Whats in a
Pronoun?
Mrs.
Hockstad, my seventh-grade English teacher
at Ypsilanti High School, taught me a lot of rules. If youre
already picturing a stern, prune-faced old gal with greying hair in a bun,
its because the term English teacher still conjures negative
stereotypes. She was in fact a very pretty young woman with raven-black
hair and music in her
voice, a
recent graduate of the University of Michigan in nearby
Ann Arbor.
I adored her. She was sweet and
cheerful, her laughter tinkling as merrily as reindeer bells, with the notable
exception of the day when the whole class flunked a quiz on prepositions.
None of us had done our homework, and we felt the full blast of her wrath.
Have you ever seen an angel in fury? Once is enough for a lifetime.
From then on I was determined
never to let her down, and I never did. To this day I follow the rules of
propriety in English usage she taught me, plus any other rules that seem to
me in her spirit. Her teaching is part of my nervous system. I can still see
her diagramming sentences on the blackboard.
When I was in college Dr. Potter
taught me that the old rules werent really binding; they had more to
do with etiquette than with grammar, the study of which had been
revolutionized by Noam Chomsky. To me it all came as a shock, like Vatican II
telling us we could eat meat on Friday.
But I loved Dr. Potter too. Since
college I have rubbed some pretty important elbows those of popes,
presidents, movie stars, grammarians, and other celebrities but I
have never met a man more dignified than he was. His poise was equally
striking in his looks, dress, manners, and speech. But his perfect
self-possession never made him stuffy; he was also kind and witty. To this
day I regret not taking his legendary Chaucer course.
The funny thing is that Dr. Potter
himself meticulously abided by the old rules Mrs. Hockstad had promulgated.
You could have hired a private detective to follow him for months without
catching him so much as splitting an infinitive.
![[Breaker quote for What's in a Pronoun?: Mrs. Hockstad's rule]](2005breakers/051208.gif) One
of Mrs. Hockstads rules was that the verb to
be required a pronoun in the nominative case It is
I, for example, rather than It is me. Not that I
dont slip up at times. After a couple of beers with the guys
Ive been known to say, Its only me instead of
Its only I, but even then I feel a pang of conscience. I
try to avoid preciosity; dont get me wrongly. But once youve
given your heart to Mrs. Hockstad, youre never quite the same man
again. And thereby hangs a tale.
The other night I was brooding, as
usual, on the Shakespeare authorship question, and I remembered the
famous inscription on the tombstone of the supposed author in Stratford
upon Avon:
Good friend, for Jesus sake
forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
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Somehow these couplets
dont sound much like the verse of the man who had recently written
Prosperos renunciation of magic, I always say, but this time I noticed
something else: the phrase curst be he. Thats the way
Mrs. Hockstad taught us. Apparently theyd taught the same rule in
the Stratford grammar school. Be goes with he.
Then I remembered another
famous curse: Macbeths last words:
Lay on,
Macduff, |
And damnd be
him that first cries, Hold, enough!
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A thrill ran through me! Why had I
never seen it before? Damnd be him!
Mrs. Hockstad would have insisted on damnd be
he.
Macbeths words had
always jarred me a bit, but Id never stopped to reflect on why.
Id more or less assumed that a man who would murder
Macduffs children wouldnt be too scrupulous about using his
pronouns in the nominative case when appropriate.
Now, at last, I saw: the Stratford
man couldnt have written these plays, simply because his
grammar was too good. Mrs. Hockstads rule, old-fashioned
though it might be, had furnished a solution to the mystery of
Shakespeares authorship.
And Mrs. Hockstad, if
youre out there, and if these words somehow reach you, I want you
to know Ive never stopped loving you.
Joseph Sobran
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