Well-Worn Sentence
Passes On

            Eddie Spindarter was on duty the morning a very famous sentence was admitted to the Hospital for Ruptured, Crippled and Defective Prose.  Although Eddie, an orderly, didn’t read much because TV had long ago sunk its hooks into him, he could tell this was a serious case.

It was a very long sentence, one stuffed with so many adjectives as to seem lumpy to the view.  If photographed from a plane it would look like an anaconda that had swallowed a cog railway.  Yet its size hadn’t stopped it from playing a leading part in the world of popular fiction.

Some people who had set themselves up as critics said that as sentences go, it wasn’t put together too well.  They agreed it had a subject and a predicate but claimed that the whole thing was so meandering as to be unwieldy.  And they deplored what they said were its leaden rhythms and ditchwater banalities.  They pointed out that persons who tried to write well usually shied away from using this particular sentence – or an approximation of it – in anything they did.  Luckily, literary mavericks of that kind have always been a minority in this country and exert about as much influence as a wood louse at a barnburning.

What made this particular sentence so widely used was that it described in detail a rape in milady’s bedchamber back in the candle-snuffer days and one which may have been provoked by those laughing dark eyes peeping out from beneath a lace boudoir cap.  Nothing had been omitted in the interests of Artistic Truth and heavier sales and it was told in a rush of muddy prose which had even the lip-movers reading rapidly.

Many bestselling authors borrowed it repeatedly despite how cumbersome it was.  They changed only the names of the participants and threw in a few words of their own.  It was then that the trouble started.  So steadily was the sentence being employed that it began to suffer from overuse because – like a whore on a bicycle – it was being seen all over the place.  Eventually it displayed symptoms of the fatigue language is subject to where the reader sees the words on the page clearly enough but they fail to register in his mind.  That was when the sentence’s friends and admirers brought it to the Prose Hospital to remove it from the reach of writers who’d worn it to a frazzle.

Eddie Spindarter, of course, knew nothing of all this.  He was just there to do a job and he was the one who transferred the ailing patient to a stretcher and began wheeling it down the long corridors in search of a vacant bed.  There didn’t seem any to be had for the hospital was at full capacity because language had been taking such a beating lately from all quarters.

Everywhere he went with the comatose sentence – its subordinate clauses dangling over the side of the stretcher – he was turned away by overworked staff members.  He tried the Geriatric Ward where old slang expressions such as dippy, nix, wisenheimer, the bee’s knees, hubba hubba, swell and many others once popular now lay neglected, having outlived most of those who had used them.  Nobody ever came to see them now.

Eddie was told to try the ward where the Nervous Exhaustion cases were handled and found the situation there just as bad.  Every bed was occupied by such old reliables as hopefully, the bottom line, this is it, gut  reaction, basically, let’s face it, meaningful relationship and dozens of other words and phrases which had seen too much service.  All were expected to recover and rejoin the mainstream of language because the need for them was still too great, but first the roses had to be restored to their cheeks.

Having no luck there, he went next to the ward where the Burnt-Outs lay.  These were patients brought in with their natural juices all but drained away.  What had been done to them was beyond forgiveness – nouns forced to serve as verbs, subjects separated from their predicates, gerunds with their terminal G’s amputated and replaced by apostrophes and such shocking examples as disinterested compelled to do the job uninterested was born for, the valuable you know reduced to tatters and as withering from neglect, having been supplanted by like.

Eddie didn’t bother going inside when he saw how jammed up things were in there.  Instead, he took the well-known sentence – whose condition was now beginning to worry him – down to the very last stop, the Intensive Care Unit where all the four-letter words were lying critically ill.

It was alarming to see the condition of these once robust nouns and verbs which had always characterized certain bodily functions, despite having lived an underground existence for centuries.  In this age of searing honesty which only the sour-minded would call depraved, these forthright Anglo-Saxon terms had finally come into their own and were now part of the daily speech of everyone from rope-skipping schoolgirls on up.

Writers of lackluster prose used them constantly, hoping to achieve effects beyond their own powers, but that was like calling the cows home each night with a bomb blast.  Ever since Freedom of Expression had replaced Motherhood as our most honored fetish, these four-letter words had been gradually worked to the point of exhaustion by the stylistically inept in the sweatshops of their prose.

Unlike Motherhood, Freedom of Expression is open to all who have the use of a mouth or a keyboard at their fingertips.  The natural tendency to rejoice at this is tempered by the awareness that most of what is said nowadays is hardly worth the saying.

When Eddie wheeled the sentence into the Intensive Care Unit, staff members were giving transfusions to some of the four-letter words, trying to reverse the almost bloodless state in which they’d been brought there.  The worst cases were being readied for electric shock treatments in the hope of rousing them from their torpor and restoring their once galvanizing effect upon readers.  It was heartbreaking to see these poor stubby darlings of graphic utterance lying wanly on their pillows, victims of intolerable overuse.

“Room for one more?” Eddie asked a nurse he knew.

