The Verb Garden

Years ago, while I was studying for my M. App. Ling., I got stuck on a train on a two-hour commute during which the train was delayed. All I had to read was a grammar dictionary. Also, I had recently spoken to my brother, who asked me how my herb garden was coming along. I told him my herb garden was a mess because I was now concentrating on my verb garden. I was studying grammar at the time, and was rather pleased with my play on words.

This following story was the result of these three things: the horrible commute, the grammar dictionary, and the conversation with my brother. I giggled a lot while writing it, probably confirming the suspicions of a few fellow commuters that gaijin are hen.

I showed the story to a friend, who told me I should not put it on the Internet anywhere; I should try to get it published in an academic journal. They take stuff like that, she told me. Academics like a joke too, sometimes, although it might not always seem like it.

That seemed like a good idea at the time. Wouldn't it be fun if my first academic publication was this silly thing (which I was nevertheless rather proud of)?

But I am a lazy person. The story sat on my hard drive through three computers (I'm a pretty good document backer-upper, less efficient with photos) and I never quite got around to doing anything with it. Today another friend's son called her with some grammar questions, and I remembered the story, did a search on my computer, and amazed myself by finding it.

I sent it to my friend to pass on to her son. I do not expect him to learn anything from it except that grammar is not always as unpleasant as we are led to believe. It can be interesting. Also, I have given him the grammar dictionary for his birthday. It is a little old and tattered (the dictionary, not the birthday), but I hope it will give him as much pleasure as it did me. And I'm pretty sure that after all these years I will never do anything with this story, so Internet (by which I mean the four or five of you who are still reading this sadly unsuccessful blog which I am too lazy to update very often BUT YOU ARE IMPORTANT, YOU MATTER TO ME AND THAT'S WHY I DON'T JUST GIVE IT UP), here you are. It is my little gift to you.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it and, I must confess, rereading it. It still makes me giggle. Grammar has all the rudest words.

The Verb Garden

What does a Verb Garden look like? Well, first of all you have to understand that the name is a little misleading: a Verb Garden does not contain only Verbs. It has all sort of other linguistic features as well. It's just that the Verbs tend to be more active, and you notice them first.

A Verb Garden looks a little like an ant farm, only instead of ants running around the place busily, it has Verbs and Adjectives and Articles and Vowels and Consonants and so on. Of course they don't all run - the Weak Vowels tend to huddle in a corner, and Passive Verbs don't do much, and Hanging Participles just hang around looking cute, but there is a lot of action all the same. It's all very entertaining, and best of all, a Verb Garden doesn't take up much space. You can keep the whole caboodle in the corner of a small room.

But Verb Gardens can be dangerous, as I discovered, and I gave up this fascinating hobby when it became more trouble than it was worth.

It all started when a Noun Phrase offered a rather feisty Dynamic Verb a Prepositional Complement. She thought the future perfect had finally arrived. "We've been living in synonymy for years," she said. "It's about time we conjugated."

("Oh, absolutely," simpered a passing Modal.)

Unfortunately, however, the Noun Phrase was paratactic at the time he made the offer, and in the morning he couldn't remember a thing. The Dynamic Verb was furious. She threw a plurale tantum, injuring a Passive Verb in the process and causing it to suffer from adnominal pains. (It consequently became Irregular.)

The offending Noun Phrase tried to explain his mistake. "It's not my fault!" he whined. "I'm delexical. It was meant to be a Deferred Preposition. Now I'm feeling all tense, and I'm not even a Verb."

"You idiolect!" the Dynamic Verb yelled. "You're nothing but a great exocentric corpus copular! I hate you! Why can't you be a Proper Noun?" She threw an Object, but it wasn't a Direct Object and narrowly missed his genitive.

The Head Noun heard the fuss and came to investigate. He was exophoric. "I've always fancied her, myself," he said. "Perhaps I should make my move now, while she's still hypotactic. I’d love to collocate with her. We'd make a great lexical item." He added smugly, "I predicated something like this would happen one day. That Noun Phrase was heading for trouble with his extralinguistic activities."

By now the Dynamic Verb was well and truly intransitive. "GET YOUR STUPID DANGLING MODIFIER OUT OF MY SIGHT! " she screamed at the Noun Phrase, "OR I’LL ELLIPT IT!"

(A Euphemism wafted past. "Oh, look!" it warbled. "A minor disagreement.")

The Noun Phrase backed away hurriedly, tripping over a Weak Vowel. The Weak Vowel was an 'O', and in a retroflexive action it started a lingual roll.

The result was catachrestic. The Weak Vowel, not watching where it was rolling, hit three Diphthongs and several Monophthongs. The ensuing domino effect caused a Great Vowel Shift which tipped the entire Verb Garden sideways. 

What a mess! There were split Infinitives all over the place. Subjects and Verbs got separated in the chaos and a whole bunch of new disagreements started. Polarity went from positive to negative, there was a great Plosion, and the entire population of my Verb Garden spilled over into the room.

I moved as fast as I could. I grabbed the Language Acquisition Device and vacuumed like mad, sucking up Metaphors and chasing Gliding Vowels across the tatami. It took some time, but eventually the whole squabbling bunch was back in the Garden, and I could relax. I thought I'd saved the day. Oh, I noticed a couple of Solecisms had got in there somehow, but I thought it was just a result of the general disorder.  I thought things would settle down in time.

But I was wrong. There were bugs in my Garden. In the frantic rush the Language Acquisition Device had somehow managed to suck up some student homework I'd carelessly left lying around, and after a few days the infection started to spread. Style Disjuncts demanded better outfits. Unfulfilled Conditions moaned in frustration, attracting the unwelcome attention of marauding gangs of Ejectives. Whole Clauses were rank-shifted without permission. Euphemisms proliferated, several Verbs were entirely abandoned and Adjective order was hopelessly scrambled. Punctuation got lost in the mess (aside from a few malfunctioning Colons), and when I asked what had happened to the Paragraphs a Run-on Sentence exhausted itself trying to explain. Nothing made sense. Subject-Verb disagreement became epidemic and the hideous noise kept me awake at night.

It was tragic, really, but there was nothing I could do. Inevitably some of my Garden escaped into the real world, leading to such incidents as the T-shirt I saw one day soon after the accident, on which was written: "A halt to action fresh perspiration brings forth a pleasant melody." It was all my fault! Feeling guilty, I decided on the spot to give up Verb Gardening until I knew what I was doing. I resolved to study hard, become a Grammarian, and somehow, someday, atone for my dreadful lapse in responsibility.

But it was fun while it lasted.