I guess a common formative experience for anyone whose formal education extends into their third decade is the return of the first college paper. In my case, after successfully throwing myself through the hoops represented by the Leaving Certificate exam in English (so clearly defined for my cohort that those metaphorical rings might as well have been on fire), I had turned in a paper of a standard similar, I thought, to that churned out in a febrile haze the preceding summer.

Nonchalantly expecting the pat on the head previous efforts had garnered, I was aghast at the blizzard of red ink annotating my text, which was instantly transformed in my eyes into a barbaric scrawl that must have elicited pained groans from its underpaid marker. Among the critical remarks that seemed to eclipse in word count the contents they were supposed to explicate was a cryptic abbreviation attached to an arrow spearing a hapless phrase: “sp. inf.!”

It says something about the calibre of my school education that it took a while (this was pre-Google) for me to learn that this was short for “split infinitive.” It then took even longer for me to find out what a split infinitive is.

I subsequently discovered that in my ignorance I was more in tune with modern usage than the schoolmarmish academic who had inadvertently demonstrated the gap in expectations between school and academic work.

In essence, contemporary pundits argue that to avoid a split infinitive is to crimp your style in obedience to a rule that cannot be broken in the language you are supposed to be emulating. In Latin, as in Romance languages, the infinitive form of a verb is a single word: for example, ire, “to go” (French: aller). In English, as just shown, the form comprises two words because the verb is prefaced by the particle “to.” Apparently, in the 19th century some usage panjandrums argued that muscling in a third word between the two—an “adverbial modifier” as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes it—threatened to break the holy bond between “to” and its verb.

The aforementioned Merriam-Webster volume gives its view:

To repeat, the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis. The original cause for complaint was probably awareness of a relatively sudden marked increase in use of the construction, perhaps combined with the knowledge that in those more elegant languages, Latin and Greek, the infinitive is never split—because it is a single word distinguished by its ending rather than by an introductory particle.

But if your initial awareness of a term coincides with your being taken to task for its misuse (even if the correction itself is semi-erroneous), can you ever return to that prelapsarian state of blithely dropping in adverbial modifiers?  Even now, there is a reflexive wariness that steers me “to write cautiously” rather than “to cautiously write.”

But if a correction from long ago can continue to influence your writing style, what effect can mockery have? I’ll take that up in the next post when I address a usage issue where the battle between fundamentalists and modernisers is still being waged.

The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s word, antitragus, appears in a much-lauded first novel by Rivka Galchen entitled Atmospheric Disturbances.

Antitragus refers to 

A) a fourth-century heresy that was condemned at the Council of Nicaea

B) a part of the anatomy of the ear

C) an aesthetic movement in Ancient Rome that criticised the staging of Greek tragedies

D) the name of the drug administered in a tetanus shot.

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option B.  As you might guess, the nub of cartilage above the earlobe called the antitragus is located opposite the tragus. (That pinch of a gap between them—the straits through which sound enters the conchea—is evocatively named the “intertragic notch.” The tragus, the knobbly protuberance that helps keep earphones in place, derives its name from the Greek tragos, “goat.” The fine hair fringing the tragus supposedly resembles a goat’s beard. (This reproduction from Gray’s Anatomy will instantly clarify any obscurities that my explanation might have thrown up.)

Galchen deploys the word while describing a less-than-attractive reader sitting opposite her troubled narrator (antitragus to his tragus, if you like) in the New York Public Library:

“The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red.”

This glancing observation presumably serves two purposes. First, it’s evidence that this writer’s eye can discern the microscopic details that, at a distance, blend to form what passes for “reality.” And second, it might be said to demonstrate that the author’s expensive medical education (the paperback’s inside page tells us Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine) has not been entirely squandered by the switch to literature.

