How English Raveled Martianese: An Hydraulic Memory of Lewis Carroll
Leonard R. Jaffee, Copyright © 2021, all rights reserved
Are you a water sport? A terra-denizen who plays in seas, or on rivers of words?
Then Kayak down my stream of consciousness — through a rapids of mind.
And tumble up a mental carny-ride that spins into the film "Mars Attacks!" — an objet d'art that joined the cargo of a spaceship toting human civilization to alien life-forms that may snare the vessel and find it curious enough to merit curiosity. The ship ships scores of mementos — including (but not only) these:
a cloned sheep
the wardrobe the McCain campaign and the RNC bought Sarah Palin (and a copy of Palin's 2009 Form 1040 Schedule C claiming tax deduction for the wardrobe's being stowed in the rocket's cone)
the final prototype of the Dominion Voting Machine and operating instructions written in Hanzi and Sanskrit
the original, signed-with-dung manuscript of Hitler's Mein Kampf
the mummified corpse of Covid-19 patient zero submerged (for further shelf-life) in a vat of mRNA vaccine. [That cadaver-artifact was accompanied by a manual explaining how to (a) administer an RT-PCR test and (b) misinterpret RT-PCR results to generate mass panic.]
a lock of Trump’s hair nestled in a capsized MAGA hat
a Bibi-Netanyahu-donated parchment-scroll bearing Obersturmbannführer Otto Adolf Eichmann’s (drunken) accounting that the true Third-Reich-attributable Jewish death-by-holocaust count was 372 million
an etched-in-glass copy of Hunter Biden’s economics PhD dissertation proving that maximizing illegal Hispanic immigration will raise the average U.S.-citizen-laborer’s wage by 67.3% per annum
But back to the film "Mars Attacks!" — that œuvre d'art (screen-scripted by Jonathan Gems, directed by Tim Burton, and released in the year of Billy Clinton’s second election).
In that high Olympian didactic opus (a semi-documented quasi-docudrama), Martians speak a language having just one pseudo-word: "ack." Martians form syntax by altering pitch, tone-direction, repetition-speed, cluster-configuration, decibel-level, and other such (as if using a very "refined" transmutation of Morse Code). A Martian sentence may be: "ACK-ack; ACK-ack-ack-ACK; ack-ACK-ack; ACK; ACK-ack."
Consider, for edifying comparison, the below-following proper English sentence, which vies with any of Martian speech, courageously as the language of GW Bush, our previous Glorious Leader who addressed an assembly of rapturing Texas Christians and (likely still wearing the uniform he wore when he stood on an aircraft carrier and said "mission accomplished") summoned the cause of human embryos and assured the audience: "Even feces have rights. Even feces deserve to live."
Oh! Wait! Just then, in a speed-of-light millisecond, I mused through tens of Martian sentences my memory contrived; and I apprehended that my soon-to-be-presented, exemplar English sentence left a "had" dangling (like a caveman condemned, as if a mere, base, errant participle, lacking rational antecedent). I almost-neglected the flaw because I failed to attend rhythm compulsively.
By revisiting Martian syntax, I re-apprehended the meanings of metronomes that are (as WC Fields required of children & John Cage of pianos) properly prepared — in the metronome case, inventively deranged. [
endnote 1 ]
Thus I rendered the exemplar English sentence quite grammatically, logically, stylistically…….correct.
Below, now, appears that consummate English-language sentence completely well-incompleted — even pumped up to Schwarzenegger size.
Please forgive the sentence's inelegance of using not just one, but two words ("that" & "had"). Alas, unlike Martian, English needs both nominatives AND verbs (while Martian needs neither, but only ack-beat).
Yet, the sentence bears the virtue of being not mere code, but a good, Yorkshire-pudding-hardy English-language structure — laudable because syntax of the tongue of Englishmen, who "never never
never
shall be slaves" despite they don't still "rule the waves," since they're smarter than rest, as proven by their accents, the best.
[Oh, notice: "never never never" equals "never" (since the third "never" cancels the second's canceling the first and the first "never" cancels the second's cancelling the third). Would that the “never”s were just two (as a Nigerian, Zulu, Kenyan, Hindu, or Burmese might have wished).]
NOW THE EXEMPLAR ENGLISH SENTENCE:
"That that that that that had had, had had that that that had that that that had that, that that that had had that that."
SAME SENTENCE PARSED:
"THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] THAT [restrictive relative pronoun] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] HAD [auxiliary verb creating plu-perfection] HAD [past tense turned plu perfect because of preceding auxiliary verb "had"], HAD [auxiliary verb creating plu-perfection] HAD [past tense turned plu perfect because of preceding auxiliary verb "had"] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] THAT [restrictive relative pronoun] HAD [simple past] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] THAT [restrictive relative pronoun] HAD [simple past] THAT [demonstrative pronoun (ellipsis of "that X ")], THAT [subjunctive subordinating conjunction] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] HAD [subjunctive because of the "that" that begins this dependent clause] HAD [a rare creature, a plu perfect subjunctive, that occurs because of the immediately preceding auxiliary "had"] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun]."
I (or someone not no one) could have strung more “that”s and “had”s into that simple compound complexity — a conditional clause, perhaps, like "HAD [auxiliary verb] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun] HAD [plu perfect of "to have"] THAT [demonstrative determiner] HAD [noun] THAT [restrictive relative pronoun] HAD [auxiliary verb] HAD [plu perfect] THAT [demonstrative determiner] THAT [noun]..." (etc.).
I shall resist the joy of enhancing that sentence to infinite infinities stretched beyond all beyonds. For, being merciful as humble — humbly merciful? mercifully humble? — I shall deny you additional sumptuous torture (pointlessly pointed permutative pains), but tender a shape of more colorful prose:
Rue
Prune
Lynx kill
Magnolias
Carrot or leek
The pitch of lying
Meteors of sapphire
A hail of magma and coal
The fungus and funk of party hacks
The blaze and smoke of a plutocrat’s auto da fé [
endnote 2 ]
John Cage pioneered the "prepared piano" — a piano that has its sound altered by objects placed on or between its hammers or strings. See here and here and here and here.
In one of his films [Tillie and Gus (1933)], WC Fields was asked: "Do you like children?" Fields replied: "I do if they're properly cooked."
Auto da fé (etimolgy Portugese) manifests often like this.