Login
Helping verbs are curious, AND fascinating
English has a big bagful of auxiliary verbs. You may have learned these as “helping verbs” in elementary and middle school, since they are sometimes described as verbs that “help” the main verb express its meaning. There are even schoolroom songs about them. They are a curious bunch.
The auxiliaries include the modal verbs (can and could, shall and should, will and would, may and might, and must). The verb that follows a modal is in its bare, uninflected form: can go, could go, must go, and so on. There are also a number of semi-modal auxiliary verbs (such as dare, need, ought to, had better, have to, and used to). Some are compound words spelled with a space and several have unusual grammatical properties as well, such as being resistant to contraction or inversion. And in parts of the English-speaking world, modals can double up, yielding expressions like might could, may can, might should, and more.
Aside from the modals, semi-modals, and double modals, the primary auxiliaries are forms of have, be, and do, which are inflected for tense (is versus was, has versus had, do versus did), number (is versus are, has versus have), and person(is versus am versus are, do versus does). These auxiliaries help to indicate verbal nuances like emphasis, the perfect and progressive aspects, and the passive voice. Here are some examples, adapted from Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
Those who did catch sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove … (emphatic do and perfect aspect had)
The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. (progressive aspect)
His shirt was patched so many times that it was like the sail … (passive voice)
The primary auxiliaries come before the negative adverb not and allow contraction to it.
They didn’t catch sharks.
His shirt wasn’t patched.
He hadn’t taken the sharks.
And they play a role in questions by hopping to the left over the subject
Did they catch sharks?
Was his shirt patched?
Had he taken the sharks?
or by being copied at the end in a tag question.
They caught sharks, didn’t they?
His shirt was patched, wasn’t it?
He had taken the sharks, hadn’t he?
Main verbs like see and go and walk don’t do any of those tricks.
Things get even curiouser, however, because the helping verbs have and do have doppelgangers that actually are main verbs.
The old man did his chores.
His shirt had a tear in it.
How do we know these are main verbs and not helping verbs? Well, for one thing, they are the only verbs in the sentence. For another, they can occur with other helping verbs:
The old man had done his chores.
His shirt had had a tear in it all day.
And if you make the sentences questions or negate them, you have to add a form of auxiliary do.
Did the old man do his chores?
Did his shirt have a tear in it?
The helping verb be also has a doppelganger main verb, but the forms of main verb be behave pretty much just like the helping verb. More curious behavior, keeping us on our toes. The first sentence below has past tense main verb was followed by an adjective; the other two have the past tense helping verb was.
The shark was tenacious. (main verb was)
The shark was never caught. (auxiliary was)
The old man was trying his best. (auxiliary was)
But all three was forms hop to the left in questions.
Was the shark tenacious?
Was the shark ever caught?
Was the old man trying his best?
The curious behavior of helping verbs goes on and on, with different dialects doing different things. If you’ve read many British novels or watched British television you might have noticed forms of helping verb do popping up in elliptical sentences. Here’s an example from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “Sam frowned. If he could have bored holes in Gollum with his eyes, he would have done.” (For a study of these forms, check out Ronald Butters’s 1983 article “Syntactic change in British English propredicates.”)
In African American English, the auxiliary done lends a completive meaning to events. You can see it in these dialogue examples from August Wilson’s Fences and from Walter Mosely’s Blond Faith: “Now I done give you everything I got to give you!” and “Didn’t she tell you that Pericles done passed on.” For more on this use of done, take a look at the chapters by Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk and by Charles E. DeBose in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language.
We’ve just scratched the surface of auxiliaries. I hope you’ve become curious about these curious words.
Featured image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash (public domain)
During the news coverage of the COVID pandemic, I enjoyed seeing Dr Anthony Fauci on television and hearing his old-school Brooklyn accent, still shining through in his late seventies in words like Pfizer, because, data, here, and that.
But my favorite expression to listen for was his use of “down the pike” to mean “in the future.” Fauci explained once that “you don’t see for days or weeks down the pike.” Another time he said “before you know it, two to three weeks down the pike, you’re in trouble.” Discussing vaccine testing he said “So we go into phase one, it’ll take about three months to determine if it’s safe. That’ll bring us three or four months down the pike.”
“Down the pike” is an expression I grew up hearing all the time in my home state of New Jersey. And, of course, many people say it besides Anthony Fauci. Joe Biden talks about how government and the private sector should “anticipate and respond to shortages that may be coming down the pike.” If you Google “down the pike” you’ll find it everywhere, even in New York Times headlines like “Is a Trans-Atlantic Pact Coming Down the Pike?” and (with an attempted pun) “Hydrogen Cars, Coming Down the Pike.” You can find occasional instances of things coming “up the pike,” and there is an early twentieth-century slang expression “hit the pike,” meaning “hit the road” or “leave.”
Not everyone is familiar with “down the pike.” Some mislearn it as the semantically plausible “down the pipe” rather than “down the pike.” It’s “down the pike,” but where does it come from?
I had assumed that “down the pike” had something to do with the New Jersey Turnpike, the 117-mile toll highway that runs from New York City to Delaware. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority was created in 1948 and the Turnpike itself was completed in 1951. It’s been collecting tolls ever since, along with the Garden State Parkway, which was completed in 1957.
