The cost of beauty

I have a great admiration for poets.

They have an amazing way of collapsing a tremendous amount of punch into a small space.  The best poets use language in vivid and surprising ways, often contravening the laws of grammar to evoke powerful images and emotions.  Consider, for example, Peter Viereck's striking poem "The Lyricism of the Weak:"

I sit here with the wind is in my hair;

I huddle like the sun is in my eyes;

I am (I wished you'd contact me) alone.

A fat lot you'd wear crape if I was dead.

It figures, who I heard there when I phoned you;

It figures, when I came there, who has went.

Dogs laugh at me, folks bark at me since then;

"She is," they say, "no better than she ought to";

I love you irregardless how they talk.

You should of done it (which it is no crime)

With me you should of done it, what they say.

I sit here with the wind is in my hair.

Viereck's twisted syntax and use of questionable forms like "irregardless" and "should of" might be wrong -- more about that in a moment -- but man, they work.

In my opinion, though, no one used language in more startling and creative ways than e. e. cummings.  He's the name I come up with whenever I'm asked, "Who is your favorite poet?"  He uses words the way a skilled Impressionist painter uses color.  Some of his best -- from paeans to joy and love like "if everything happens that can't be done" to emotional sucker punches like "me up at does" and "anyone lived in a pretty how town" actually use ungrammaticality as a tool.

This is why I was of two minds when I read an interesting paper by Thom Scott-Phillips of Central Europe University called, "Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition?"  Why, for example, do we intuitively recognize that the sentence in English "I don't want to go to the cinema" is okay but "I don't want going to the cinema" is not?  Why, in Viereck's poem, did the word "is" in the first line sound like a linguistic hiccup?

Scott-Phillips's contention is that our expectation is that the speaker (or writer) is expressing him/herself using the "principle of optimal relevance:"

Informally, "optimally relevant" means "efficient use of cognitive resources."  More formally, the relevance of a stimulus is the trade off between the cognitive costs and the cognitive benefits created by attending to and processing the stimulus; and stimuli are optimally relevant if and only if neither costs not benefits can be improved without making the other worse off.  Cognitive costs are, in the most general sense, the opportunity costs of attention; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means audience processing costs.  Cognitive benefits are, in the most general sense, the impact that attention has on future decision making; and in the specific context of communication this effectively means accurate enough identification of the communicator’s intended meaning.  Putting all this together, the Communicative Principle of Relevance implies that when interpreting communicative stimuli, audiences presume that no alternative stimulus could suggest the same (or a very similar) meaning at lower processing cost for the audience.

He compares our sense of sentences that "feel wrong" to our immediate (and intuitive) recognition of the weirdness of "impossible objects:"

[Image is in the Public Domain]

He further states that our linguistic alarm bells go off in one of three situations:

• The sentence appears to have no plausible cognitive benefits in the first place (i.e. no meaning can be determined), such that there is no possible trade off of costs and benefits (i.e. no relevance).
• The sentence deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced.  Such sentences raise the cognitive costs of interpretation with no plausible change in benefits. 
• There are mutual contradictions between the functions of two (or more) constructions within a sentence, rendering the optimisation of cognitive costs and cognitive benefits impossible.

Well, okay, but.

I can accept this in the case of technical communication, or even (most) common conversation, where the main goal is simply being understood.  (Although given how often misunderstandings take place, perhaps "simply" is itself the wrong choice of words.)  But what about language being used to evoke emotion?  In Viereck's poem, the non-standard grammar was a mirror of the disordered thoughts of the jilted lover he was writing about, and in context works brilliantly.  I mean, try straightening out the sentence structure and "correcting" the wording -- what you'll have left is an empty complaint you probably wouldn't remember five minutes from now.

On the other hand, I first ran into "The Lyricism of the Weak" when I was in college, something like forty-five years ago -- and it popped into my mind immediately when I read Scott-Phillips's paper.

My point is, strange and unexpected syntax -- ungrammatical usage -- might have "no plausible cognitive benefits" in a scientific paper, a news report, or a conversation with your significant other.  But in poetry, and in beautifully-written prose fiction as well, the cognitive costs are worth it.  Consider the epic smackdown King Théoden of Rohan gave to Saruman in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers:

"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort.  Several of the Riders cried out gladly.  Théoden held up his hand.  "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.  You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts.  You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor.  Cruel and cold!  Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there?  And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead.  When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc.  So much for the House of Eorl.  A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers.  Turn elsewhither.  But I fear your voice has lost its charm."

There's some non-standard grammar in there, and a few words (like "elsewhither") that wouldn't show up in common vocabulary.  It's not written simply -- with "optimal relevance" -- but wow.  I defy you to find a single word you could change in that passage without lessening its impact.

Honestly, I suspect that Scott-Phillips wouldn't disagree; he did, after all, say that the problem arose when a sentence "deviates from conventional use without any plausible change in interpretation, however small or nuanced," and it's that nuance that I'm talking about here.  But I think sometimes a strange, even jarring, turn of phrase can be preferable to more straightforward diction.  Think of your own favorite example of evocative writing (and feel free to post some examples in the comments!), and consider the damage if some grammar prescriptivist insisted that it all be written according to "the rules."

For me, the cognitive cost of reading something beautiful is one I'm willing, even eager, to pay.

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