I picked up Tana French’s praised In the Woods because I was interested in whether it’s possible to produce a crime novel set in contemporary Ireland that doesn’t make your toes curl in embarrassment. Of course there’s plenty of potential material out there—we have more than our share of misdeeds—it’s just that fictional depictions of the interactions between Irish police and criminals are typically pallid photocopies of either US or UK models. French sidesteps this pitfall by having her work explore the psychological turmoil stirred up by a child murder. The body of a young girl is found on the site of an archaeological dig taking place on the exurban outskirts of Dublin; the discovery sets in train an investigation that, according to the back cover blurb, “takes the reader on an irresistible journey through a tangled web of evil and beyond—to the inexplicable.” I can’t fully vouch for the veracity of this breathless promise—I’m still only on around page 150 of a nearly 500 page book.

In the Woods, by Tana French. Published by Hodder Headline Ireland.

In terms of style, however, it’s already clear that the writing is a cut above the bullet-point prose of, say, a James Patterson policier. Unfortunately, while clearing that low hurdle, it often fails to reach the heights I had been led to expect from some of the plaudits I had read. It seems as though French, appraised of the genre’s clichés, swerves away from them only to end up in new cul de sacs. So, avoiding the hackneyed image of a grizzled, maverick ‘tec, French gives us as our narrator Rob Ryan—a new breed of more cultivated investigator. But the erudite copper (with a shadowy past nonetheless) already feels like an established archetype. And Ryan’s above-average education means that hard-boiled one-liners are replaced by observations that can sound laboured in their efforts to put a new spin on old subjects:

 For example, 

Few people would have considered her beautiful, but my tastes have always leaned towards bespoke rather than brand-name….

Or

Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

And

My time in training and in uniform [...] all felt like an embarrassing daze scripted by Ionesco…

The last quote forces you to consider the plausibility of an Irish police officer comparing his professional life to a script by a European absurdist playwright. Yet at least the above examples are lucid; I’ve read the following section repeatedly and I still can’t fathom what the word soupçon (meaning suspicion or a trace of something) is doing there:

We give taxpayers their money’s worth of comforting cliché. We mostly shop at Brown Thomas, during the sales, and occasionally come into work wearing embarrassingly identical soupçons. 

In sum, the uneven quality of the text reminds me why I usually avoid genre fiction in favour of the far smaller ghetto of literary fiction. There the storylines may be unoriginal, and the suspense tepid, but—for me at least—a book has to offer something over and above plot to keep you turning the pages.

Sometimes the scattered data accumulated through adventitious cultural activity appear to align in such a way as to make you briefly give credence to Jung’s dubious concept of synchronicity. For example, about a week ago, I watched Uli Edel’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex. It’s an entertaining enough film, although any ambition to explore either the philosophy of the post-war radical left in Germany or the latent tensions muffled by the Federal Republic’s affluent democracy is jettisoned in favour of a scrupulously staged costume drama, featuring chic killers and enough shooting to please a Bruce Willis fan.

Trying to fill in the gaps left by the film, Moira checked Wikipedia. As well as getting some background about the group—more “correctly” known as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)—she also discovered the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” which was new to both of us. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialised version of the effect of serendipity.

The “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” was coined by a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Terry Mullen. The Minnesota newspaper runs a daily column called “Bulletin Board,” for which readers, using pseudonyms (in this case it was ‘Gigetto on Lincoln’), submit humorous or interesting anecdotes. The term was coined when Mullen submitted a story around 1986, about how he first heard about the terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then heard about it again a short while later from a different source.

Readers suddenly piled on with their own versions of the phenomenon, which quickly came to be known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Today, all similar stories are published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Bulletin Board under the heading “Baader Meinhof Phenomenon.”

The day after reading the above explanation, I came across the following passage on page 59 in the Harper Perennial paperback of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances:

I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi Gal-Chen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, in the immediate wake of learning that “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” describes the déjà vu-like feeling that arises when re-encountering an unusual word or term soon after running into it for the first time*, I recursively experienced that phenomenon by again coming across the phrase “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” in an unrelated source. Was this mildly jarring serendipity evidence of Jung’s collective unconscious, which implies an invisible grid of meaningful connections between apparently isolated events? Or simply dumb coincidence?

(I’d guess Ulrike and Andreas, as good dialectic materialists, would truculently nod their heads for the latter option.)

*I wonder if there is a phrase that describes a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as it applies to people. Viz. when you have just been thinking about somebody you haven’t seen in ages and the person in question turns up, as if summoned by your recollections.