Word: syntaxes
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This summer Rinker & Co. set up "institutes" at 20 universities from Cornell to California, gave 900 teachers a stiff dose of everything from satire to syntax. Supposedly the nation's best English teachers, they are expected to go home as "germ carriers" after a graduate-level summer tour of literature, linguistics and composition. Rinker is pleased-but not nearly as pleased as he hoped...
...assume that this passage has a meaning; and ignoring that meaning for the nonce, let us place the passage before a Hum 6 student and ask him what he makes of it. He would certainly note the vagueness of syntax, the frequent use of passive (or inactive" active) verbs; the strange shifts of person; the lack of any tone or speaker's authority; the fatigued manner in which the author goes from critical alternative to alternative; and, if our imaginary student was gifted in the gentle art of placing in context, he might note that this vocabulary and syntax occurs...
...Polly wrote a bestselling memoir (A House Is Not a Home) that helped enrich the idiom ("There's no shaking off the press"), completed two years of college, where one of her professors coined a rich one of his own: "The problem is, Miss Adler knows nothing about syntax...
...fast but not fast enough, discreet but not discreet enough. He had served four Presidents, mastered Churchill's stutter and Eisenhower's wayward syntax, but the new tempo of the White House was not his, and last week Official Stenographer Jack Romagna was unceremoniously fired. The sacking left correspondents morosely pondering a final, unanswered question: Was Romagna's fatal mistake marking the transcript of a presidential telephone talk "From the White House swimming pool...
...with a vocabulary of 3,500 words and 128 different patterns of simple-sentence syntax, the computer can turn out hundreds of poems. Because these creations are as intelligible as some beat poems, the computer's engineers call it A.B.* (for Auto-Beatnik...