Glassboro, N.J.: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

By Melvin Maddocks

In a suburban house in Glassboro, N.J., 21 miles southeast of Philadelphia, there stands a 72-year-old rattle-and-clank printing press. When Richard Mitchell, the doting owner and an English professor of 16 years' service at Glassboro State College, is asked why on earth a man would want to buy his own press, his very own Chandler & Price, he squashes his soft hat down on his head, raises one finger in a hark-the-angel gesture, and proclaims: "The spirit of Gutenberg stood before me and said, 'Mitch...'" At such moments Mitch looks a bit like a road-company version of Rex Harrison (with glasses), called upon by God and central casting to reform a whole functionally illiterate world of Eliza Doolittles. And behind all the song and dance, he is not just kidding.

Woe unto wanton danglers of participles! The professor and his faithful press are out to save the English language, with a fire-and-brimstone fury quite beyond the droll tut-tutting of Edwin Newman.

Nine times a year Mitch raises a deafeningly militant clatter, pumping from his venerable machine 1,800 copies of the latest issue of the Underground Grammarian, which must rank as the most inflammatory broadsheet to come out of Philadelphia since Tom Paine published Common Sense.

WARNING! the first page of the first issue shouted in January 1977. RAPE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE WILL BE PUNISHED! The declared policy of the editor-reporter-printer is to "expose and ridicule examples of jargon, faulty syntax, redundancy" and any "outrage against English" practiced by Glassboro State memo writers, especially those in high places.

Mitch disemboweling a culprit in print is a sight only brave readers should witness. "Some of the stuff we have to read causes cramps and vertigo," he mutters, warming himself up to a fine frenzy over "the works of Scriblerus X. Machina," as he dubs the bulletins from the chairman of the college's communications department, or perhaps the "feats of Clay," as he cruelly pun-points the communiques of one Glassboro dean. "A detailed analysis," he worries out loud, "might well cause irreversible brain damage." But he risks it. One writer's offenses against God and good English, pretty much the same thing to Mitch, are carefully totted up: seven "comma faults," three "failures" of subject-verb agreement, two unpardonable cases of "purple fustian." The villain is hoist by his own "demonstrable inanities." To quote is to destroy--so goes Mitch's modus operandi.

Then comes the general commentary. Adjectives like "pretentious," "sleazy" and merely "stupid," nouns like "gibberish," "bunk" and "rubbish" fly from the page like hot spittle. The world suddenly becomes overrun with "boobs" and "nitwits" and "barbarians" and their synonyms: "vice presidents," "curriculum developers" and, above all, "educationists" who have made careers out of not teaching Johnny to read while not learning to write themselves.

A final thunder roll is delivered to any quaking survivors: "When a professor perverts our language, he does so either as a scoundrel or a fool and outrages the truth and his calling." And so, may Fowler and Strunk & White and all the other guardian angels be with you until next month!

Mitch's congregation may be local; the sermon is addressed to America. And in its ambition, it exceeds the limits of the grammarian's priggishness. Mitch is not merely working night and day to stamp out the verbal excrescence "hopefully." In the Owl's Nest, a campus restaurant, he unfurls his scarf like a banner and expounds his true credo.

"A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe where responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is immoral."

The fidgeting Mitchell hands clutch his head. "God, if only I had time, if only I had life. It eats me up, keeps me awake at night: thinking about the origin of language. In my heart I'm convinced that it began as poetry. 'Golden destroyer' was the name of the animal before it was called 'lion.' The English language may be the greatest symbol system the world has ever devised. Yet we grow up practically mute."Rolling a cigarette, the professor waves his arms until the tobacco flies from his pouch and the frayed threads in his gray herringbone jacket, begging for an elbow patch, threaten to burst. He is having a small revelation.