By luck there was.  An empty bed was found for the stricken sentence and a medical team immediately started working on it.

Eddie ate his lunch at the employees’ cafeteria and then went for a walk in the Cemetery for Extinct Words just opposite the Prose Hospital.  Because lately he felt more and more drawn to words, although not to the extent of actually opening a book, he’d gotten into the habit of coming here after eating.

What he most liked to do was wander among the gravestones, some tilted at extreme angles and others sunk halfway into the soil.  The grounds were no longer being kept up, the weeds had triumphed over the flower beds and the grass hadn’t been cut in years.  Yet Eddie liked lingering before the last resting place of such antique expressions as  eidolon or maugre or yclept and wondering what they had once stood for.

He’d begun to admire words and how unreproaching they were despite the treatment they were forced to undergo and how bravely they would struggle to stay alive.  Nor was he the only visitor to their rundown burial place.  Sometimes he’d seen one or two elderly philologists picking their way over the cracked flagstones to lay a nosegay on the grave of an old favorite.  To Eddie it was all very sad but somehow restful.

Reporting back on duty again he was dispatched to the Intensive Care Unit to take the well-known sentence – now sinking rapidly – to surgery.  All other efforts had failed and this was the last remaining hope.  Eddie, involved despite himself, watched in dismay the shudders that racked the wasted form he was wheeling to the operating room.

 Dr. Slash was the surgeon on duty.  He was an erstwhile fiction editor who had worked at every publishing house there was and, like a frog in a pond with no more lily pads left to jump to, had gravitated to the Prose Hospital.  As the desperately ill sentence was brought in, the doctor was told nothing of the case for fear it might confuse him. 

Instead, he was taken over to the operating table by his Seeing Eye dog.  A blue pencil – the only kind of scalpel ever used there – was placed in his hand.

The doctor made a number of lucky cuts and after removing several adjectives, was about to amputate still another modifier when the patient suddenly gave up the ghost, ending its existence as a factor in the world of letters.  Death was inevitable because all that was done had been done too late.  The remains were taken to a funeral home and news of the passing made all the papers.  The burial, as was expected, would take place in the Cemetery for Pedestrian Language.

A few of the nation’s big-money novelists came in their cream-colored private jets or peacock blue limousines to say goodbye to an old friend.  The ladies turned up in jewels and furs, with ornately constructed hairdos concealing their tin ears. The male authors made to attempt to hide theirs because – like the husband in a French farce – they never knew and no one had ever told them.

Eddie, having worked in the Prose Hospital long enough to have become used to illness and death, still found himself taking this one hard – so much so that he went to the funeral parlor on the last day of the well-known sentence’s wake.  There were no other visitors and he was alone as he stood contemplating the stilled form, its parts of speech at rest at last.  Then, because he thought it wouldn’t be polite to leave so soon, he sat down in the corner and tried to think about the late departed, but the funeral parlor atmosphere was so lulling that he dozed off.

He awakened just as the most famous of popular novelists was ushered in a few moments before closing time to pay his final respects to the sentence he’d made use of  with minor variations in all thirty-five of his books, not once but several times over in each one. While Eddie watched open-mouthed, the writer made a complete cast of the veteran sentence using a quick-drying mold.  It was child’s play for him to smuggle it out beneath his coat.

Eddie, who admittedly was slow on the uptake, needed almost half a minute to figure out what had happened.  But he knew disrespect for the dead when he saw it and jumping up ran after the man, yelling: “Hey!  You can’t do that.  Hey!”

He saw he was too late to catch up with the novelist who was already behind the wheels of his heliotrope Mercedes-Benz, the duplicate sentence on the seat beside him.  The famous writer threw the car into gear and zoomed off into the darkness.  Eddie, not even sure why he was doing this, hopped on his motorcycle and roared after him.  The chase spun itself out for miles and miles through cities, towns and early-to-bed hamlets.  As far as Eddie could figure out, the general direction was the Bucks County region of eastern Pennsylvania where the renowned wordsmith had an estate that was one room short of baronial.

The writer, a molelike man in taupe suede, kept glancing back in fright.  Despite his fame he was a haunted little chap who couldn’t spell, couldn’t read, couldn’t feel, couldn’t think but knew how to concoct by borrowing copiously.  He made the mistake of looking behind him once too often and the Mercedes-Benz hit a telephone pole in a curve of the road and rolled over a number of times.

The duplicate sentence hurtled through the air and smashed into a tree which began instantly to sicken.  Fragments of words were scattered everywhere, turning the grass brown wherever they fell and killing several field flowers in the process.

Eddie Spindarter was able to pull the dazed man out of the wreck just before the engine exploded, thereby saving him for many more years of cranking out books in his pemmican prose.  News of the rescue swept through the world of writers both living nd dead in an intuitive instant – not surprising because they’re all so damned sensitive.  Flaubert, deep in hell where he made open-toed booties for the bourgeoisie damned, raised agonized eyes Heavenward and blasphemed.