If writing in French is an art, and in English it is a craft, then in German it is an applied science. German grammar is strongly rule-bound, and that mindset seems to get transposed onto English when German speakers are writing in it. A few years ago I was surfing a wave of German authors (the mscripts I’m assigned come in waves – military for a few months, followed by a flood of Rousseau studies, then three semiotics mscripts in a row – I long ago stopped looking for the rhyme or reason). This particular author was quite good – a bit clumsy but, not dramatically so. No clumsier, that is, than expected from an ESL German. He did have one strange tic and, he displayed it repeatedly. With compound sentences, he consistently placed the comma after the conjunction. Of course it doesn’t belong there and, each time I moved it to before the conjunction. That’s Grammar 101 and, for that matter, it’s Copy Editing 101. I sent him the mscript for review and, he howled. “Don’t you know what a cat-and-dog sentence is? Are you that incompetent!?” And he moved all the commas back to after the conjunction. Weird. I reversed his reversal, figuring to wear him down without starting an argument. It worked, up to a point.
Two months later, the same thing happened, with a different author, another ESL German, another cat-and-dog guy. “For heaven’s sake, haven’t you ever heard of a cat-and-dog sentence?” I now developed a theory that they had both used the same English textbook back in Germany and that the textbook was in error.
A year later, I was in a train station in Vienna buying tickets for Salzburg. I reached the ticket kiosk and asked the seller for two tickets to Salzburg. “Is English possible?,” I asked. Oh my that was hilarious. The seller rocked back and forth in gleeful mirth and did everything but slap his thigh. “Do you mean, ‘Is it possible to speak English?’ Ha ha.” “Well, yes, it’s the same thing.” I paid for the two tickets, while he shook his head in disbelief. Gad, vernacular, guy.
My wife and I boarded the train to Salzburg the next morning. A majestic river surged between towering banks, and the sun danced on historic monasteries. Eidelweiss bloomed, and snowfields glistened on the horizon. We were sharing our compartment with a little old Austrian lady, who it turns out, had taught high school English in Vienna for forty years before retiring. Sweet old bird, and quite talkative. They love to practise their English over there, and hers was immaculate, almost.
“I was walking in the street …” she began a sentence. I forget the rest of it.
“It’s better, by the way,” I said when she was done, “to say, ‘I was walking down the street.’”
“What do you mean, ‘down the street.’”
“I mean, you walk down a street, or up a street. If you walk in a street, you’ll get hit by a car.”
She was flustered. It crossed my mind that she’d spent forty years teaching her students that in was the correct word. So I felt bad about that – what was the point of stirring her up? – and waited to change the subject, but too late now.
“How can that make sense?,” she asked us. “How can you know when you’re going up instead of down a street?”
“Well, if you’re walking uphill, then it’s up the street.”
“No … but what if the street is flat?”
“Then you go by the street numbers. Lower numbers are down. Or if you’re walking toward the downtown, then you’re walking down the street.”
“But you could say ‘on the street,’ my wife offered her, “if you’re on Kaertnerstrasse.” Kaertnerstrasse is the pedestrian street in Vienna.
“I was an English teacher for forty years,” she declared.
I felt bad, like I said, but I was also feeling some professional pride. “I’ve been a book editor for thirty,”
We all stared out the window. The cottages had red-tile roofs, satellite dishes marching in perfect order. The train hummed softly — no click clack in this country. It began to slow down, and a Salzburg sign flashed by several times on the platform. She now gathered herself and turned to face my effrontery.
“But it’s in a book!” she declared, and I let her settle the argument. Was it the cat-and-dog book?
ESL Russians have their own foibles. One author – the subject was Russian cultural theory – had clearly learned English thoroughly and well, and was eager to show off his grasp of vernacular, but from what must have been the KGB Manual for Passing as a Hippie. That book could not have been updated since 1980, but, clearly, he knew it perfectly and has a groovy time showing off his knowledge of slang. I stepped in as a representative of the language fuzz, and toned him down some, or tried to, but he just didn’t dig me, which was a bummer.
Let us not forget Scandinavians. It must be the school system there. Technically, they’ve spectacular. They write perfect English, but it’s dead – no colour, no soul. And quite often, they can’t bear any change that would resemble vernacular. When AI ever takes over the world – and I expect I got out of this job just in time – every mscript will sound like a Norwegian wrote it.