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April 26, 2008
What's a Participle?
One student out of fifteen -- mostly valedictorians, I'm told -- in my Honors seminar knew. Our schools do not teach the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax, what used to be called "grammar". They do teach what now is called grammar, meaning a grab bag of rules, usually mistaken and never organized into a coherent system, which students learn to follow as docilely as they learn to write five-paragraph essays, with a vague opening, three ho-hum body shots, and a recapitulatory conclusion. Respectively.
Anyway, Steve's post below has made me think of the six stupidest "grammatical" things our schools teach. Some of these slide from grammar into style, but since my students are but slenderly acquainted with either one, it hardly matters here how we characterize them:
1. Never begin a sentence with "but". When they tell me they've been so advised, I open up the King James Bible at random, glance at the page, and read. "If it's good enough for Almighty God," I say, "it had damned well better be good enough for a high school English teacher." It is the preferred method in English prose of making the quick adversative shift.
2. Never begin a sentence with "because." When our retiring linguist heard about this rule, she gaped in incomprehension. That's what my daughter tells me, who was in the class. What can you say about it? It betrays an utter incapacity to understand how sentences are put together in English. Because teachers do not know what a subordinate clause is, they do not teach their students what a subordinate clause is. And because they have no clear way to explain what a sentence fragment is, and because immature writers will sometimes begin a fragment with "because," they say -- you get it.
3. Avoid the passive voice. This rule would be fine, except for two things: neither the teachers nor the students know what the passive voice is; and the passive voice is often quite useful. My students are under the impression that any verb with an "is" or an "are" in it is passive. If ever they had to learn about the middle voice, they'd take ill.
4. Never use the pronoun "I" in an essay.
5. Never use the informal "you," meaning "one".
6. Never use the same word more than twice in a row. Imagine Lincoln revising the Gettysburg Address, that government of the people, for society, and by the general population, should not perish from the face of the earth.
But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them. I'm still talking about the valedictorians here. I suppose "improper predication" would do as well as any. They use words in ways that are impossible not only in English, but sometimes in any conceivable language. They get away with it, too, because their teachers, including college professors, do likewise.
Posted by Anthony Esolen at 11:09 PM | Permalink
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4. Never use the pronoun "I" in an essay.
5. Never use the informal "you," meaning "one".
Well that's liberating. It's strange, I read peer reviewed essays that do both of those things, but as a college student I am not allowed to refer to myself in my papers.
I'm told this came about because some students took it too far. All I know is that my knowledge of my own language is tragically inadequate.
I was taught, and believed, everything you just said except the part about the passive voice (I learned that in Greek!).
Posted by: Keljeck | Apr 26, 2008 11:33:43 PM
Professor Esolen, I was an English major in the '70's but never learned grammar. They didn't teach it in my public school, and I didn't have to take it in college and so, being a lazy student, didn't. BECAUSE I had a good "ear" for writing and grammar, my lack of knowledge has not hurt me much. I've worked as a copy editor at a newspaper, won a writing award in law school, and write fairly extensively in my profession's trade publications.
BUT sometimes I would like to teach myself what I missed. Can YOU recommend an older grammar textbook that would teach "the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax"? In my middle age, I think I might even enjoy learning how to diagram a sentence! ANY HELP YOU CAN GIVE ME WOULD BE MUCH APPRECIATED.
PS - thanks for mentioning the idiotic rule about not repeating the same word in a sentence. I see sentences like your "Gettysburg address" revision all the time, and they drive me crazy.
Posted by: Robin | Apr 27, 2008 4:35:58 AM
I had an old-fashioned HS English teacher and learned a lot of grammar. I recall an incident in faculty senate wherein a particular faculty member spent 20 minutes slamming a proposal because it had a split infinitive. There were two problems with this. One, split infinitives are OK. Two, the construction in question was NOT an infinite.
(This same faculty member has been known to talk twenty minutes only to say, "I don't have an opinion on this.")
Posted by: Bobby Winters | Apr 27, 2008 7:22:18 AM
I echo Robin's request: what books do you find helpful? Also, what do you think of Strunk and White? I've sworn by it, but I've also seen some criticisms here and there from people I respect.
Posted by: Irenaeus | Apr 27, 2008 9:36:16 AM
Very near total agreement from here, Tony! I must confess, however, that I do ban the use of "you" in freshman essays. This is not because it can't be used well informally, but because my students don't use it as an informal "one" -- shoot, they don't use "one" as a formal "one." Rather, almost universally they use "you" as a lazy means of not bothering to figure out whom they mean -- students? carpenters? Christians? lions? . . . Or they are using it, as they use "one," to avoid the great he/she debate, in which most of them have obviously been flayed alive at some point in their school career.
I can hear the sighs of relief when I tell them that the inclusive "he" is not only grammatically, stylistically, and theologically sound, but they can use it in their papers for my class! I do teach them how to avoid it if they run into an ultra-feminist professor or boss someday, but I also tell them what you have mentioned before about editors often not noticing that it's there anyway, since it doesn't confuse meaning. This helps with the universal confused usage of pronouns in all their work.
But "you" -- sure, I agree that it's not an innate problem to use it in certain contexts, but when you have youngsters who are by nature imprecise in their thinking and lazy in their writing, it seems to help them a great deal not to have that particular out. (I ban "one" also on similar grounds.) Also, their use of "you" tends to come across very much "holier than you" in their persuasive writing, and it helps them with the tone of those essays to avoid it.
All your other points -- oh, yes, we find ourselves addressing them every semester! Their eyes get huge and they begin to hyperventilate when we tell them the 5-paragraph essay is forbidden -- but most of them quickly discover the helpfulness of letting the ideas form the structure instead of vice versa, and they love being told that sentences *of course* may begin with conjunctions, and paragraphs may be whatever number of sentences are needed, and "I" is perfectly legitimate, and repetition can be an extremely effective literary device . . . .