There are lots of turnpikes, however, and the word goes way back. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples from the early 1400s. It originally meant “a spiked barrier fixed in or across a road or passage,” and was used as a defense against attacks by men on horseback.
Later turnpike became extended to the sense of a turnstile to block horses. Samuel Johnson offered this definition: “Turnpike… a cross of two bars armed with pikes at the end, and turning on a pin, fixed to hinder horses from entering.” By the late 1600s, the turnpike was a toll booth of sorts, and a late seventeenth-century Act of Parliament refers to “collecting the said [toll]… by setting up a Turnpike or otherwise.”
Turnpike, or the clipping pike, was often used to refer generally to roads in the nineteenth century, and the expression “coming down the pike” was another way of saying “coming down the road.”
By the late 1800s, figurative senses were emerging and taking hold. An 1898 story in the Dayton Herald had the line “Bowling, if dead, is the liveliest corpse that ever ’came down the pike’, as they say on the bowery.” The quote marks suggest that figurative “down the pike” was a newish expression at the time.
Pike was also used as a synonym for boardwalk or midway, and in 1903 the organizers of the St. Louis World’s Fair announced that the upcoming fair would call its promenade “The Pike,” to distinguish it from Chicago’s Midway. Perhaps St. Louis got the idea from Long Beach, California, which debuted a boardwalk amusement zone called “The Pike” even earlier—in 1902. In any event, St. Louis encouraged visitors to “Come Down the Pike,” and there was later a Broadway musical titled “Down the Pike” whose second act took place at the 1904 World’s Fair.
The figurative sense of “coming down the pike” took hold but remained sporadic in the early twentieth century. A 1905 Portland, Maine, newspaper talked about “nothing but anarchy coming down the pike” and “chaos coming down the pike.” A 1936 issue of the International Stereotypers’ and Electrotypers’ Union Journal which refers to “The fall election… coming down the pike.” Both examples are clearly oriented toward time and events rather than space.
By the 1950s the sense of “coming down the pike” to mean happening in the future was increasingly common and it took off in the 1960s and 70s, after the completion of the Interstate Highway System.
With language, you never know what’s coming down the pike.
Featured image: the New Jersey Turnpike, 1992, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)
What does a technical writer do?
When people think about careers in writing, they may focus on writing novels or films, imagining themselves as the next Stephen King or Sofia Coppola. They may aspire be a poet like Tracy K. Smith or Ada Limón. They may lean toward non-fiction, aiming to become an author like Jill Lepore or Louis Menand. But for steady work, there is nothing like technical writing for science, medicine, manufacturing, finance, retail, and other specialized fields.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 55,000 technical writing jobs in the US, projected to hit 59,000 by 2031. And while there are advanced certifications available in specialty fields and even master’s degrees in technical communication, technical writing is a career path open to writers with undergraduate degrees in English, communication, linguistics, and related fields. It usually helps though to have some experience in design, business, science, or technology.
Technical writers prepare instruction manuals, guides, technical articles, descriptions, posts, and documents for all manner of processes, products, and procedures. One student of mine working as an intern said that her first task was to write instructions for packing jars of peanut butter in shipping boxes. Another developed a safety manual for a supermarket’s deli kitchen. A third got assigned to explain procedures for using water softeners and filtration systems. And I once worked for a time documenting an automated query system for real estate listings.
When I’ve invited career technical writers to visit my classes, they’ve shared some of the work they do at any given time. They’ve written clinical evaluation reports and protocols in the medical field and instructions for financial and business systems and software. They have written explanations of how environmental data is collected and analyzed and procedures for compliance with federal and state regulations. One rewrote hospital incident reports to make sure they were understandable to staff and insurers. Another developed a design proposal for an event venue. The writing itself is tremendously varied.
A writer friend once told me, “A lot of writing is not writing,” meaning that there was more to it than words on paper. That’s certainly true for technical writing. Research and consultation are large parts of the technical writer’s work. Figuring out the needs of the users takes time, curiosity, and perseverance. Technical writers consult with designers, developers, managers, technical staff, and end-users to understand the products or processes involved. They may be responsible for recommending the most appropriate medium and design for materials and for ensuring that content is uniform across various modes of delivery.
Some technical writers may also be responsible for collecting and analyzing user feedback and usage patterns. And they may work as technical editors for projects developed collaboratively or drafted by others: scientists, clinicians, programmers, and engineers may not be familiar with writing for the general public or for their end-users.
At times, technical writers can also find themselves doing some feature writing in addition to the technical bread and butter. A writer might profile staff members explaining their work and write newsletter, blog, or magazine copy to tell the backstory of a new discovery, promote an innovative product, or explain a live-saving procedure.
Our fiction-writer colleagues like to remind us that “all writing is creative writing.” If you enjoy research and can write clearly, technical writing may be the place to put your creativity to work.
Featured image by Amy Hirschi via Unsplash (public domain)
The realization started with the word akimbo. I had first learned it as meaning a stance with hands on the hips, and I associated the stance with the comic book image of Superman confronting evildoers. Body language experts sometimes call this a power pose, intended to project confidence or dominance.
