Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Jan. 2, 2012

To was, or not to was, them be the question

Share |

Words, even very small ones, are important. In last week’s column, if you were to look carefully at two particular sentences, you would notice that something seemed wrong. A reader pointed this out to me in a very emotional email, which used the word “numnutz” much more than was necessary. But when I reread those sentences I had to agree that they made no sense at all. The sentences referred to last year’s dropping of Michael Moore onto the roof of a 2011 Chevy Volt. See if you can spot the troublesome word:

“Fortunately, the car was still BE under warranty. Unfortunately, the driver was not.”

No, you must only select one word. And that word is “be.” Any grammarian worth his salt will tell you that, even when you add “be” to that second sentence, to make it compatible with the first, as in: “Unfortunately, the driver was not BE,” there is still something wrong. “Be” simply does not belong in either sentence, and it tends to make the reader wonder if perhaps the columnist had consumed a large quantity of cough syrup while composing that New Year’s Eve column.

Well, if I must answer that emailer, and others of you curious about that pesky “be,” then I will. Oh sure, I could chalk it up to a typographical error, or to a keyboard malfunction, but my readers deserve better. They deserve the truth, and I swear what follows is the honest, absolute, unvarnished truth, or my name isn’t Timothy Titus Philemon Sanders ... Esquire. Here goes:

Several years ... no, make that several months ago, I composed a very thoughtful, scholarly column about former European monarchs and their favorite winter sports. It was written in honor of the upcoming Vancouver Winter Olympics, and I was hoping to win a bronze medal with it. I did not do a lot of research on the subject, because all those many years ago, regardless of what my teachers may have thought, I was paying attention in history class. Those tidbits of historical information were planted deep in the rich soil which was my brain, and so all it took was a little water and some fertilizer to make that history come alive once more and blossom like a rose. I was sure that the editor would appreciate my efforts.

I first mentioned how Charlemagne, who was originally a Frank but changed his name just before the inauguration, loved figure skating until that fateful day when, working on a difficult camel spin with his favorite camel, Doris, he sent his partner whirling off into a retaining wall, where she fractured a fetlock. Charlemagne and Doris never strapped on all six of their skates again. I told how Britain’s Henry VIII looked forward each January to his winter trips to the Mount Holyoke Ski Lodge, and how Elizabeth I, England’s last virgin from the House of Tooter, insisted on being helmsman on her two-man bobsled team, with Sir Francis Drake seated in the rear, dutifully maintaining Her Majesty’s Golden Hind. But then I made the mistake of inserting the following sentence:

“Sadly, In January of 1793, all France’s Louis XVI could look forward to was that cheesy scaffolding on Roquefort Square, where he knew he would soon be beheaded.”

It seemed like a perfectly good sentence to me, but the editor felt that there were too many “be”s in there, somehow. “‘Be beheaded’ sounds like you’re stuttering,” he said, and added that he planned to remove one of those “be”s and toss it into the trash can. “We’ll just make it ‘where he knew he would soon be headed.’ If you’ve already said that it was a scaffolding he was headed for, then obviously it wasn’t for a manicure.” I told him I could see his point, but that it would be a shame to trash a perfectly good “be.” Instead, I told him to just store it away somewhere for future use. Recycle it. He did just that. He put it in a can on a shelf above his desk, and left it there for almost two years. To be perfectly honest, until last week I’d forgotten about it, but Scott had not.

That can of “be” rested on his shelf right next to cans containing phrases and words he’d removed from some of my other columns. One can, for example, contained phrases like “flitting along behind the cat, from pile to pile, Bob watched the horsefly intently,” or “gurgling ominously in the bathroom, Nelson knew that he’d left the toilet running.” That was Scott’s dangling participle can. He had no intention of ever reusing them, but just collected them to annoy me.

The “be” can, on the other hand, bothered him because he’d promised to use it later, and he was a man of his word. So he had waited, looking for just the right opportunity. Given the short shelf life of smaller auxiliary verbs like “be,” “am,” and “nit,” he realized last week that if he didn’t use the thing before the end of December, it would expire. And once a word goes bad it’s of no use at all. But since he could find no partial words like “-reft,” “-fuddled,” or “-smirched” to attach it to, he simply threw a dart at my column, and thus both the dart and the word “be” were left there after the word “was.”

That is what word recycling is all about.