Anthony Sandstrom: Web Content Specialist

“The cannon booms gold.”

There’s something about that phrase that makes me cringe.

No, I’m not a South High School loyalist. “The bell rings red” fills me with just as much rage – and I’m a Centennial grad.

Both of them simply sound, to be blunt, ugly.

The phrases can’t be grammatically correct. I’m sure of it. I just can’t put my finger on it.

But, any regular reader of mine knows that I am loose at best with my respect for the English language and grammatical dogma. See my
previous sentence for proof – I’m all about using conjunctions like “and” or “but” to start sentences, as well as the stylistic and/or lazy usage of the em dash instead of a comma or parentheses.

By the way, I adore the use of idioms, as long as it’s done correctly. And have I mentioned my freewheeling use of commas to convey a pause? Yes, I do that too.

I chalk it all up to “style,” which, when I explain it, allows me to be a grammatical renegade as I defend a “conversational tone” in my writing.

My claim of “style” also allows me to hide the fact that I squeaked by with a solid “C” in my collegiate grammar and syntax course.

I’ll pause, dear reader, as you absorb the gravity of this shocking revelation.

Having forgotten all about the nature of dangling participles and present perfect tense or whatever it’s called, I sought help.

This is why I reconnected with linguist Dr. Ted Taylor, a nearly 30-year vet of the English department at CSU-Pueblo who also tolerated me in the aforementioned grammar and syntax course, to explain to me what was so unsettling about the rallying cries of local high school football.

“You have linguistic intuition,” Dr. Taylor told me as I stared at him blankly.

It turns out that linguistic intuition is something that all native speakers of a
language possess. You know that moment when a phrase “just doesn’t sound right”? It’s that devil on your shoulder (who’s a grammatical master, apparently) instructing you to raise hell because you’ve heard something grammatically incorrect.

In my case, that devil is my 11-year-old son, whose favorite subject in school is grammar for some reason, but I digress.

When Dr. Taylor told me about my sparkling linguistic intuition, I felt validated. Yes, I knew “the bell rings red” and “the cannon booms gold” was unequivocally wrong.

But why?

The simple “high school grammar” reason was that “booms” and “rings” are both intransitive verbs, meaning that you can’t attach an adjectival predicate to them. Adverbs, such as “loudly,” are completely legal.

Colors are adjectives, and are therefore not legal.

Intransitive verbs are just the first strike against both phrases.

You also can’t have a sound be a color. That’s just strange. Maybe that’s why the phrase sounded gross?

Then, he whipped out one of his doctoral-level words to explain it.

“Synesthesia,” Dr. Taylor explained. “It’s when your senses get crossed. You can’t ‘smell something loud’ or ‘hear something blinding,’ and that’s what we have going on here.”

Dr. Taylor then offered a suggestion to make the local rallying cries more grammatically-correct.

“Maybe ‘the bell rings for red?’,” he awkwardly suggested. “‘The cannon booms for gold?’”

Dr. Taylor clearly doesn’t know anything about football.

His suggestions, though, were obviously more ugly. Who would shout “the bell rings for blue?” Nobody. Never. Ever.

I needed my hypothesis, created by my linguistically-intuitive little devil, to be validated.

But, as scholars do, he began to shoot holes through my hypothesis.

“Does everybody know about the Bell Game and the Cannon Game?” he asked me.

Um, yeah.

“Even though I’ve lived here for 30 years, I’m not a native,” he explained. “So those phrases are not automatic for me. Are they automatic for anybody who went to those high schools?”

Of course they are. In high school, I hung out with a lot of stoned goths who could care less about sports. But even they knew that if you didn’t “sound off,” which meant screaming “the bell rings red” three times when asked by an upperclassman, you’d get thrown in the deep end of the pool whether you could swim or not, dared to cheat death.

All of us have said these phrases for so long, none of us even think about it.

“Then that means they really are idioms,” Dr. Taylor explained. “They’re just really localized.”

Localized idioms? Curses! I adore idioms! It was like Lex Luthor making Superman eat a kryptonite cupcake!

I sat with Dr. Taylor for a half-hour quibbling about these two phrases (Yes, I actually did that. In real life). By the time we changed topics, discussing my family and job and how I routinely skirt syntax and grammar to write with “style,” I got the heck out of there. I didn’t even want to give him a chance to deconstruct my writing style.

But, he successfully argued that everybody’s nonsensical language about the Cannon and the Bell is justified linguistically.

So, carry on citizens.

I’ll just be quiet and play with my comma splices.