From time to time, I had encountered akimbo used to mean haphazardly sprawled, in expressions like “arms and legs akimbo,” but I assumed it was an error. And I’d seen the occasional phrasing “legs akimbo,” which referred to a splayed position.
Then I ran across “studiously akimbo hair,” which seemed to connote an intentional messiness. It was time to check some dictionaries.
I found that akimbo comes from a Middle English phrase in kenebowe, which meant “at a sharp angle.” Arms and hands had been in kenebowe since the 1400s and a-kimbo from the 1800s. In the nineteenth century we find a tailor on a bench with his legs akimbo and a man dancing with knees akimbo. There are hearts akimbo, hats akimbo, curtains akimbo, and, yes, hair akimbo. Today there’s even an action movie called “Guns Akimbo.” The Oxford English Dictionary yields a 1940s Mayfair slang use for being on one’s high horse, with the example “She got terribly akimbo.” Bent out of shape, perhaps?
By now, it was clear to me that my narrow conception of akimbo had gone askew. I got curious about what other lexical preconceptions of mine might be in disarray, so I turned to penultimate and erstwhile.
Penultimate is still defined as “next to last,” though Merriam-Webster notes that it is sometimes used as an “intensified version of ultimate,” but not usually in edited prose. Erstwhile too is still defined as “former,” though it is sometimes used as a synonym for esteemed or as a fancy way ofsaying worthwhile.
It’s not hard to see how these meanings could shift in use. When someone refers to the “penultimate scene” of a play or “an erstwhile professor,” listeners may understand these as referring to a finale or an eminence. Vagueness permits some drift in common usage, but the specificity of the older definitions provides a strong counterweight. It’s one thing for a dictionary to go from akimbo to askew, but a bit harder to get from the meaning of final to next-to-last or of esteemed to former.
A word that has shifted like akimbo is cohort. From its beginnings as a tenth of a Roman legion, the word was later extended to other bands of warriors and to people united in a common cause. Later it also came to refer to a group sharing a demographic characteristic (such as an age cohort or a cohort of students).
Since a cohort is a group and groups are made up of individuals, cohort also came to refer to one’s compatriots. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the gloss “assistant, colleague, accomplice,” and one of the citations is a bit of snark from a 1965 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “The new American vulgarism of ‘cohort’ meaning ‘partner’.”
And by the way, even though you might be in cahoots with your cohorts, the two words don’t seem to be related. Cahoot is most likely related to the French word cahute referring to a cabin or hut, where one might form a partnership away from prying eyes.
Words shift their meanings for a lot of reasons. For akimbo and cohort, the fuzziness of their early meanings (“limbs askew” and “band of individuals”) has left room for new standard meanings. In other cases, as with penultimate and erstwhile, dictionaries have resisted including the newer, casual uses. For now.
And sometimes, there is a split decision. Recognizing that some people blur amused and bemused, Merriam Webster gives the sense “wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing.” The OED sticks with the sense of confused, muddled, or stupefied.
I’m bemused for now but waiting to see how those meanings play out in the future.
Featured image by Leon ellDOT via Unsplash (public domain)
Concluding our discussion of On Certainty, with guest Chris Heath.
We try one last time to get a handle on Wittgenstein's philosophy of science. How do people actually change their minds about fundamental beliefs?
The post Ep. 310: Wittgenstein On World-Pictures (Part Two) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.We continue with Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty (written 1951), with guest Christopher Heath.
What is Wittgenstein's philosophy of science as it's reflected in this book? We talk about Weltbilds (world pictures) and how these relate to language games, relativism, verification, paradigms, testimony, and more.
The post Ep. 310: Wittgenstein On World-Pictures (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Continuing to discuss On Certainty, we get deeply into textual quotes.
How does he actually respond to Moore's argument about his hand? How does he extend his account to talk about mathematical and scientific statements? Is Wittgenstein a pragmatist?
The post Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part Two) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Discussing the notes Ludwig Wittgenstein made at the end of his life in 1951 that were published as On Certainty in 1969.
Can we coherently doubt propositions like "physical objects exist," "the world is more than 50 years old," and "this is my hand"? Wittgenstein looks at these questions via his framework of language games. Is doubting one of these a legitimate move in a game?
Check out the Overthink podcast and Conversations with Coleman. Attend our live show in NYC on April 15.
The post Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.
When linguists talk about prosody, the term usually refers to aspects of speech that go beyond individual vowels and consonants such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such suprasegmental features may reflect the tone or focus of a sentence. Uptalk is a prosodic effect. So is sarcasm, stress, or the accusatory focus you achieve by raising the pitch in a sentence like “I didn’t forget your birthday.”
Scholars working with computer corpora of texts have extended the notion of prosody to aspects of meaning. The term “semantic prosody” was coined by William Louw in his 1993 essay “Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer: the diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies.” Building on work by John McHardy Sinclair, Louw used the term to refer to the way in which otherwise neutral words can have their meanings shaded by habitually co-occurring with other, positive or negative, words. He referred to it as a “semantic aura.”
How do you see the aura? Researchers use tools like the Key Word In Context (or KWIC) feature which produces a listing of collocates of a key word. As the term suggests, collocates are words that are co-located with the key word in the corpus and in some genre. Semantic prosody is not as in-your-face as a connotation, and as Louw’s title suggests, it can be used ironically. Perhaps because of this, dictionary definitions tend not mention prosodies in a word’s definition.
