“For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to update an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism, and homophobia). Pretty quickly the effort to write exercises that were simultaneously inoffensive to Dalles and San Franciso left Paul struggling to stay awake in front of his computer screeen by the middle of every afternoon. In his stupor he began to imagine an actual battle on his desktop, a ragged collision of Lilliputian armies out of Spartacus: a well-drilled phalanx of Promise Keepers and West Texas cattlemen on his right versus a scruffy rabble of Berkeley vegans and Earth Firsters on his left.

Paul’s supervisor, Bonnie, was an embittered former high school English teacher from Little Rock who had lost her job to budget cuts. (…) When he was really pissed off, he composed items with inappropriate references that he figured Bonnie wouldn’t get – “Mr. Humbert (brought, brung) Dolores a banana” – or arranged an exercise so that the first letter of each item spelled out a subliminally subversive message like “MEAT IS GOOD” or “BOW TO SATAN” or (in a twenty-item review exercise he was particularly proud of) “SATAN SEZ EAT MORE CANDY”. And when he was feeling unusually ambitious, he combined the two techniques into one exercise:

In each of the following sentences, underline the direct object once and the indirect object twice. Not all sentences have an indirect object.

1. I gave Renfield instructions not to wake me till sunset.
2. Lizzie offered her father a close shave this morning.
3. Oliver, have you told Mr. Fagin about the missing wallet?
4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.
5. Eagerly, Oscar taught Bosie the backstroke.
6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.
7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.
8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.
9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.
10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.”

Kings of Infinite Space, James Hynes