The question before us today is the question before us every day: Is the sentence dying? It was posed by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who then answered it in the affirmative. And that set Washington Post writer Linton Weeks on an imaginative reporter’s journey to test his conclusion. It’s a clever little trip. In typical reporter fashion he finds Important People to agree with Billington and Important People to disagree, and concludes with a trope newspapers seldom employ. He gives us a quote about the whole sentence problem that seems to agree with Billington, but he has taken it from an old Atlantic magazine (October 1937) and out of its context (that the loopy sentences of John Dos Passos and his kin were undermining the sentence with their complexity). Which just goes to show that language changes, and maybe that’s OK. Well played, Mr. Weeks.

The key paragraph of the story has this quote from Billington:

“We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers,” he says. “Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking.”

He’s talking about texting, IM-ing, commenting on blogs and how these activities are seeping in the language as a whole. Sentences lurk beneath these crypticons, of course, but not good sentences, not beautiful sentences, not important sentences. The language of technology is replacing the language of… falconry. I made that last bit up, but my point is that technology always affects language, special languages do too, and for that matter so does the mode of communication. The old telegraph “language” was masterfully compressed (stop). So are classified ads (talk about a phrase that’s about to exit the language in a hurry). They save keystrokes, space and money. Modern texting is the same thing: an exploration of how little language it takes to make sense.

So, to the question, is the sentence dying? No. Is the great sentence dying? Now, that’s another question altogether, an important question and really the question that Billington wanted to pose. Or maybe: Is the great sentence dying and taking the great argument with it? And the great story? And the great speech? Quoting from a few papers by student writers, papers that contain horrible sentences, isn’t going to prove anything one way or another. (It was the weakest part of Weeks’ story, by the way, mainly because they weren’t funny — bad student writing is supposed to be hilarious, at least in the newspaper.) We think we know great writing when we read it or hear it, but the funny thing is, that’s often something we find unusually pertinent to our lives.

Does Sen. Obama (or his speechwriters), for example, our Great Orator du jour, write a great speech? Or does he give us something that communicates something important about our present situation? Are his speeches as “good” as Roosevelt’s? As Lincoln’s? I would argue that the Gettysburg Address is “great” to us because it’s so pertinent to us. Still. And part of its genius is its compression — which is only possible when you are sure that other people know what you are talking about. It was criticized for being a “short” speech, and part of its greatness is that it was a “short” speech. Lincoln asked his audience — and us — to fill in the spaces he left open with their/our own experience, our own conviction, maybe our own imagination, certainly our own sense of the meaning of sacrifice.

I started to put a at the end of that sentence for its disconcertingly comic/absurdist effect. Oddly, I didn’t consider but maybe that’s because I’m not a big emoticon guy, which you probably have figured out by now, though I find nothing wrong with them. I have a hard time imagining someone responding to the news of the death of a friend’s father by typing — YR DAD — though maybe in the right context that would be quite powerful. Great sentences may simply have greatness thrust upon them.