Grammatical Parralelism Baffles Me

I’ve never been much of a committee kinda guy. I fidget a lot during meetings. My mind constantly strays when I’m sitting in a room full of people discussing important stuff. I worry I will burp or do something gross involuntarily. I don’t bring a drink to meetings because I have that reflux thing that causes me to cough and gag sometimes if a liquid goes down wrong. Embarrassing to say the least.

I’m paranoid that my chair will make a rude sound when I shift in my seat. And I catch myself watching people so closely sometimes that I can’t hear what they’re saying. I’m not proud of any of this phenomenon. But the fact of its existence remains.

But perhaps the greatest issue that confronts me when I am serving on a committee of intelligent and learned people is my ineptitude at comprehending big words. I am often exposed to more highly educated people than me who are able to spout structurally eloquent sentences using intelligent sounding words that flow freely and naturally.

My simpleton mind sticks on the words I hear whose definitions evade me. By the time the thought is complete, I’ve missed the entire point thanks to my obsession with the terms I couldn’t comprehend due to my scholarly inefficiency.

Trying my hardest to appear semi-intelligent during these particular discussions is taxing but I’ve become reasonably proficient at disguising my weaknesses. But recently my ineptitude reared its ugly head during a meeting of the minds.

The issue at hand was the specific wording of an important document destined for public consumption. One member suggested something about the structure of a particularly tricky sentence needing to be concisely informative while conveying proper grammatical parallelism. When a fellow committee member glanced my direction and suggested that perhaps “the writer” could help out, I wet my pants. (Figuratively, not literally, thankfully.)

Having little idea what grammatical parallelism actually meant, I did what I always do in these situations. In this order, I: 1)panicked, 2)wet my pants (again figuratively), 3)reverted to my sense of humor and quick wittedness to relieve the tension. Said I, “Any of you who’ve read my columns know I butcher the English language and proper grammar on a regular basis. So you might want to move on to Option Number Two.”

With the tension adequately relieved, a light-hearted discussion of proper grammar ensued. At one point, a member even joked about the grammatical parallelism of a sentence that went something like “This is a situation with which up I will no longer put.”

Off the hook, I joined in the laughter and wiped the sweat from my hands onto my pants when no one was watching.

Flash forward to a meeting two weeks later. At one point I offered my perspective on a particular issue. My words were typically elementary and afterwards, I was concerned that I had merely lengthened the duration of the discussion with my soliloquy. But after the meeting, a colleague for whom I have great admiration pulled me aside and informed me that my words were humbling and inspirational. Suddenly I felt profoundly cerebral, even though I’m pretty sure none of the phrases I uttered during the meeting involved anything remotely parallel in the grammatical sense.