[silk] The Muse Of Mopar

["Udhay Shankar N" <udhay@xxxxxxxxx>]

A review of a *driver's manual* ? This reads like it's supposed to be 
funny, and it is - in patches. Mostly, however, it gives me a feeling of 
dislocation.

Udhay

http://www.vocabula.com/VRMar01Carkeet.htm

The Muse of Mopar  

David Carkeet  
 


I have fallen in love. I have found grace, class, and subtlety, along with 
an intuitive appreciation for who I am, in a place where I would never have 
expected to find it. I am speaking, of course, of The New Dodge Caravan 
Owner's Manual. 

We have come to expect little from official prose style. Clarity is so rare 
that just to understand something feels like a triumph. We are a nation of 
IRS memos printed in all caps despite the fact that abundant research shows 
it is a severe strain to read all caps. 

Take heart, virtuous reader! Consider: 

Located in the front of the cup drawer are coin holder slots that have a 
scalloped rubber insert. Coins are held securely and quietly in place by 
pressing them firmly into the rubber holder so the edges of the coins 
interfere with the rubber. 

First, "scalloped rubber insert" gets your attention. "Quietly" is good 
too ? we all want our coins to shut up. But the payoff is "interfere with." 
I never knew interference could be so pleasant. Interference normally gets 
in the way. It's negative. But "interfere with" here is used in an archaic 
neutral sense that you won't find in any current dictionary. The Oxford 
English Dictionary tells us that the last writer known to have used the 
word with this neutral meaning was Daniel Defoe, in 1725. Defoe's spirit 
mysteriously lives on in the Chrysler Technical Writing Division. 

Interested in building your vocabulary? Read on: 

All exterior mirrors are hinged and may be moved either forward or rearward 
to resist damage. The hinges have three detent positions: full forward, 
full rearward, and normal. 

I've heard of "detente," but never "detent." The latter is an engineering 
term for a catch or lever that locks a movement. The two words come from 
the same source, originally meaning a loosening, but they are pronounced 
differently. You say "detent" the same way you say the last two words of 
this sentence: "Put de damn dog in de tent." 

Here's another new word for you: 

Leaves collected in the air intake, located directly in front of the 
windshield, may reduce air flow. If they enter the plenum, they could plug 
the water drains. 

The "plenum." Isn't that where Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar? It does sound 
Roman, borrowing glory from "plenary," "plenitude," and "plenipotentiary." 
Those words sound much loftier than a place where dead squirrels and mold 
and other crap collects. 

The manual does more than increase my vocabulary. It understands me: 

Do not put anything on or around the airbag covers or attempt to manually 
open them. 

I know I'm not alone in the longing I regularly have to grab a screwdriver 
and pry off an airbag cover. Everyone loves a balloon, and the airbag is 
the ultimate balloon. The warning, therefore, is well placed and sobering. 
Besides, for the passenger's side, the cover is not just a cover. It's 
a "Knee Impact Bolster": 

The Knee Impact Bolsters help protect the knees and position you for the 
best interaction with the airbag. 

You don't know it, but all the time you're sitting there staring into space 
you're being positioned for an "interaction" with the airbag. In 
anticipation of this explosive event, the Knee Impact Bolster performs a 
kind of foreplay on you, whispering intimately, "Move your leg a little 
bit. No, higher. There. That's better." 

The manual goes on about airbags, rightly sensing that their recent mention 
in the news calls for reassurance. Airbags can abrade you when they 
inflate, and the language on this subject hits just the right tone: 

The abrasions are similar to friction rope burns or those you might get 
sliding along a carpet or gymnasium floor. 

The chumminess disarms us, taking us right back to our school days. It 
seems to say, "Remember the time big-mouth Sally dared you to slide down 
the rope in the gym and you were still mad about what she told Judy at the 
party so you slid down fast just to show her? Remember the rope burn you 
got? That's what an airbag abrasion feels like." 

And listen to this: 

Your vehicle may be drivable after the airbags deploy. If so, you can tuck 
the deployed airbags inside the opening in the steering wheel hub and 
instrument panel covers to make driving somewhat easier. 

Chrysler doesn't sugarcoat the fact that driving after an accident won't be 
easy. It'll be a bitch, in fact. But tucking those bags out of the way, 
more or less, will make driving somewhat easier. 

The manual is deeply committed to furthering our general education: 

Gas props support the liftgate in the open position. However, because gas 
pressure drops with temperature, it may be necessary to assist the props 
when opening the liftgate in cold weather. 

Indeed, it is necessary to give those props an assist in cold weather, but 
who thinks about the reason? We scratch our underarms, think, "Duh, it 
doesn't work too good when it's cold," and get on with our confused lives. 
But Chrysler believes learning never stops. 

