Light and Heavy Sentences

This episode I wanted to write about sentences. So here are some sentences.

The back door robs the house.

Poverty is the mother of health.

The cow gives good milk, but kicks over the pail.

There is not a companion like the penny.

The tongue is the rudder of our ship.

The eye is the pearl of the face.

It is hard for an empty egg to set upright.

Who can shave an egg?

You cannot hide an eel in a sack.

Eat peas with the king and cherries with the beggar.

Knit my dog a pair of breeches and my cat a cod-piece.

Asses die and wolves bury them.

Three women and a goose make the market.

For a flying enemy make a silver bridge.

The higher the ape goes, the more he shows his tail.

Seven may be company, but eight is confusion.

A lazy sheep thinks its wool heavy.

You ate up that grass which I meant to make hay of.

A fog cannot be dispelled by a fan.

You dance in a net and think nobody sees you.

Do in the hole as thou wouldst do in the hall.

When the sky falls we shall catch larks.

Bells call others to church but do not go themselves.

You gazed at the moon and fell in the gutter.

(Stéphane Mallarmé, English Themes, 1872)

Mallarmé’s day job was teaching English in a lycée. These selected sentences come from a pedadogogical manuscript, unpublished in his lifetime, in a section called “A Thousand English Sentences to Learn by Heart.” They appear to be authentic proverbs; many of the others are familiar: “A stitch in time saves nine” (which puzzled me no end as an immigrant schoolchild—nine who?), etc. Mallarmé is placidly using them as examples of English grammar and usage. To us they are immediately identifiable as proverbs: the sententiousness; the implied gravity; the parallel constructions; the sound they make, like a Webster’s Third International dropped three feet onto a table in an empty room. You can imagine some of them occurring naturally in speech or writing (“You cannot hide an eel in a sack”), but most of them stand resolutely alone, like menhirs. They may be folk sayings, or they may have been hatched by some eighteenth-century hack to fatten a pamphlet or broadside. Proverbs in Western culture all refer back to the book of that name in the Bible. Like the Bible and most jokes they have no definite author. They are austere; they hit simple words as if they were gongs; they carry an air of conclusiveness even if they appear nonsensical. They are useful rhetorical models for certain occasions, such as for expressing scorn. (Perhaps we can see the faint outlines of familiar phrases by William Carlos Williams or Oscar Wilde appear in the developing bath.)

From those sentences my mind immediately traveled to these:

Alfred’s friend lifted the tough fire.

Phyllis found the hand on the sofa.

Becky led the sob to the bakery.

Whittaker left the waffle under the wagon wheel.

Edgar divided the dainties among the fiends.

The thieves took Sylvia’s vacation.

Mrs. Mather soothed the withered loaf.

Their mother gave each of them a fart.

Wilbert and Herbert walked to the tulip in the heart of the forest.

The visitor viewed the duck in the valley.

Thelma and Theodore yanked the studious youth.

The man’s keen eyes scanned the nude machine

The boys took pictures of the frozen balls.

Jack jumped when he heard the huge gnat.

Julia washed the dish and put it on herself.

Arnold knelt beside the chill.

Lucretia wished to become an illusion.

Emmet and Elliot enjoyed the mayor’s chest.

Sally and Bessy sat under the realm.

The whistle was heard under the hustle and bustle of the meat.

Soon we were to learn that Lucy and Rose were part apple.

On Wednesday Helen and Henry entertained an idea.

The toy child destroyed the adjoining room.

(Ron Padgett, selections from “The Complete Works”)

These are all individual lines from a five-page poem included in Padgett’s debut collection, Great Balls of Fire (1969). None of the lines connect to any of the others. They might derive from a primary-school reader of the Dick-and-Jane variety (although perhaps a higher elementary grade), and have all been subjected to some kind of alteration by simple cropping or substitution. You can imagine, for instance, that their mother gave each of them a farthing. It is easy to picture a visual analogue in the form of altered images; they are Pop Art. Like those images, they are brightly colored depictions of an impossibly placid childhood world in which everything has its place and adventure carries no risks—although the alterations they have been subjected to has taken the floor out from under their feet. A professor might say that they destabilize language, that they subvert the established order, that they show us the wreckage of bourgeois existence after revolutionary vandals have come through. And of course they’re hilarious for the same reasons, because they do what we pay humor (and horror) to do: they set up an expectation of normal procedure and then blow it up.

I then thought of these sentences, examples of language you’re not supposed to understand.

He’s a finger for the eye.

Sorry we had to blot that hack.

Lamp that bulge in the kick.

It’s your funeral after the beef.

That angle’s got me queered.

Go wise the mob the why-for.

I never carry soup in my breech kit.

George is taking in the dough on his cat-rack.

He’s no buck, you rum; he’s an Episcopalian.

Nix on the dinah, I’ll take stew every time.

I like that ice but there’s an anchor on prop.

Jake hadn’t been off the heavy a week when he fell for the owl.

That fuzey bibled he caught me with the rocks, so I fell for receiving.

That fuzey bribed a reader and they fingered me at the piss-house.

If you don’t take that monkey for a walk, he’s going to squawk.

The joint went wrong that night and I lost a lot of slum.

There’ll be plenty of heat if we have to root against the oliver.

He was sneezed and shook down for five X-rays.

I was just stemming when in stepped the clown.

That fink craved the tat and you couldn’t knock him.

(David W. Maurer, Language of the Underworld, 1981; examples collected 1931)

These are all sentences illustrating the use of defined terms in a glossary of criminal, carnival, and confidence lingo. They represent figurative language in the service of concealment, intended to be understood by those in the profession while remaining opaque to outsiders. They range from fairly decipherable to totally esoteric—to “root for the oliver” means to work by the light of the moon; no etymology is advanced to account for how the moon became “oliver.” They all follow regular American syntax, and you could replace the slang terms in most of them with their square equivalents while preserving their form. But then you’d lose their jazz. Slang of any sort is poetry on the fly, and criminal slang is twice as urgent. It is poetry made by people who were very likely semi-literate at best, which doesn’t mean they didn’t have an ear for language. It’s heavy on single-syllable anglo-saxonisms and their hard consonants, which gives them their music, as percussive as the engine on a 1931 Ford. The imagery, picked from the effluvia of daily life, is ordinary but unexpected in context. To the outside ear the sentences are both hard to understand and teasingly familiar, mocking you for your ignorance but paying you off with surprise.