So, to take an example used by Susan Hunston of the University of Birmingham in her article “Semantic Prosody Revisited,” the word persistent often occurs with a following noun in negative contexts. We find examples like persistent errors, persistent intimidation, persistent offenders, persistent cough, persistent sexism, or persistent unemployment. That tone seems to carry over to examples like persistent talk or persistent reports. The reports and talk have a presumption of negativity to them. Hunston points out that persistent is not necessarily negative, however. One can be a persistent advocate, or a persistent suitor, or reach a goal by persistent efforts. Its aura comes from being often negative.
That carries over to the verb persist as well, I think. When Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced during a 2017 confirmation debate, the Senate majority leader’s comment that “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” was intended as a rebuke. Quickly, however, “Nevertheless, she persisted” and “Nevertheless, they persisted,” became a rallying cry of women refusing to be silenced and a renewed call to activism. The rebuke of “she persisted” was repurposed as defiance and determination.
Linguists are fascinated by phenomena like semantic prosody and the potential hidden patterns in language use. For writers who are not linguists, semantic prosody is worth pondering as one drafts and revises. How do our words shade our sentences with positive or negative associations? And how can we play with those associations to surprise readers.
Consider the example of break out, a two-word verb studied by Dominic Stewart in his 2010 book Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation. What sort of things break out? Typically, it’s wars, crises, fires, conflicts, violence, insurrections, diseases, inflammations. As writers, we can reverse that tone with phrasings like “peace broke out” or “hope broke out,” giving peace and hope the sudden eruption often associated with negative events.
As readers, we ought to be aware of potential semantic prosody in the media we consume. When we encounter words like utterly, symptomatic, chill, threaten, rife, or give rise to, what subtle tones are being communicated to us? There’s not, as yet, a dictionary of semantic prosody where you can look up a word’s preferences, but you can certainly think about them.
Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash (public domain)
Join Sarah Jones and Zoe Hu for a discussion on stay-at-home girlfriends and feminism.
You may have seen the 2021 BBC story with the heading “Nirvana sued by the baby from Nevermind’s album cover.”
The 1991 album cover showed the then-baby nude and swimming toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. Not long ago, the thirty-ish grown-up baby sued the former members of Nirvana and the estate of Kurt Cobain, accusing them of child pornography and of causing him emotional damage. But the headlines make it sound like a baby is suing. CBS News tried for tortuously clarity, offering “Man shown as a baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind album appeals ruling in band’s favor.”
The clunkiness of both attempts is a reminder that English noun phrases have something called a “temporal interpretation.” That’s linguist-speak for how we understand their place in time relative to the tense of the verb. You can think of it as a time stamp on a noun phrase.
There is a robust academic literature on temporal nouns and some excellent articles, dissertation, and books by scholars such as Irene Heim, Murvet Enç, Renate Musan, and Judith Tonhauser, among others.
The basic point is that a noun can be understood as existing at a different time than the verb. For example, a tired mom might elbow her partner in the middle of the night and grumble, “It’s your turn to feed the baby.” The baby and the feeding are both in the present. But an adult showing old family photos might comment that “The baby in that picture is me.” The baby is in the past. And a pregnant mother-to-be would be likely to say that “The baby was kicking all day,” using baby rather than fetus or baby-to-be. The baby is in the not too distant future.
“A noun can be understood as existing at a different time than the verb.”
We often gloss over the alignment or misalignment of a noun’s time stamp with its predicate. If I say that “A student of mine was named to the board of Tesla,” it can be understood as referring to a current student or a former student. University students are not typically on corporate boards (even Elon Musk’s), so the likelihood is that I mean a former student. A listener gets that, even if I choose not to make things unambiguous by adding former.
Modifiers like former or current help to place a noun phrase in time, giving nuance: a current student, a former Governor, a sitting Senator, an erstwhile roommate, a past lover, a one-time contender, an old professor, the present administration, and so on.
Former baby sounds a bit odd, since babyhood is something that one naturally grows out of, like being a high school student. So, consider a sentence like “A high school student invented a new type of telescope.” The phrase high school student suggests a temporality, so just a date will do. Adding former would confuse matters.
Other nouns have similar temporal limitations: Murvet Enç’s clever example “Every fugitive is now in jail” means that those who were formerly fugitives are now jailed, since fugitive implies flight. And nouns like captive and hostage can be used to refer to those who have been recently released or freed, though after a certain interval former seems necessary. “Every incumbent is running again” is fine, but with current added, we get redundancy.
Sometimes the mismatch of verb tense and noun temporal interpretation jumps out at us, like when a baby files a lawsuit. Sometimes it slips right by. The lesson here is to keep an eye on both the tense of verbs and the time stamp of nouns.
Featured image by Sonja Langford on Unsplash (public domain)
This was originally published at The Rumpus on November 17, 2020.
I Was on That Bullshit
June 10, 1998, I decided my father had abandoned me for the last time. My father didn’t attend my high school graduation and as far as I was concerned, he could fuck off forever.