All this reminds me of a small moment in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 
During a funeral, a howling dog in the cellar disturbs the mourners in the 
parlor. Huck describes how the undertaker sidles out of the room to 
investigate. A whack and a yelp are heard from below, followed by welcome 
silence. The undertaker returns to the parlor and says to the preacher, in 
a whisper just loud enough for all to hear, "He had a rat!" Huck says, "You 
could see it was a great satisfaction to the people, because naturally they 
wanted to know. A little thing like that don't cost nothing, and it's just 
the little things that makes a man to be looked up to and liked. There 
warn't no more popular man in town than what that undertaker was." 

The same can be said about the extra touches in the Chrysler manual. 
They "don't cost nothing." Excellence in style consists of precisely such 
welcome gratuities. 

The manual is a versatile devil, shifting styles as needed. It recognizes 
that the elegance of Rome is not appropriate for life-and-death 
instruction. Where safety is concerned, Dick and Jane take over: 

Getting under a jacked-up vehicle is dangerous. The vehicle could slip off 
the jack and fall on you. You could be crushed. 

Most writers would omit that last sentence, figuring it goes without 
saying. But folks who like to spend time under jacked-up vehicles probably 
need it. The next passage treats an obvious consequence in a similar 
manner: 

If the hood is not fully latched, it could fly up when the vehicle is 
moving and block your forward vision. You could have a collision. 

Something else could happen, of course. You could inadvertently wheel into 
a superstore, be declared the millionth customer, and win lots of 
merchandise. On the other hand, you could have a collision. 

I must temper my praise with a few small bricks. Good stylists are good 
rhetoricians. They can snow us with their words. I regret to report here 
that Chrysler tries to put one over on us. The subject is the child-
protection door locks. When they are engaged, the sliding van doors can be 
opened only from the outside. Who among us has engaged these locks on their 
sedan or van without immediately thinking, "In a crash, a passenger would 
be trapped; death by drowning or fire could follow"? It's a terrible 
tradeoff. Do we protect our children from fiddling with the doors and 
tumbling onto the highway? Or do we deprive potential crash victims the 
option of freeing themselves from a suddenly hazardous backseat? Here's how 
Chrysler handles the dilemma: 

Avoid trapping anyone in the vehicle in a collision. Remember that the 
sliding doors can only be opened from the outside when the child protection 
locks are engaged. 

No matter how many times you read this, you will find no real advice 
here. "Avoid"? How? Here's how: "Remember." I can see the drowning victim 
glugging as he goes down, "I remember! I remember! But it's not helping!" 

Late in the manual, we find this sentence: 

All Wheel Drive is automatic with no driver inputs. 

"Input" is already disputed turf, a word whose entry into general usage 
many prescriptivists have resisted from the beginning, on the grounds that 
it smacks of mechanistic, technical jargon. But this plural is a creature 
I've never seen before, with a whole new meaning ? roughly, initiative ? 
and it's an annoyance. How many times, I wonder, will my grammatical taste 
have to deal with some version of this word? 

Also late in the manual, we find this lapse on the subject of power 
steering: 

If for some reason the hydraulic pressure is interrupted, it will still be 
possible to steer your vehicle. Under these conditions, you will observe a 
substantial increase in steering effort. 

The car will be harder to steer. That's what they should have said. Instead 
they inflate the diction with "observe," "substantial," "increase," 
and "effort." Was this euphemistic, obscure sentence penned by the same 
honest soul who brought us the true information about the car being 
only "somewhat easier" to drive with the deployed airbags flopping around? 
What happened? 

Here's what happened. Chrysler hired an old-fashioned fellow (let's call 
him Ezekiel), luring him out of retirement (his last job, in the fifties, 
was polishing "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power" in Reader's Digest). 
Ezekiel took to his new job with enthusiasm, though he did wonder why his 
boxlike office had burlap-covered walls that didn't reach the ceiling. 
Ezekiel brought us "detent" and "plenum"; he brought us gym ropes and gas 
laws; he wove original prose on his loom until some middle-management 
hardass, puzzling over proofs of the manual, bellowed, "Who's the wing nut 
in Section A-23?" The manual went downhill from there. 

Still, I hold The New Dodge Caravan Owner's Manual high as an example to 
all other manuals, like the one I got with my new fax machine ? 107 pages 
of corkscrewing prose that ruined my life for a day ? or the manual that 
came with my dehumidifier, a device I love for the way it magically draws 
water vapor from the air in the basement. The manual instructs us about 
regularly emptying the reservoir of accumulated water, and, for the user 
tempted by other ideas, offers this sage advice: "Do not drink the water 
collected in the reservoir." 

Damn! After a hot afternoon under my jacked-up vehicle, what better 
refreshment than a quaff of liquid basement air impurities?   

David Carkeet 


 
 
 David Carkeet is a linguist and novelist. He is the author of five novels, 
Double Negative, The Greatest Slump of All Time, I Been There Before, The 
Full Catastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways. His short stories and essays 
have appeared in American Literature, Carolina Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, 
The North American Review, The Oxford American, The San Francisco Review of 
Books, New York Stories, The New York Times Magazine, and The Village 
Voice. Carkeet teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri in 
St. Louis.