"The real purpose of language is to talk about the world you can't see: the past, the future, the world of the mind. If we fail to master the tool, then difficult, important ideas go out of public discourse. We live meager, pinched lives, all of us, because we speak and write such meager, pinched language." A moment of silence. Then the scarf is re-furled. The hat sets itself at an angle of attack. It is time for Don Quixote to reassure himself of his mission by an encounter with a windmill.

In the office of the president of Glassboro State College, Mitch, restless as a terrier, circles while he introduces the visitor. President Mark Chamberlain is a tall, handsome man with casual aplomb. A year ago, the Underground Grammarian ran a quaint old engraving of a fireman, reins not so firmly in hand, flailing his horses toward an off-page blaze. The headline read: MARK CHAMBERLAIN WRITES AGAIN. Beneath a sampling of a letter from the president's office, featuring words like "reproducibility" and "quantitative," Mitch, to the wicked delight of the student body, commented on President Chamberlain's writing in the time-honored style of a teacher delivering an F: "There are kinds of English prose which simply can't be justified."

If any teeth marks are left on Mark Chamberlain, he does not permit them to show. "I'm a chemist," he says. "I was taught the first-person pronoun was not good form. One writes in the passive. Mitch," he chooses his words carefully, everybody chooses words carefully around Mitch, "Mitch made me aware. If Mitch did not exist," he concludes gallantly, "it would be necessary to invent him."

Mitch helped rescue Mark Chamberlain's truck from a snowdrift last winter; Mark Chamberlain lent Mitch the truck to haul in his Chandler & Price press, when he was replacing an earlier, even more ancient Gordon-Franklin. There are hope-filled rumors about the campus that Mitch is mellowing: giving up, as Chamberlain puts it, "ad hominem arguments"--assaults such as the one that publicized a vice president's healthy salary while dissecting his diseased prose.

Nitwits! Barbarians! What they fail to realize is that the campus sniper is turning into a long-range artilleryman. First Glassboro, then the world. With this month's issue, the Underground Grammarian enters its third year. Mitch has a third-class mailing permit, and more and more copies are going off campus. On a growing circulation list, at his own request, is the U.S. Commissioner of Education. Printed on elegant paper, exquisitely designed in handbill style with an often brilliant display of type faces, Mitch's four-page missive becomes more handsome with each issue.

Mitch himself is turning into a sort of Ann Landers of English usage. Grammatical inquiries arrive, one signed "Perplexed in Pittsburgh." Twelve to 15 letters a day overflow the sill above his breakfast table and spill into his dining room, bringing floods of horrible examples, some contributions, and a rising chorus of: "We're mad as hell too, and we're not going to take it any more either."

After the conviviality of the Owl's Nest, after the bracing confrontation in the president's office, Mitch returns home, to the headquarters of the Underground Grammarian. At the wheel of his 1968 blue Plymouth, he makes even "drive" seem like a passive verb. Hands are reserved for their primary function: underlining words. He bisects the road as heedlessly as most people split infinitives. His wife, coming from the opposite direction in a red Volkswagen, toots in greeting, and maybe a little in self-defense.

Safely in the house, secure in the holy-of-holies basement, with one hand on his press and the smell of lead and ink in his nostrils, Mitch feels the mood of prophecy descending. "Everywhere there's a discontent, a feeling that something is wrong at the heart of education. The mind that can't weigh and measure with words after twelve, 16, 19 years at school is a mind in distress.

"In the next ten years things are going to change. Already we're trying to get back to reading, writing and ciphering. What else is there, when you come down to it? What would happen if people gained a reasonable command of language? Inconceivable! They wouldn't vote for many politicians. They wouldn't buy any deodorants. If you can keep your participles from dangling, you can spot a non sequitur. If you can spot a non sequitur, you can tell when people are lying.

"So the millennium doesn't come? I've found out what I want to do when I grow up. Freedom of the press means everybody should have his own press, right? Then there's the other notion, 'the power of the press.' That's no idle phrase either. You send out the word. Some man with a printing press can make important changes in the world. That's what it all means. I'm going to crank this thing until I die." -- Melvin Maddocks

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