That morning, I sat up front in the first two rows of graduates, a sea of purple caps with gold tassels. When my name was called, I walked across the stage and strained my eyes beyond the seats to find my family. I saw my Jama first, her wheelchair a great marker for finding everyone else. My mother, my sisters, my aunt, my cousins, and my uncle—my father’s brother. No sign of my father.
I went through the rest of the day feeling excited and proud but distracted, my father’s absence a sharp, jagged hangnail that snagged every moment of celebration. Fuck him. Forever.
I ignored my father for three hundred and eighty-seven days.
My Mama Was on That Bullshit
The summer of 1999, my mother asked me to drive my father to his court date. I didn’t want to do it and didn’t know why she was even getting involved, but whatever.
Navigating the afternoon of my father’s court date involved a special brand of mental gymnastics. I would look at and listen to and respond to everything and anything but him. I pulled up to the house my father lived in—a dingy white, wooden four-square house with a large porch that sat back from the street in a neighborhood some called “The Zone,” a shorthand for ‘The Twilight Zone.” I couldn’t help but watch him walk toward the car.
He looked terrible. Thin in the arms and shoulders and face, his stomach distended like he was six months pregnant, his eyes yellow and sunken. As he struggled down the cement steps of the rooming house, I struggled to find sympathy.
My father, looking a fucking mess, was probably just more drunk than I’d ever seen him, coming down off some week-long bender where he hadn’t eaten or drank any water. It had been a year since my graduation no-show, and in that run-down place he chose to live, it was no wonder he looked like shit.
Once we got to the courthouse, my mother asked me to come in with them. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t know why she bothered. My mother is the strongest woman I’ve ever known. The way she carried our family through all my father’s bullshit inspires me to push through when times are tough and has taught me to make sense of things when faced with chaos and uncertainty. That morning, I was confused. My mother had been so invested in finding her own happiness—seeing someone else, buying a new house—yet, here she was, once again, playing supportive wife.
During the hearing, my mother commented on how disoriented my father seemed, her face creased with concern. I shrugged. As my mother listened to my father, I listened to the judge. Apparently, my father had failed to appear for some other court date after a drunk driving arrest a couple months prior. He’d hit a light post and a parked car that had children in it. Because he was a repeat DWI/DUI offender, he was looking at jail time.
I knew it. Same bullshit.
I slid out of the gallery and walked into the hall. Standing firmly in my self-righteousness, I reasoned cutting him off had saved me, I was better for it, even. I wanted my mother to do the same. Be done. Cut the bullshit. I wanted her to be the strong woman I knew her to be. I wanted her to remember who the fuck she was.
My mother, worried and flustered, pushed open the court room door and found me in the hall.
“They’re calling an ambulance for your father. We need to meet him at the hospital.”
Doctors Be on That Bullshit
The doctor stood at the foot of my father’s hospital bed. I stood in the corner. My mother sat bedside. The doctor explained my father’s appearance—the bloated belly, the jaundice—and his demeanor—fatigue, disorientation—pointed to ascites, a common companion to liver disease, or cirrhosis, which affects alcoholics.
“Are you a heavy drinker, Mr. Wilson?” the doctor asked.
My father’s eyes rolled from the doctor to my mother, then to me.
My mother answered for my father. “He’s an alcoholic.”
“Recovered? Trying to quit?” the doctor pressed.
My father closed his eyes. “Trying to quit,” he said.
“I see,” the doctor said. He shook his head and whistled through his thin lips. “You’re going to have to try harder if you want to stick around.”
Try. Harder.
But then, the doctor looked at me and my mother, his tone changing. He launched into an explanation of alcoholism as a disease, pressing upon my father’s helplessness, his sickness, his need.
Try. Harder.
I had heard it all before. The Al-Anon and Alateen meetings my mother took me and my sister to as kids explained alcoholism the same way. I remember reading and rereading What’s “Drunk,” Mama?. I remember wishing it had more pictures. I remember wishing the pictures it did have weren’t sadly sketched drawings with squiggly lines and no colors. I remember wishing it didn’t use the word “sick” to mean arguing all the time, sleeping a lot, and breaking promises when I knew sick meant sneezing and coughing and sore throats.
Standing in the corner, I was that little girl again, rereading that same paragraph: “I guess Daddy is sick. He’s always drinking. Something is wrong with Mama, too! Mama is always crying or mad. It’s hard to understand. It mixes me up.” There were no pictures on that page. Only words. Sick, drinking, wrong, mad, cry, bad, wrong, angry.
Is being angry being sick, too?
Am I sick, too?
I looked around the room. My father’s eyes watered with apology. My mother’s jaw was tight with disappointment. The doctor glanced around at the three of us. He was the professional. He was supposed to have some answers. He offered none. Instead, he set a bomb of bullshit blame in the center of the room.
“If your father had been left alone for a few more days, he wouldn’t have made it,” he said holding his clipboard to his chest. Then he left without telling us how to get well.
Blackouts Are That Bullshit
In September 1998, I got blackout drunk for the first time. Even though I drank when sneaking into clubs—my older sister’s ID my passport to adventures in Bacardi Limón and Sprite, vodka-cranberry, and Captain and Coke—I had never blacked out, never drank so much I couldn’t remember the night. But the weekend after my eighteenth birthday, my mother, and the man she was seeing at the time, took me out for what was to be a grown-up evening of Milwaukee night life.
