If Doggies Could Write

I learned recently that the GED test has dropped its poetry section, which used to be included in the reading portion, called Reasoning Through Language Arts. Which reminds me that my parents were amused, back in the sixties, at the new term language arts. They found it overly fancy. As with a lot of polysyllabic neologisms, we all got used to it. Now it sounds normal.

I was both pleased and chagrined at this news. People getting their GED shouldn’t have to jump through unnecessary hoops (in my opinion). As I implied in my previous post, unnecessary hoops might include balancing equations and manipulating negative exponents. I fear the poetry test questions might have emphasized the distinctions among similes, metaphors, personification, and synecdoche, and not really explored the relevance and beauty of poetry. All trees and no forest. I used to annoy my grad school friends by alluding to “the eternal truths as they are expressed in literature.” Probably the GED never touched on those.

On the other hand, the culture at large is nibbling away at the humanities, and the GED decision is symptomatic. The university where I used to teach has dropped foreign language majors and some foreign languages altogether, including Latin, ancient Greek, and Chinese. The department has been decimated. Students at an urban state university don’t need those frills, I can imagine our state capital sages saying. They just need jobs! The GED students, then, are victims of similarly low expectations. They miss out, maybe forever, on reading some pretty great stuff.

In the meantime, I remain happily mired in language minutiae. No practical applications, no job qualifications necessary. A case in point: Someone passed me a few lines of verse the other day and cautioned me not to read it in public, lest it make me cry. I read it as soon as she turned away and didn’t cry. Instead, the word doggerel came to mind because, to me, the poem was sentimental and trite.

I bet you know where I’m going with this. What’s the history of doggerel, anyway? What do bad poems and dogs have in common?

Doggerel does, in fact, derive from dogs. The word dog has been used contemptuously in many contexts, including poetry, as in “Whoreson dog!” (King Lear) and “Egregious dog!” (Henry V). Shakespeare used the word as an insult almost exclusively. If a dog wrote poetry, I guess he or she would do so ineptly. A whoreson and egregious dog’s verses would not be very good.

It’s all in the eye (and ear) of the beholder, of course. My acquaintance was genuinely moved by the bit of verse she shared with me. Debating such questions–what makes a good poem?–is, or used to be, part of most people’s general education. Now? Maybe not so much.