Yankee Notebook: The 'but' stops here
Toolbox
By WILLEM LANGE - Published: April 5, 2009
About 20 years ago I wrote a column deploring the use of an all too common, but all too often unnoticed piece of punctuation. At the time, I must have believed that the sheer force of my argument would eliminate it from popular usage. But no soap; it's at least as common today as it was then.
So, keeping in mind the silly ant whom Frank Sinatra once made famous — the one who thought he'd move a rubber tree plant — it's once more into the breach!
We're all familiar with the effect upon a sentence of an interrogation point: a rising inflection at the end that makes it a question. (At the time of my last writing, the current practice of youthful speakers — of adding a rising note to almost every phrase — wasn't yet heard of.) And an exclamation point adds a little excitement and punch to a sentence. The Spanish thoughtfully add an upside-down interrogation or exclamation point to the beginning of a question or exclamation so we'll know what's coming.
The article I have in mind is a conjunction called a "commabut." It's not in any book of grammar or usage, and it doesn't show up, even when it's been used, in any transcription of spoken English. Contrary to the thoughtful Spanish writers, we use them in sneak attacks and obfuscation. To warn folks that one was coming would be inconsistent with its intent.
Commabuts are used to end complete sentences and introductory subordinate clauses contrary to fact; to whit, outright lies, unwitting misstatements or hopeful rationalizations. They're invariably followed by a dissonant statement (express or implied) more accurately reflective of the speaker's true sentiments.
There's no key on my keyboard for the commabut, so I spell it with a comma and three periods that invite you to supply the rest of the thought yourself.
They cause a sentence to end in the air, like only one shoe dropping. Listening, you realize uncomfortably that the sentence hasn't really ended. Unless you're listening to a one-legged man disrobe, there's another, much heavier shoe still to fall, and it may hurt.
Here's an example of the use of the commabut. A geeky but nice high school kid has been helping a girl he really likes with her math because he wants more than anything else in the world to take her to the prom. Finally, after she's passed a trig quiz because of his coaching, he steels himself and pops the question. It's time for a commabut! "Stuart," she says in an apparently anguished tone, "I'm very fond of you. I like you a lot, …"
There it is. That second shoe is going to break poor Stuart's heart, and unless he's made of pretty stern stuff, he may never quite get over it. The pity of it is, she knew it was bound to come, and if she had known how much her answer was going to hurt, she could have headed off the question. Instead, she retreated to a commabut, which is often a coward's weapon.
That was an easy one; most of us could have seen it coming. But sometimes the second half of the complete statement is found as much as a paragraph or even whole pages later. Any freshman can spot a commabut if the two clauses are contiguous. But it takes a little practice (as well as a healthy skepticism) to catch the more sophisticated ones.
It's easier if you know where to look for them. They're most abundant in the arguments and apologias of intelligent and articulate people with something to gain, lose, conceal, avoid or justify. But they're still lies.
Example: At a zoning board meeting I attended some years ago at a "Vermont leisure living community," the developer was attempting to alleviate concerns of Fish and Wildlife and environmental group representatives that his housing would impinge upon and destroy an active deer wintering yard. "Let's get this straight," he said, with a straight face. "I'm as sensitive to the environment as any other person, …
Politicians often use the commabut in responding to questions from constituents or the press. To be fair, it's often advisable; a question may have only one dimension and the problem several. So what may seem like evasiveness may in fact be trying to be relatively honest and trying not to give too protracted (and boring) an answer.
In the current debates over gay marriage, I often detect commabuts. Few of us who are not gay can possibly appreciate the importance of this issue to those affected by the outcome — whose lives are, in a real sense, in the hands of others, if only because others are in the majority. Imagine how they must feel when a dark-suited, sober-faced, credentialed member of that majority intones, "I am not a homophobe, …" It's the commabut that always kills you.
I've been married for almost 50 years now to a woman who, as far as I know, has never once used a commabut. She has a seemingly insane notion that honesty is the best policy: that you put your real meaning, intention and feeling into a simple declarative sentence, and that if it must be compound, into the first clause.
Her style would cause chaos at any departmental meeting at an academic institution; she'd never get tenure. She almost always spots the bad guys on "Law and Order" before I do. I would never try to slip a commabut past her. She might not know what it is, but she'd smell it.
To me she exemplifies the reaction of Brutus, when an old friend has suddenly turned formal and polite: "There are no tricks in plain and simple faith."
Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and retired contractor who lives in East Montpelier. His column appears each week in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus. He can be reached through his Web site, willemlange.com.
25