Professor Raymond Orkwis speaks about the English language in his office.

“My dreams are a very active part of my life,” Annandale English instructor Raymond Orkwis said, right after stressing the importance of strict realism in life-planning essays. Orkwis’ outlet for those dreams is poetry, occasionally published, sometimes heard in coffee-houses, and usually, as he says, “surreal.”

“No writing is really real, is it?” said Orkwis. “Fiction is basically a lie. Do you try to portray a picture of the world that fits with the world’s rules?”

His opinion of poetic fantasy notwithstanding, Orkwis does place a high value on rules and order. He is a grammar-prescriptivist, as well as an individual who, even in casual conversation, does his part to keep the more obscure words in the English language alive.

Orkwis said he assigned his Developmental English students “an encomium.” Before composing this essay in praise of their heroes, he said they had to dig the word out of the dictionary and breathe life into it.

Without Orkwis’ contribution and that of other English teachers, the living English language – the commonly used, existing, widely understood English language with all its underlying concepts – might shrink like a messy grape popsicle in the summer sun. We might waste what we could enjoy.

Why does it matter? Distracted by other theorists, Orkwis never got a chance to comment on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which links language with the transmission of culture.

That modern English has changed since it first became “modern” around 600 years ago goes without saying. Orkwis said he identifies with William Safire when it comes to the meaning of words themselves. Safire, said Orkwis, had an idea of language which “was not prescriptive, but descriptive. [According to Safire] a word means what people believe it to mean.”

Why the seeming contradiction between the conservation of old rules and the acceptance of new meanings?

“I have to teach [students] not the rules, so much, but the logic,” said Orkwis. “Words go in the sentence with a certain amount of power. My students see it as random. The more you use the tools [for understanding sentence construction], the more of a critical thinker you become.  This will help them as teachers tell them they need to vary their sentences.”

If students see this teacher’s opinions as unimportant in the wider world, they may lose one of their best sources of influence and success. Students may also become less adept at spotting eloquent lies, or seeing the warping of truth in advertising and politics.

“When I was in grad school, Foucault was the darling of the social revolution,” Orkwis said. “It had become a social matter rather than intellectual. The idea of power was more that if you controlled the discourse, you controlled the actions of people who lived under that discourse.”

Though he links knowledge and use of grammar rules to ordered, logical and abstract thinking, Orkwis is capable of embracing many writers who have defenestrated the rules for a reason.

“Susan Howe, a favorite writer of mine, is constantly stretching the rules,” Orkwis said. “Heather McHugh also. You see the polysemousness of a particular phrase. I had mentioned [how] Cummings and Dickenson played with punctuation – with the sound and feel of it. Dickenson had blips of ideas that don’t connect seamlessly.”

Orkwis said he admired surprises – the diametric opposite of clichés. The Naming of Parts, by World War II-era poet Henry Reed, struck him because Reed “compared a drill sergeant telling soldiers how to load their rifles with Spring.”

“When I use a phrase that’s commonly used, I do so to undercut it – probably not as much as I want to,” Orkwis said. “If you don’t put yourself out there, what’s the point? You have to be who you are to the point where you couldn’t be anyone else, nor could anyone else be you.”

Students unafraid of the public viewing their best work – their non-generic, personal work – have a chance at publication. Orkwis, who has taught at NOVA since 1999, is a managing editor of the literary magazine at the Annandale campus, Calliope. This publication, which accepts submissions only from students taking classes at NOVA Annandale, is highly selective according to Orkwis, making it a nice challenge to submit, an honor to be published, and hopefully for those who haven’t yet picked up a copy, a joy to read.

With English, there is always something to learn, even subconsciously. There is always something to aspire to, and a person can become a better writer by reading. “When the light goes on,” Orkwis said, speaking of his Developmental English students, “it never goes off.”

By: Christine Boyce

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