It began with a dinner cruise on the river. My mother, who didn’t know I was already regularly drinking with friends, told the bartender on the Edelweiss boat I was celebrating my twenty-first birthday. Because I was with two parental types, the cute bartender didn’t hesitate to keep my cup overflowing with a variety of cocktails. I don’t remember what we had for dinner or what the night felt like exactly, but I can imagine a cool breeze, the lights of riverfront bars and office buildings reflecting in the ink-black water mirroring the blanket of night overhead. I think there was dancing, the bartender snapping and twirling behind the bar each time I got a refill.
After the dinner cruise, we went to 1000 East, on Milwaukee’s east side. It was here I had Kamikaze shots, the bartender tall with broad shoulders and a small afro. We left the bar, and I remember flowers, a kaleidoscope of colors, red and blue and green and yellow. The window down, the air felt so good, everything felt so good.
My next memory is being carried down the stairs to my room in the basement. After yanking my shirt off and peeling my skirt down my thighs, I collapsed on the bed. The next day, my mother said I had started undressing before her friend left the room. She said he called out to her to come help me as he stumbled out of the room and flipped the light off so he wouldn’t see anything. I spent most of the morning vomiting and trying to cobble together pieces of the night based on what my mother told me. Even though the bartender from the Edelweiss had left a message on the house phone, singing happy birthday with a show-tune flair and telling me how I’m a beautiful person and a dancing queen, I still couldn’t remember his face or his voice or his lips—my mother said he planted several kisses on my cheeks. “Your little gay boyfriend,” she called him, “couldn’t get enough of you!”
I smiled through the telling. I pictured myself—the confident, carefree me I knew I became when I drank—dancing and flirting and throwing my head back in laughter. I told my mother I didn’t remember much that happened that night, but I did remember how I felt. Good.
My mother made a face. “I bet you don’t feel good now,” she said. Her plan had been to make the moment teachable, to get me so drunk I’d get sick, so sick I wouldn’t want to drink again.
She didn’t know I was already drinking, that I had found a friend in the swirling, swaying, swimming delight of intoxication earlier than she could’ve ever imagined. She wanted to know if I’d be drinking like that again. “I know you miserable,” she said, obviously anticipating an answer that might be pledge, a response that might be promise, to never drink like that again.
“I had a blast last night.” I said. Through the blur of music and colors, winks and smiles, new people and places, I knew that at no point in the spin of lights and sounds and touch had I been sad. I knew I hadn’t thought about my promise-breaking father, nor had I felt the guilt of refusing to talk to him or see him. I knew I hadn’t thought about my boyfriend’s confusion when I dumped him for reasons I couldn’t put into words, nor had I acknowledged the increasing demands of caregiving as my grandmother’s stroke recovery stalled. I knew I hadn’t thought about the challenges of my first semester as a college student, all the white students looking at me in class but ignoring me on campus, the anvil of lust and confusion and need that hovered over my head with each visit to the Black Student Union lounge where beautiful, smart, confident women with smoldering molasses skin and their own apartments talked about pledging and midterms and internships while smiling at me and asking me about my major.
That night solidified what I knew to be true. Drinking to forget was a thing. Drinking to feel better worked. And drinking until the night blacked out meant I thought about nothing, feared nothing, needed nothing, and remembered nothing.
Drinking Culture Is That Bullshit
Ignoring my father through the summer of 1998 was easy and forgetting about him and my pain through my first blackout and my first semester of college was a breeze. Focused and determined to be better than my father, to be stronger than my mother, you couldn’t tell me shit.
Taking my father to his court date, seeing him sick, and knowing he almost died threatened to break that focus, that resolve. I didn’t want my father dead. I didn’t hate him as much as I blamed and judged him for being broken, for breaking our family. Recovered but still in custody of the court, I visited him at the hospital. Relief, shame, and guilt wrestled in my belly. In his hospital bed, thin and exhausted, he made promises like always—to be better, to stop drinking.
I wanted to believe him but didn’t know if I could. I wanted to forgive him but feared being hurt again. I shook that shit off though, and I remembered who the fuck I was.
I wouldn’t let myself get hurt again. This was his battle, not mine. He was on his way to jail to do his time, to pay for his recklessness. If my father made a change, great. If he didn’t, it meant he was weak, not me. It meant he was sick, not me.
I was fine. No one and nothing could hurt me.
I am not that little girl or that awkward teenager. I am a grown woman. I keep a bottle of Bacardi Limón in the freezer. I am in college. I am in control. I go to classes where no one speaks to me, but I’m here to learn, not make friends. I study and study but this shit still doesn’t make sense. I keep a bottle of Southern Comfort on top of the fridge. I hang out in the Black Student Union. I keep my crushes to myself. Adding vodka to wine coolers makes them taste better. I spend time with my grandmothers—caregiving for my Jama who never fully recovered from her stroke, loving up on my Granny who’s going to die soon. I mix Peach Schnapps in my orange juice to go with my breakfast. I check in on my sisters, but they’re not like I remember, or maybe it’s me. It’s never about me. Everybody else is changing. Everything is different. I stop mixing my Bacardi with Sprite. I tell my friends stories—entertaining, salacious stories that are a perfect mix of truth and lies. I go on dates like I’m supposed to. Red wine makes me feel sophisticated. I dance until I sweat because it makes me feel free. Rum punch is more refreshing than water. I have sex like I’m supposed to. I drink the last of his drink while he sleeps. I commit to nothing. I ask for nothing. I expect nothing. This makes me cool. This makes me popular. College is so much fun. Life is so much fun. Wray & Nephew warms from the inside out, even in the dead of winter. I don’t need no coat. I don’t need no sleep. I don’t need anyone.
