lived, the latecomers were the Irish. They mostly did the housework.

Prejudice has always been a fact of life in America. One group of immigrants has always found a reason to dislike the next.

Fortunately, I'm an enlightened person. I don't have the same prejudices my mother had. I think highly of the Irish.

It's all those Mexicans I worry about.

“No,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“You just can't,” I said.

It's Saturday morning and I've taken Alexis to the supermarket. Alexis is five.

The trick with a child in a supermarket is to snake your way up and down the aisles, without forgetting the things on your list, without losing track of the child, without buying one of everything she wants,
while, at the same time, keeping her interested and happy enough so she doesn't make a scene.

“Can I get in there?” she asked, pointing to the shopping cart.

“You're a little big for that, aren't you?”

“Mom lets me.”

“I'll bet she doesn't, but OK, get in.”

I figured I'd have better control over her in the cart than out of it.

“Let's get some cookies?” she said.

“We'll get some cookies.”

We passed the cookie shelves and I picked out two packages.

“Get chocolate,” Alexis said firmly.

I got chocolate.

“Can I have a cookie now?”

“No. It's too early.”

“Mom lets me have cookies,” she said with a little tiny smile on her face, indicating she was kidding and that I knew she was kidding.

“You can't open them until we pay for them anyway.”

“Why can't we?”

“They aren't ours yet. They still belong to the store until we get to the cashier and pay for them.”

“Mom lets me,” she smiled.

Being the father of Alexis' mother, I knew better.

A woman whose face was familiar but whose name I didn't know, passed by.

“Hello,” I said, smiling more than I normally would have, trying to make up for not being able to recall her name.

“Why did you say ‘Hello'?” Alexis asked.

“That woman is a friend of mine,” I said.

“What's her name?” Alexis persisted.

“It doesn't matter,” I said.

“Why doesn't it matter? Now can I have a cookie? Can I have some candy? Mom lets me have candy.”

I don't know why I'd thought it was such a good idea to take Alexis to the store. Probably, in some general way, I thought it would be part of some educational process for a young girl to go to the store with her grandfather. As things turned out, it was more of an education for me than for her.

I had not realized, for example, how fiendishly clever all the companies had become at pushing their wares at us. After years of wandering through the aisles of supermarkets, I'd become inured to the attractive displays of food companies. We rolled the shopping cart to the car in
the parking lot, unloaded it and I started to push the cart back to where they were stacked in front of the store.

“Can I push it?” Alexis asked.

“There are a lot of cars here,” I said. “I better do it.”

“Dad lets me,” Alexis said.

It's about twelve miles home. I turned out of the parking lot and started down the road.

“Are we almost home yet?” Alexis asked.

By the time we arrived in our driveway, Alexis had eaten a small bag of popcorn and one big chocolate cookie. I had forgotten butter, lettuce and paper towels.