Here’s a story I wrote in my book, “An Alaskan Childhood,” about my favorite word. g

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE MEMORY:

TINTINNABULATION

“Say it again,” she would tell the class. We were seventh graders in her English class at the Anchorage Junior High – the former Anchorage High School – in downtown Anchorage. “Say it again and listen to how it rolls trippingly off your tongue.” “She” was Roe Olson, whom I would have as my English teacher in seventh grade and again as a freshman at the new AHS on Romig Hill. She had paraphrased Hamlet to us, ‘though none of us knew it then.

The word we were learning to say, and more importantly, to hear, was invented by her favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe, in his poem The Bells.

“Tintinnabulation” became, for me at least, the gist of seventh grade English under Mrs. Olson. Listening to the sound of it, the lilt of the syllables, the musical flow of the vowels appealed to the budding musician in me.

Not that the word “tintinnabulation” is what was most memorable about Mrs. Olson. No, that would have to be the orange hairdo she wore to school on Halloween. Or the little sneak of a nip on the bottle she kept in the lower right-hand drawer of her big, oaken desk. St. Patrick’s Day saw her in a green ‘do – so stylish! She was too old to be a hippie but there she was, seemingly a transplant from the beaches of Malibu in 1955. When she walked, her legs wobbled unsteadily from age and booze, we presumed. But she walked the halls of school with a grace and flair akin to no one else.

One day in this seventh grade English class she had us answering whether a sentence was spoken correctly or incorrectly. She said “‘The grocer took him and I to the candy shelf.’ Is that correct or not?” And I raised my hand. “Erryl? What do you think?”

“It’s incorrect,” I averred.

“And why do you think it is incorrect?” she asked.

“Because it doesn’t sound right to me.” Again, it was the sound that made the most sense.

“Well, you are correct. The sentence should have been ‘The grocer took him and ME to the candy shelf.’ But you should train not only your ear to hear the correct way, but also your mind to know why it was incorrect.”

She turned to the chalkboard to diagram the sentence. Long will I remember the horizontal lines, the vertical lines, the oblique lines and the lengthy discussions of where each word fit in the scheme of sentence structure.

And long will I remember the correct sound of “him and me”. To this day I am an unrepentant Grammar Nazi on Facebook. My explanations of the “why” would make Mrs. Olson proud. “Take away the ‘him’ in the sentence and you are left with ‘the grocer took ME to the candy shelf.’ And that is correct grammar.” In my mind, I see Mrs. Olson smiling at me and nodding with satisfaction.

I followed Mrs. Olson to Anchorage High for ninth grade English. Here, we worked more on writing skills than parsing sentences. On one of my short essays – one page of single-spaced verbiage was all that she required of us for that assignment – that was particularly Poe-ish in its pessimism about myself, she wrote, “Challenging. Could any of your teachers help you get acquainted with this stranger?” Her first love was her students, I realized when reading her comment.
And we students had not held her in the esteem which she deserved. She was an unsung artist with the English language. As George Edward Moore has written, a great artist is always before his time or behind it. To my mind, Mrs. Olson was both ahead of and behind her time. And definitely under appreciated.

Spending two years under her tutelage inculcated in me a love of all things Poe, a desire to write sentences with words that were euphonious. (While I love the word “euphonious”, I was a trumpet player and not a baritone horn player. Inside joke.) After years of tooting my own horn (yes, I had purchased many different trumpets and owned them all outright), I attempted to write stories of my own.

None are as memorable as are Poe’s. And I never created a word of my own to match the pure brilliance of the word “tintinnabulation.”