SPELLING DNA

by James Lincoln Warren

I graduated from high school a year early — not because I was exceptionally brilliant (which movingly modest confession I don’t doubt will bring a tear to the eye of the Gentle Reader) — but because I loathed high school with a deep abiding loathing and went to summer school after my sophomore year with the specific intent of getting enough credits on my transcript to bug out early. My sister Mobi had done it, after all — sans the summer school, true, but what the hell — so I decided I could, too.

As a consequence, at 16, I was one of the two youngest students in my 12th grade Honors English class. Our teacher, Mrs. Mullen, was a young and beautiful raven-haired Latina with a mind as sharp as the dagger-trimmed point of a red pencil, and who was also somewhat obsessed with sex — she viewed everything through Freudian-tinted critical glasses and it wasn’t until years later that I found out how utterly passé that was, even then. But she was quite demanding and had high standards for literacy. She didn’t think much of me, I’m afraid. She regarded me as too young and immature to be a high school senior, which was probably true, and viewed my presence in her class as a sort of unfortunate accident, like having an idiot cousin. (The youngest student in the class, Kathy Spillar — who later became a prominent feminist activist and is now the Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine — endured the same prejudices, alas.)

Mrs. Mullen didn’t hate the short story I wrote for her, a tale of Gothic horror called “Alf and the Witches”, because hatred would be grossly overstating her wildly tepid reaction to it. She observed that ghost stories were very difficult to write and strongly implied that I had bitten off more than I could masticate with my wee milk teeth. My term paper, the single most important project of the year, thirty pages of profusely annotated criticism of the plays of Samuel Beckett, got a “B”, along with the notation “based on content — certainly not on usage”, which I regarded as a slap in the face at the time. Of course, she was right — the paper was not very well written. (I didn’t learn to write well until I was 17.)

People who know me, especially my fellow bloggers who have to put up with my arrogant pretensions as editor of this site, may be surprised by this, that I was not a precociously gifted user of words in my adolescence, if only because one of my favorite hats is my Grammar Cop helmet. I am today a stickler for style, diction, and punctuation, and every single one of my colleagues on this site has borne the burden of having my jack-booted corrective tread leave its ugly imprint on their otherwise fabulous prose. 1

But I confess I came to Diction Detective work late, in my 30s, and when I did, I thought it was merely a sign of my new-found maturity and recently refined good taste. It never occurred to me it might be genetic, like the loss of my willowy boyish figure at age twenty-five, when, exactly as my elder brother had done and my younger brother would do, I overnight acquired what I like to call my “adult frame”, a phrase I find finely descriptive of my present respectable corpulence, and generally preferable to describing that time as “the year I smacked into the Fat wall.”

Then one day, in the not-too-distant past, actually just this past summer, my father was regaling me with anecdotes about his father, who died ten years before I was born. Quite out of the blue, Dad got nostalgically misty-eyed, fondly reminiscing about what a tyrant his pater had been regarding the use of proper English. Uncompromising. Strict. Hell on wheels, in fact. In other words, just like me. You might expect that my father inherited this particular tendency, too, and that I got it from him in the nursery in a clear demonstration of disciplinary nurture triumphing over anarchic nature, but the fact is, he didn’t, or at least it never showed if he did. I don’t ever remembering him correcting my usage, not ever, not even once, well, all right, once — to inform me that “Scotch” is a kind of whisky, whereas “Scots” are a dour Celtic race who play the bagpipes when marching off to war — although Mom did on occasion gently admonish me when I was very little for using an adjective where an adverb rightly belonged. So with Dad’s revelation, I suddenly realized that my obsessive devotion to good English was not simply something I had come to on my own.

With the actinic clarity of a religious awakening, I saw that I had been born with it, and like so many other family traits, it had not emerged until it chose the Right Time to Reveal Itself. 2

3 A similar feeling had washed over me soon after I joined the Navy, which at the time I had regarded as an original, even willful act in stark relief against family tradition — my father had been a Marine grunt in World War II, and a career U.S. Air Force physician all the time I was growing up. His dad had been a salesman in Ottawa and Minnesota and a cowboy in Saskatchewan. (Grandpa never did become a U.S. citizen.) My mother’s family were all businessmen of one stripe or another, although many of them had served in the Army during the war. Not one of ’em a squid, you see? But then after I was commissioned, I learned that I actually came from a long, long line of mariners on Dad’s mother’s side. The whole romance of going to sea thing was in my blood, but I hadn’t known it.

Now, of course, I’m starting to wonder if any of my forefathers (or foremothers) were literary hacks, too. So far I haven’t seen any evidence of it, but then, I didn’t know about the ancestral sailors and Grandpa’s pronounced predilection for proper diction, either. I bet that one of these days my father or one my brilliant sisters or my brilliant niece will uncover the unsavory fact that I am descended directly from an agony aunt or a political pamphleteer. One of them already found out, much to our collective horror and shame, that George W. Bush is a distant cousin. I’m a liberal Democrat, for God’s sake! Bush don’t even talk good!

As for Mrs. Mullen, at a class reunion some years ago I heard that she eventually left her high school gig and became a successful romance novelist. I wish I knew what her byline was. Now, San Antonio, Texas, where I went to high school, is in Bexar4 County. And Bexar County was named after the esteemed personage to whom Part One of Don Quixote, perhaps the greatest novel ever written, was dedicated.

Do you think that Mrs. Mullen’s maiden name might have been Cervantes?

1. Note, however, that I personally invited every single columnist to join Criminal Brief based on my great admiration for every one of them, and that my critical obsession with correct grammar et al by no means diminishes my high regard for their exceptional talents, even if I complain about a misplaced comma or two here and there, or suggest another word now and again. [↩]
2. “Reveal”, by the way is a VERB, and never a NOUN. The NOUN is “revelation”. There is therefore NO SUCH THING as “a reveal” in a story. There is “a revelation”. [↩]
3. Picture taken in early 1986. I was a 30-year-old lieutenant with just under six years of active duty under my belt. [↩]
4. Pronounced by good ol’ boys as “bare”, and by Chicanos as “bay-HAR”. [↩]