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Hijinks and Hoodwinks in English class
When I was in high school, I do not recall being a particularly good writer. One problem, I was convinced, was my lack of vocabulary. I have heard it said that a good vocabulary comes from a lot of reading. Well, I did read quite a bit; but new words did not stick with me (this was true of foreign languages as well) at that time. I was the kid who, in the English SAT test, did not know most of the words I was supposed to be comparing to one another.
Naturally this lack of suitable vocabulary influenced my writing.
I recall two incidents from high school which attest to this inferiority complex about vocabulary and writing. As they are loosely related, I present them together here.
1. I only plagiarized a paper once. (I know, once is one too many times!) That was in Mrs. Kalijarvi's Ninth Grade English class. I don't know why I did this, since the assignment was so easy: read a book (the hard part), and then write a summary of the book in the style of those found on book jackets (that is, a relatively brief piece of writing.) So I read a western potboiler called The Texas Pistol. But then I noticed the jacket blurb pasted in the front of the library book: it started something like, 'When gunsinger Duke Watson arrived at the B-Bar-B Ranch, he couldn't have known that pretty little Molly Smith
' (etc.) Well, I knew right away that I couldn't top that! It was better or worse than anything I could ever write. It was written in a style that would take some literary hack years, if not decades, to perfect. Better to admit defeat at the onset and not worry about finding the mot juste!
(If I had been smart, I would have chosen a real book and then provided one of those blurbs myself. This sort of thing would been great fun to write:
'Dashing Count Vronsky couldn't believe his eyes when he spotted cute little Anna Karenina on a Moscow street! Only problem: she's married. But soon the extra-marital high jinx are flying fast and furious, to result in a slam-bang finish!')
Anyway, I copied the blurb from The Texas Pistol (while making sure that I disposed of the original in the book) and handed it in. Unfortunately for me, Mrs. Kalijarvi had an astute knowledge of style. So she called me in and asked me, in her good and patient voice (whilst regarding me with her kindly eyes), whether I had cribbed my report. What did I do in response? I had visions of my father's anger and my mother's tears. And so, as I avoided her eyes (had I looked therein, I might well have confessed!), I equivocated; I prevaricated; I did what the Joey Bishop-character does in Guide For The Married Man when his wife catches him in bed with another woman: Deny! Deny! Deny! (I know that this word rhymes with 'lie'; but the latter is so harsh - I'd rather not use it here.)
I knew that Mrs Kalijarvi didn't believe me for a second. But there was nothing she could do without direct proof.
The feeling of shame that little escapade left me with lasted for several years thereafter. I decided that it was much more fun to write my own papers. But how, with my limited vocabulary?
2. Ten words do not an essay make. Or do they?
It was in Miss Nickerson's Tenth Grade class that I pulled the writing stunt described below. Miss Nickerson was an old-time teacher who was probably very near retirement; at any rate, she was ancient of visage and heavy of bearing. She was a practitioner of The Withering Stare: when a kid misbehaved in some way, Miss N would stop abruptly what she was saying (even in the middle of a sentence) and direct a look of icy coldness at the miscreant, boring through them like a diamond drill. This look she would hold for what seemed like an eternity.
(I knew the effects of this look because I was once its recipient or so I thought. Miss N had suddenly stopped speaking. I looked up, and she was staring directly at me. For a moment I met her stare; then I looked down. That caused me to worry that I had betrayed guilt by looking away. But what guilt? I could not think of anything I had done (could she tell if my mind was wandering?) So I got up the nerve to look her in the eye again only to as quickly glance away again, the look was so searing. So then I began to pretend that I was innocent: I affected a look of nonchalance, and glanced about me and out the window (what is more guilty-looking than someone feigning nonchalance?) I could feel the pressure building: filled with trepidation like a pathetic character out of Edgar Allen Poe, I was ready to scream aloud, 'Enough! I am the guilty one! Only stop those staring eyes!' Fortunately I was spared this demeaning self-display when Miss N stated the name of her victim overtly: it was someone sitting behind me. She had been looking through me something I knew adults could do at will anyway.)
(I was tempted to sue her under the legal statute stare decisis but desisted.)
Anyway, Miss Nickerson had given us a writing assignment whether book report or essay, I've forgotten. That evening I found myself bored with the prospect of doing things as I usually did them (which meant: receiving the usual grade of 'B.') I felt instinctively that I needed to spice things up a bit. But how?
My eyes alighted on a little book of vocabulary words which I was using (without much success) to review for the SAT's. Aha! I chose ten words I didn't know but which appealed to me for their sound and/or meaning. (I think 'intrepid' was one of them; I have paid homage to that word by using a form of it in this essay.)
Most writing is undertaken as follows: the writer has an idea as to what to write about, and the suitable words are then found to give utterance to that idea. But what if one did the reverse: found a set of key words first, and fashioned an essay around those? That latter is what I did.
I composed an essay and scattered those ten words through it like figs through a plum pudding (or was it like plums through a figgy pudding?) And then I handed it in.
Now I must admit, I was throwing down the gauntlet here. I assumed that word had gotten around the English Department that I was a cheater. No doubt Miss N had heard such talk. So what I was doing was challenging her to accuse me of plagerism; I could then vindicate myself during her inquisition and emerge triumphant.
A few days later, Miss Nickerson handed back our papers. When she got to mine she paused; her eyes filled with tears; and then she proclaimed with great emotion, 'This is a college paper!' The grade was 'A+.'
Mine was 'a college paper.' And by implication I was a college-level writer. But was I? Of course not. Miss Nickerson, bless her, was guilty of applying the Iceberg Fallacy (as I call it), namely: she assumed that my writing was a sampling; that what she could see (my essay) meant that there were tons of like words in my vocabulary below the surface. But of course there weren't.
Those ten words, as I recall, stayed with me. And so it seems I would have done well to continue this practice of deliberately sprinkling alien words through my writing. But I didn't, alas. And so I had to wait for the natural osmosis, the seeping-in of words in my adult years.
By the way, I don't know which college(s) Miss Nickerson was thinking of when she made her pronouncement. But apparently she did not know most of the colleges I've since taught at, wherein I've found the writing to be distinctly inferior to that in many high schools I've worked at.
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