I’m fine. Nothing and no one can hurt me.
Daddy Issues Are That Bullshit
Weeks before my high school graduation, my father said to me, “if your mother’s friend is going, I’m not coming.”
My mother’s “friend,” who had been a regular feature in my life throughout much of high school and had helped with my senior-year expenses no less, told me he wouldn’t come to graduation if it meant my father wouldn’t attend. I told him he shouldn’t have to do that, but he insisted. He didn’t come to graduation but came to the graduation party at the house when it was clear my father would be a no-show.
I tried to make light of it all, my father’s absence at graduation and the party, but it hurt me. I wanted him there. I wanted him to be there for me, to celebrate with me.
But it wasn’t about me, and maybe it never was and never would be.
The first couple times my parents separated, seeing my father was always hit or miss. He would make plans with me and my sister, fun shit like car shows and movie dates, trips to the Lake front or the park—he was still driving then—only to cancel them when he extended the invitation to our mother, and she declined. I remember the punch of those cancellations, right in the center of me, the anger and disappointment, thinking he missed us, he wanted to see us, only to be proved wrong by his drunken call thirty minutes after he was supposed to pick us up, or worse, his no-call/no-show.
Forget all that, though. I’ve dealt with all that. My father’s no-calls/no-shows were in the past. My graduation heartbreak was in the past, my father’s near-death experience was in the past. Ignoring him was childish and weak. I was better than that. Stronger and more in control, I knew how to manage my interactions with my father in a way that wouldn’t get me hurt.
While he served time in Milwaukee County House of Corrections, I wrote him letters—mostly encouraging him to stay positive, reminding him of good times, and sharing a few details about my life. I wrote him two or three times before he finally wrote me back.
April 18, 2000
Dear Sher’ree,
Just a few lines to let you know that I’m doing fine. I’m sorry that I forgot to answer your letter. But I thought I wrote you last.
I hope that you got the apartment you wanted. I know you will make it out there on your own. Then mom can rent me your room (smile). Tell her that. She will get a kick out of that. I would be with her any way I can.
I am really going to make a big change for myself and you girls. I am really learning the meaning of missing you. I’m sorry for the lost time. I knew we can’t make it up, but we can try to love and trust each other again. Well, kiss everyone for me & put in a few words to mom.
Send me another picture of yourself. That last one of you and your sister was too dark.
Love always,
Dad
I answered the letter, sent more pictures, but after his last reply I didn’t write back again.
June 1, 2000
Dear Sher’ree,
I hope this letter will find you doing fine. Just a few lines to let you know that I am doing fine.
I was glad to receive your letter. You always make me feel good. Well, I have three more months to go. I hope I will be able to find me a good job, so I can help my family in the future.
I hope that things can be worked out between me & ma. It’s been a long time and I am ready to start being the man I know I can be.
I know you will make it in school. You always find a way. You are very lucky to have a mother like you do. All three of you girls mean the world to me. I know you find it hard to believe at times. But I need and love you very much.
That was a very nice camping trip. Are you sure I didn’t catch a fish? “smile.”
Well, kiss your sister and mama for me. Let them know that I really care. I don’t know about your big sister, but I guess she will come around sooner or lately. I also love her deeply and wish the best for her.
Tell your mother that she is getting a little slow in answering my letters. Tell her to give up some of the pictures, like now.
Love always,
Daddy
Something about the letters sounded like a song I’d heard before, reminded me of a book I’d read. Same old promises, same old, “Is your mama coming? Put your mama on the phone.”
I saw what I wanted to see. I saw “I’ll be there for you, if your mama is there for me.”
I refused to be moved, and that is not how you spell my name.
Mommy Issues Are That Bullshit
My mother tells me a story about a dude she knew when she was in her twenties. They called him Harry Hippie and his mission was “to get people wasted.” He wore a military-style coat and came through parties with a fringed satchel bag full of drugs and “equipment.” One time, he brought out a retooled gas mask for smoking weed, something like a wearable bong that engulfed your face in smoke. My mother admits to trying a few things, but she quickly follows with anecdotes about how she “doesn’t like” particular types of highs and how she never got addicted to anything because she’s always had a strong mind.
My mother quit smoking cold turkey every time she got pregnant and quit for good when carrying my younger sister. My mother was especially careful about us never seeing her drunk. I knew my mother drank, but her drinking was different than my father’s. My mother’s drinking was about fun. My mother’s drinking never ostracized or demeaned her. My mother’s drinking never meant destruction. I remember my mother giggly and loving. I remember my mother dancing. When I remember my father’s drinking, I remember terrifying car rides where he would drift in the lane and clip boulevard partitions. I remember him passed out and drooling. I remember him stabbing at furniture and throwing things. I remember him yelling. I remember him leaving.
