When discussing a particular kind of English usage, I often tell my students that there are no rules. You just have to internalize the usage. Exposure is the means. You build instinct. And yet, I have students whose instinct remains underdeveloped after years of study, and others who seem to know the intricacies from the get-go. How is this possible? Because instinct really is instinct, I’d like to conclude. Student A was born knowing. Student B is a parrot, repeating words without feeling, often missing the mark and never knowing why. “I don’t get it,” he’ll admit.
Not knowing why is not the issue, because Student A, getting it right every time, also has no idea why. An example is the use of emphatic doubling—repetition that emphasizes meaning instead of being inelegant imprecision. Safe and sound, great big—these are legitimate uses of repetition, whereas large huge is mere redundancy, the repetition adding nothing to the meaning.
Classes are over for the summer, and I know my students are happily taking a break. And so am I. Yet I keep thinking about them. Some will return to class in the fall a bit rusty; others will not be so much slow and creaky as diminished, having lost some of their store of English—as if it dries up and evaporates from lack of use. A few students will keep learning, despite themselves. A song lyric, a bit of advertising, a slogan on a T-shirt—they take it all in.
And then one or two students have a small germ inside them that grows in the dark as well as the light, that needs no watering but cannot be drowned. No such thing as too much or too little attention threatens this germ. It grows. That germ—it is instinct. Those students just know. And know, and know.
But most of my students, though they still have the knowledge, will have buried it somewhere. They won’t find it immediately. That first week back, when I demand they look for it, they will tell me it’s gone.
“It’s there,” I’ll say.
They’ll shake their heads, all of them, in unison.
“Say it to yourselves. No—better, say it aloud to your partner. Which is right?” I’ll write a few phrases on the board. Tiny little, huge fat, big fat, small little. I already know who will fail, who will think and pass, and who will pass as easily as they breathe, no thought needed. Some are lucky that way—surprisingly good results for surprisingly little effort. I once read that Virginia Woolf couldn’t write an inelegant sentence. Lucky her! I write and rewrite and then rewrite again most of mine. Ah, but then she didn’t get the payoff of the struggle.
I picture my students. Is there any way stodgy Student B is better off than Student A, who can’t give a wrong answer? Maybe I’ll ask Student A. But why expect A to be knowledgeable about everything? If she has never had to struggle, how could she know the satisfaction of a breakthrough at last?
Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy, so I don’t worry too much about B. And though it is easy to envision the gifted as tortured, I don’t really—I thought A had it made. But what if instead of satisfaction, she feels bored to death by always getting it right, again and again, day after day? No mystery and no doubt.
Sisyphus or no Sisyphus, I still wonder whether B’s “I finally got it” is a greater satisfaction than A’s effortless grace.
