Poems by Frederic G. Cassidy

Poems by Frederic G. Cassidy Song of the Native Speaker (1962) Hail to the Native Speaker, He never can go wrong! For by some process mystic, Subliminal, sublinguistic, And utterly spectacular, He knows his own vernacular To every last detail — He simply cannot fail! Field-workers seeking to dissect The structure of his idiolect Occasionally may detect What seems at first an odd effect, Yet every item simply must belong: The Native Speaker never can go wrong! Our analytic bag of tricks, Each segment, sign, and superfix Unto the uttermost fud, He knew 'em by the age of six — He has 'em in his blood. Yes, they're there, lurking there In some infra-conscious layer Where there isn't room for any trace of doubt ¦ And all we have to do is draw them out! Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 22 (2001) 28Poems by Frederic G. Cassidy What if they prove erratic Or quite unsystematic? Could there have been a lapse? A slip of the tongue perhaps? No! No! No! It simply can't be so — No Native Speaker's syllable Is anything but unspillable; The fault is ours, and we must ask Are we equal to the task? We speakers quite sophistic Of cultivated tongues, Our grammar's pluralistic; Its diachronic features Like fossilized sea-creatures Have gills instead of lungs And structural variety Defying all propriety As primitive people's speech would never do. And so we'd better tíiink twice And count the horrible price Before describing the speech of me or you! But it isn't the same at all With languages never writ — So with the Native Speaker We needn't worry a bit. The Scientist is humble And Linguists never grumble; So when our first analyses Appear to swarm with fallacies, When by no form of gimmetry Can we discover symmetry, When even terminology Collapses in tautology, When -ernes and alios-, nasty devils, Refuse to stay on their proper levels — Poems by Frederic G. Cassidy29 And when the room gets hotter, Our tongue feels like a blotter, Our brain begins to totter Like a titubating otter, And we see our Native Speaker With the eye of a garrotter, For our structure analytic Has proven quite rachitic, We must resist the urge to prune and patch. (Natch! Just throw it away and start again at scratch!) Then fill a foaming beaker And hail the Native Speaker, The Hero and the Burden of our song — For he never, no, never, can go wrong! 30Staff of the Dictionary of American Regional English Back Home (1994) I've been places, places, traveled most parts of the world. Seen the great wonders of nature, of mankind that fill the eyes, shake the brain; troubled my body with heat and cold. I have felt shrunken beside great things, aroused to trembling, shivering, all my inner flesh and blood aroused by the need to recognize, to admit to some overwhelming force of being of which I am an infinitesimal atom, a nearly-nothing, spectral, that has not forgotten the birthing-cord, the mother-tie, the separation that never is complete, fully complete, until we die. For each of us there is a corner of earth, a refuge of green trees, a cover of clean snow, rocks firmly heaving above the sea, unreachable horizons, small cress-grown creeks, hard clayey fields, that we call "home." An infant grasps the hand of the old man. The other grasps the earth and the waters under the earth. If true love exists this is a part of it. ...