I know this is selective memory, but it feels entirely true. Where my father’s drinking was about weakness, my mother’s drinking was about strength, about control.
I wanted my drinking to be like my mother’s drinking and not my father’s. The times my drinking led to anger, to sadness, to hurting people and hurting myself, I descended into a shame like I’d never felt. Most times, blackouts hid the most painful parts, but the shame was always the same. Another morning of weak-ass apologies and bottomless guilt. Then, hair of the dog to stop the pounding in my head, to steady the churning in my belly, to make anecdotes of the recklessness, to make fun of the loss of control.
I remember my mother and father arguing once. My father denied saying some hurtful things to my mother, and she pressed him. He finally said if he did say those things, he didn’t remember and didn’t mean it. My mother wouldn’t accept it, didn’t accept it. A drunk mind speaks a sober heart, but most importantly, my mother pointed out that she drinks and had been drunk before, but she can remember what she does and what she says. My mother has always been strong in mind.
I never told my mother how much I drank. I never shared with her how often I blacked out, how often I woke up wrapped in shame. Part of me figured she wouldn’t understand, but mostly, I knew this was my problem and not hers. She was strong, and I was being weak. I had to be stronger in mind.
Therapy Is That Bullshit
Every time I see my therapist, I expect to come out of our session fixed. I talk about my father. I talk about my mother. I talk about myself. She asks questions I have difficulty answering because they push me to think about experiences, my family, and myself in ways that go beyond broken or fixed, weak or strong, good or bad. I answer, “I don’t know” a lot. When I do share something, it feels like whining, like brooding, like bullshit.
I tell her this. That it’s all bullshit.
But she makes me share it anyway, and for the first time in my life, I’m talking about it instead of drinking about it. I’m finding a softness, a stretch and bend, a vulnerability in the narratives and beliefs I thought were as solid and necessary as bones. But there is flesh here. And muscle. And skin. And hearts that need and scream and harm but also give and whisper and comfort. I’m learning my father is more than one thing, my mother is more than one thing, I am more than one thing, we are all more than one thing.
We are flawed and perfect. We are the light after the blackout. We are all doing the best we can, and now have the chance to be better.
***
Rumpus original art by Isis Davis-Marks.
***
Author’s note: names have been changed to protect identities.
***
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
Article tags
I have a review of Elisabetta Basso’s excellent Young Foucault: The Lille manuscripts on psychopathology, phenomenology, and anthropology, 1952–1955, translated by Marie Satya McDonough (Columbia University Press, 2022) in The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. The review is unfortunately behind a paywall, so here are some of the key bits:
Box 46 [of the Foucault archive] is especially noteworthy. It contains 400 pages of manuscripts, most of which have recently been published but await translation. There are notes for a course on the question of philosophical anthropology, probably delivered both at the University of Lille and the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris in the early 1950s, a manuscript with the title Phénoménologie et psychologie, probably from around 1953–1954, and another manuscript from a similar time, without a title but published as Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle (Foucault, 2021a, 2021b, 2022). The editor of the last text is Elisabetta Basso, and the book under review here is an exemplary analysis of the importance of these manuscripts.
Basso’s work on Foucault’s relation to Binswanger’s approach to psychoanalysis dates from her Italian book Michel Foucault e la Daseinsanalyse (2007), through articles in English and French, as coeditor of the important collection Foucault à Münsterlingen: À l’origine de l’Histoire de la folie (Bert & Basso, 2015), and as editor of some important correspondence, including Foucault’s with Binswanger (in Foucault à Münsterlingen) and the Binswanger‐ Gaston Bachelard letters (Basso ed. 2016). She was, therefore, the natural editor of the Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle manuscript, and her contextualization in that book is a crucial guide.
Young Foucault takes all of that work and deepens, reassesses, and expands it. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, focusing on the box 46 manuscripts, all written while Foucault was teaching in Lille between 1952 and 1955…
Basso is excellent on situating the Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle manuscript in relation to the published ‘Dream and Existence’ introduction, as well as to Foucault’s interest in psychology and a network of thinkers around Binswanger, especially Roland Kuhn. She shows how Jacqueline Verdeaux was not just significant as Foucault’s collaborator on the ‘Dream and Existence’ translation, but also for providing him with some clinical experience, working in a laboratory at the Hôpital Saint‐Anne and at the Fresnes correctional center. She reconstructs the story of Foucault’s visits to Switzerland to meet Binswanger and Kuhn, especially the first visit to Münsterlingen, in which Foucault, Jacqueline and Georges Verdeaux also attended a Mardi Gras fête des fous. Foucault mentions this festival of the mad, where residents in the asylum would parade in masks and costumes, obliquely later in life, but Basso shows how important this was in the connection to Binswanger and Kuhn. While Young Foucault is good on the story, Foucault à Münsterlingen should also be consulted for the valuable documentary and photographic record it provides. There are a few interesting photographs and manuscript pages reproduced in this book too. While Basso makes use of a large number of archival sources, she also uses some material still in private hands, including letters between Verdeaux and Foucault…
Basso is an invaluable guide to much of this rich new material.
I’d be happy to share the full review with people if interested. Please email me.
stuartelden
FreshRSS