My recent Father’s Day gift appealed to both my love of language and baseball, and prompted this column. It also provided a mystery omission.
The gift was a T-shirt on the front of which was a diagram showing the names and positions of the players in the classic, and still hilarious, Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” routine. Although part of the reason why that skit still works is the acting of the two protagonists, what drew my attention is its brilliant manipulation of our language, making use of ambiguous functionality of basic words.
We begin with the “who” of the title. Grammatically, it is an interrogative pronoun as a subject in a question as in “Who did this?” Or it can be a relative pronoun when it introduces an object clause, as in “I know who did this” where the clause it introduces is the object of “know.” But in the skit, it is the name of the first baseman. So, when Costello asks Abbot, “Who’s on first?” Abbot replies, “Right” because ignoring the contraction, we get “Who is on first,” which reads the same as “Smith is on first.”
Now, grammatically, there is no problem. “Who” can be the subject of a sentence, just as well as “Smith” can. When Costello asks “who” picks up the first baseman’s paycheck, Abbot can reply, “Of course, he earned it.”
The brilliance of the script — I don’t know who wrote it — is how well the players’ names slide into their sentences, just as, for example, if the first baseman’s name was “Smith,” which would cause no confusion because it is syntactically correct, just as “Who” is. So the sentence sounds fine. Except it doesn’t seem to answer the question as to the name of the player who takes care of first base. It is just the opposite, seemingly a repetition of the question because “who” as a subject usually introduces a question.
That pattern persists throughout the dialogue, syntactically correct names that do not provide meaningful information. We have a pitcher named “Tomorrow” throwing to a catcher named “Today,” creating the illusion of talking about when a question about pitcher/catcher will be answered while actually providing that information. The dialogue has to shift a little in that exchange because “tomorrow” and “today” cannot perform the syntactical role of subject as neatly as “who” can but they do provide one-word answers. And that is because both “tomorrow” and “today” are often adverbial modifiers rather than the subject as in these famous lines from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” where “tomorrow” modifies the verb “creeps,” more easily seen if we put this into more conventional subject/verb sequence: This petty pace creeps in tomorrow and tomorrow ….
As brilliant as the script is in making single-word responses in the dialogue both syntactically appropriate while not providing actual information such as a name like Smith would, it needs to be filled out with the occasional syntactically complete utterance, such as “I don’t know” on third base, or “I don’t give a darn” at shortstop.
So, in sum, we have one-word replies that can stand alone in conversation, such as “who” or “why” or “today” that both do and don’t provide information since they are actually the players’ odd names, as Abbot makes clear in his opening remarks while adding the occasional fully expressed thought as the glue that holds the whole thing together in a perfectly ordinary back-and-forth conversation and, when presented with pitch-perfect performances of the buttoned up Abbot and the effusive Costello, it all makes for a comedic masterpiece.
The mystery? No right fielder.