A HARD ROAD TO HOE
A teaching assistantship at The Pennsylvania State University gave me my first opportunity to teach college-level writing. English 101, Freshman Composition, put me before eighteen trembling first-years in a program that offered no support to us fledgling instructors. One afternoon on semester-eve – mostly a get-to-know-your-fellow-TA’s – was all we got, that and a room assignment and a class roster. I remember nothing from my one semester as a grad student in American lit, except that class – nineteen young primates terrified together in a plaster-walled room filled with ancient oak desks. I was twenty-one years old, the ink on my Bachelor’s diploma still wet.
I had several memorable students in my section but the one I remember best was an earnest, strapping lad who had been reared on a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, had come to college to obtain a degree in Agriculture, and possessed a deep-seated love of mechanical devices. I assigned a form of essay known then as the “how to” essay, the gist of which is to explain in several pages of clear American English how to perform a specific task, or how something works. My model was an essay I had been given as a freshman comp student at Brigham Young University, fall semester 1969: Charles J. Finger’s “How to Cook a Steak.” My farmboy student cared little about cooking – though by the look of him he surely loved his mama’s – but he did care about internal combustion engines and wrote a wonderful short essay on the origins and workings of the Wankel engine, also known as the rotary. He knew cows and pigs and motors and chickens and how the pumps worked on a milking machine. As unselfconscious a student as I ever had, my farm lad never seemed to think about how rare his kind was becoming. He knew the things he knew, and to him they were the things most worth knowing, and that was a fact plain as a peach. In the next thirty-five years of teaching, I never came across his like again.
His speech and writing were peppered with farm language – metaphors and figures of speech that had actual referents in his daily life. As a country boy from the eastern part of the state, he used the verb “rett” fluently. As in, “I uz late for class ‘cause I had to rett up my dorm room.” Borrowed from the Pennsylvania Amish, “to rett” means to tidy. He was the only student I ever had who used the phrase “to come a cropper.” I have no idea where he got it, but it appeared in one of his essays. The cropper refers to a crupper, the stretch of a horse’s back behind the saddle. To come a cropper probably meant originally to fall headlong from a horse, but over time it broadened to refer to failing badly at anything. I loved it for the ass-over-tincups image it conjured. I never saw it written again in a student composition.
I kept teaching the essay over the years and later became a magazine and book editor and worked with hundreds of young writers, and on manuscripts of college students who weren’t really writers but wrote papers nonetheless, usually with good cheer and a certain degree of innocent determination. When you work with language that closely, you spot trends that emerge over time. Language is as alive as any organism; it’s fluid, and shifts and bends with time and trends and social change. It took me to the end of my teaching career (2023) to finally drop my objections to the use of “they” in place of the traditional personal pronouns “he” or “she.” “They” is a plural pronoun, and I was a stickler for grammatical agreement; I confronted the obviously sexist default to the singular “he” in cases of gender-indefinite references by penning a detailed memo which I passed out to writing students, suggesting artful ways to have our cake and eat it too – to preserve traditional agreement while avoiding the sexist default. I titled my memo “The Gender Trap” and argued that springing yourself from it artfully took the kind of thought and attention that would make you a better writer. I finally gave up and let the tides of social change wash away my objections – at least those penned as corrections on nearly every student paper I received. But I confess: “they” referring to a singular noun still grates. I will never use it.
My freshman farmer-writer stayed alive for me amid another trend I spotted over time: the gradual decoupling of young U.S.-born students from any vestiges of our national agricultural heritage, and the way the decoupling began to show up in the use of language. Despite the paucity of agricultural employment today – two percent of the nation labors on farms and ranches – American English carries scads of phrases and figures of speech that grew from the farm, many of them among our most threadbare cliches. We still sow the seeds of discontent even as we cultivate the latest crop of students, seeking the most fertile ground of youngsters’ minds. As one recent farm journal put it, commenting on the heritage of agriculture in American English, “This morning, you woke up with the chickens and, since you ate like a bird last night, you were hungry as a horse. After hogging everything at breakfast, you worked like a mule ’til the cows came home, and at the end of the day, you were dog-tired. Why do you do it? You’re not saying now, but later, you’ll let the cat out of the bag.”
I gently tried nudging students away from cliches – usually with success – but at the same time, I chuckled when young writers penned agricultural malapropisms. I still remember the first time a student noted in an essay that he had “a hard road to hoe.” I know from my own experience that if what you have is a hoe in your hands, there are no soft roads. Interstate highways are especially hard to hoe, what with all the traffic.
A senior in my writing workshop “The Nature Essay” once lovingly described her gardener mother “sewing seeds along the edges of the driveway.” I asked in private whether she thought her mother was trying to plant needle-and-thread grass.
The commonest ag-mal today was not common twenty years ago, when I first took note of a student writing the phrase “cut and dry,” as in, “the decision was already cut and dry before any new evidence came in.” Now I see it everywhere – not a haymaker in the house. My Wankel engine man might be sobbing somewhere in an alfalfa meadow, his crop down, all cut and dried.
But the eclipse I’m worrying about here is not limited to the extinction of first-hand experience in agriculture. The Oxford Junior Dictionary, used around the world, recently expelled forty common words drawn from nature. The list is staggering. Gone are acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. New words have been added: blog, broadband, bullet-point, and voice-mail, along with cut-and-paste. I can only assume cut-and-dry will appear any day now.