Chapter Twenty-three
On this view, sentences are held together by a kind of “nuclear glue” consisting of mesons, alpha-particles, and meaning postulates, all swirling in more-or-less quantitized orbits around an undifferentiated plasma of feature bundles. Thus, the earlier notion of a grammar as an abstract yet concretely manifested generative-recognition algorithm is abandoned, and is replaced by a device (to return to a more traditional sense of that word) in which features specify and are specified by other features in various combinations, subject, of course, to obvious constraints which need not concern us here. Whatever else may be said in favor of this position, it is at least unassailable, and this in itself represents a significant advance in the Theory of Universal Grammar as this field had traditionally been conceived. Opposed to this at the present time stands only the Theory of Universal Derivational Constraints, which, although it is likewise unassailable, suffers from a lack of plausibility…
Coughlake makes what is perhaps the best possible argument in favor of the Unsupportable Position when he says that derivational constraints should be left unrestrained, since, he argues, they have been exploited for too long already by non-derivational chauvinists attempting to exert a kind of interpretivist imperialism, a pax lexicalis, as it were, over the realm of syntax.
INSTRUCTIONS: You have thirty minutes. Identify the distinguished linguist who is quoted above, and specify the theoretical model with which he is to be associated. Then explain, clearly and concisely, the meaning of the quotation. DO NOT TURN THE PAGE UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO. BEGIN.
This was a splendid, and a rare, occasion. Looking down the tables spread with the heavy white linen (real linen, taken from chests in the storage rooms where is had been folded away along with other Household valuables rarely used), looking at the gleaming silver and crystal, Thomas wondered just when they had last done this. It had to have been years ago, unless you counted the Christmas dinners… and even for those, they didn’t bring the linens from the chests, or invite guests from the other Households. This opulent display was in honor of his seventieth birthday… and the last one, come to think of it, could only have been for some other Head-of-Household’s seventieth birthday. Long ago, in this house, it would have been the celebration for Paul John. As if the number seventy had some significance.
But it was of course only an excuse. To stop the round of work and study and breeding and training and recording. To spend time in eating and drinking and good fellowship. To spend time renewing acquaintances, seeing old friends you might not have seen except in passing for years and years. Such excuses were few and far between, with only thirteen Heads of Lines to turn seventy.
They’d been enjoying themselves, no question about it. First there had been the magnificent food, such food as the public was led to believe the linguists gobbled every night, and the fine champagne, and the exotic wines from the colonies. All of that with the women still at the tables, and the conversation restrained by their presence to politics and shop talk… but delightful nevertheless.
And now the women had gone off to whatever it is that women do when they are alone together — gossip, Thomas thought, always gossip — and the time for real conversation had come. The solid useful talk of men, who know and enjoy one another and can speak freely together. Not gossip, certainly. The bourbon had come out, and the best tobaccos; the room had a warmth that it never had at Christmas. Thomas smiled, realizing that he was genuinely contented, for that moment at least. So contented that even the thought of the latest D.A.T. catastrophe could not distract him. Not tonight.
“You look smug, Thomas,” his brother Adam observed, pouring him some more bourbon. “Downright smug.”
“I feel smug.”
“Just because you survived to seventy?” Adam needled him. “That’s not so remarkable. Two more years, and I’ll have done the same.”
Thomas just grinned at him and raised his glass to touch the other man’s in a satisfactory clink of mutual congratulation. Let Adam pester; nothing was going to spoil his mood tonight.
He pointed down the table with his cigarette, at the huddle of men in splendid formal wear complete with neckties. “What are they talking about down there, Adam? If it’s as good as it looks, I may move down where I can get in on it. Which is it, sex or the stock market?”
“Neither one. Surprise.”
“Oh? Not women, not money?”
“Oh, it’s women, Thomas. But not their arms and their bosoms and their bottoms, my dear brother. Nothing erotic.”
“Good lord. What else is there to talk about, when one talks of women?”
He paid attention then, trying to hear, and scraps of it floated up to him over the general hum.
“ — damned angel, all the time. Can’t believe — ”
“ — one single ache or pain, can you believe it? It’s unheard of, but God what a relief! I was — ”
“ — how it used to be, whine and nag and whine and nag from morning till night — ”
“ — how to account for it, but — ”
“ — damn, but it’s good, you know, having — ”
Thomas shook his head; he couldn’t hear enough. Just a word here and a phrase there, drowned in satisfied discourse.
“All right, Adam,” he said, “I give up. What are they talking about?”
“Well… I don’t know anything about it myself, living as I do in single blessedness. But if they are to be believed, something has come over all the women.”
“Come over them? They all looked just as usual to me — what do you mean, come over them?”
“According to them — ” Adam made a large gesture, to include all the men at the tables “ — the socialization process has finally begun to take hold, and the women are recovering at last from the effects of the effing feminist corruption. High time, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s what they’re saying?”
“That’s it. Women, they tell me, do not nag any more. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick — can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned. So they say.”
Thomas frowned, and he thought about it. Was it true? When had he last had to put up with insolence from Rachel? To his astonishment, he found that he could not remember.
He raised his glass high and shouted down the table, to get their attention; and because it was, after all, his celebration they turned courteously to see what he wanted of them.
“Adam here tells me all our women have gone to open sainthood,” he said, smiling, “and I’m ashamed to say that I not only haven’t noticed, I don’t find it easy to believe — it’s a good deal more likely that Adam’s confused. But if he’s not, it sounds like a damn drastic change… is it all of them? Or just a few?”
They answered without any hesitation. It was all of the women in the Households. Oh, perhaps the very oldest were still a bit cross now and then, but that was age — even old men could be annoying. Except for that, it was all of them, all of the time. As Adam had said, the distortions of the twentieth century had apparently finally been laid to rest, and the new Eden was come on Earth.