And, yes, I am grateful to you and Steve for offering me some purposeful procrastination tools this weekend . . .
Posted by: Beth | Apr 27, 2008 10:50:25 AM
Robin,
You'll find that English language guides published before the sixties are generally most useful. The internet should help you there.
These are among my favorites:
- Language guides for advanced foreign students, like those by Robert J. Dixson. I used them when I taught English as a Second Language years ago in Toronto. Just last month, in my work as an editor, I consulted Dixson's rules on the uses of the definite and indefinite articles to help out a Serbian writer who has problems adjusting from a language that avoids any articles at all. Books like these often take a detailed and no-nonsense approach to the study of our language.
- Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English by the great grammarian and etymologist Eric Partridge; and
- High school grammar texts from the time before our anything-goes era. I still consult my grade eleven text, Learning to Write by Reed Smith, which was published in 1939 and remained in use at my Catholic girls' high school in Winnipeg until the mid-sixties. This wonderful book even includes lists of words whose mispelling would be "inexcusable." You get the idea.
You mentioned sentence diagramming. I haven't checked this out yet, but its title sounds promising: Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Foley, inspired by the author's demanding sixth-grade English teacher.
I too had a teacher like Sister Bernadette, a real stickler for following the rules but who nevertheless warned us against the folly of being persnickety. Good writing, Sister Clare Miriam taught us, sometimes sometimes requires us to be creative, to make up our own rules, -- but only when we have mastered the basics, only then. Or if you're e.e. cummings, when anything goes.
Posted by: maria horvath | Apr 27, 2008 11:00:25 AM
Schools do focus on teaching a lot of (usually unsound) petty grammatical rules like the ones you cited, while failing to teach people to write whole sentences and paragraphs that have a logical flow and actually make sense. Lots of college-level essays I read are ruined by the students' inability to construct logical sentences -- sentences where you can be sure who is the subject and who the object, for example. Most of the students don't make sense when speaking at a higher level than small talk, either.
Posted by: Laura | Apr 27, 2008 11:04:01 AM
Stupid rules have always abounded in English, because of a natural tendency to Puritanism - or nay-saying for its own sake - and a strangely subservient attitude to Latin and French. One I was taught by my English teacher, who was a good teacher, too, was never to start a sentence with a preposition; which is rubbish in any language I know. And what about C.S.Lewis' favourite, the ban on the so-called "split infinitive" - enacted for no better reason than it was felt that what English called the Infinitive should act in the same way as the French and Latin "Infinitive", which was one word and could not be split? Apart from the obvious idiocy of the proposition, there is the fact that the English infinitive is grammatically nothing like the Latin/French infinitive, many of whose functions are filled by the English participle present. English has always been taught badly in English-language schools; indeed, according to Lewis, until the twentieth century, it was not taught in English schools at all, and students were supposed to learn grammar from their Latin and Greek lessons.
Posted by: Fabio P.Barbieri | Apr 27, 2008 11:45:45 AM
Mr. Barbieri,
A good point -- but I have to draw a distinction. In old days, the stupid rules were hypercorrect, because learned but pedantic grammarians attempted (sometimes; actually much less often than I had supposed, before I started examining old grammars) to impose the laws of Latin upon English. Now, the stupid rules are born of complete ignorance. In old days, you had grammarians insisting in English that certain conjunctive adverbs, like "however," were "postpositives," similar to "autem" and "enim" in Latin, and so should only be used after an initial word in the sentence. It wasn't really a bad rule; sentences beginning with "However" and a comma are rather stilted and sluggish. Nowadays, you have high school teachers who don't know what an adverb is, or a conjunction. They might know that "and" is a conjunction, but they don't exactly know what makes other words conjunctive, and as for adverbs, forget it. In general, the old grammarians were infinitely superior to the new, in the same way that doors that shut too tightly are superior to doors that are smashed in, or lawns too prettily mowed are superior to mud.
Everybody: I have somewhere the most excellent English grammar I've ever seen; I'll dig it up and let you know the name soon. From it I learned about the rare "past future" and "past future perfect" tenses, in English.... Another interesting thing about the old grammars is that they DON'T attempt to equate "tense" in English with tense in other languages. English has only two pure tenses, sort of -- present and preterite. Our other tenses have modal and aspectual shadings.
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Apr 27, 2008 3:21:24 PM
"Nowadays, you have high school teachers who don't know what an adverb is, or a conjunction. "
Wow, is that true. Nor how to write a decently coherent essay or follow the rules of documentation, or any number of things one would think would be obviously necessary. I very nearly said to a graduating (maybe, if she passes my class) senior in my office the other day "You are the reason I tell my children to homeschool their children" -- but she was already in tears, and I need my job for 4 more years (my son begins college this fall), so I forebore from making it worse.
Posted by: Beth | Apr 27, 2008 4:21:54 PM
I'd like to tip my hat here to the inanest invention ever: the grammar-checker. It's usually right next to the spell-checker button. The spell-checker will underline in red squiggly lines, the grammar-checker will underline in blue squiggly lines. Because computers do not understand semantics (by definition), but only syntax, and a very limited range of syntax at that, and further because the tasks of grammatical analysis are essentially semantic (such as determining the part-of-speech of a word like "run" which could be either a noun or a verb depending on what the sentence MEANS), the grammar-checker is, by definition, whacked-up.
I don't know what rules they program into it but in my experience it mainly flags sentences which it thinks to be in the passive voice. That might explain something, Tony. Of course, whenever it flags a sentence, the student need only rearrange words aimlessly until the blue squiggly line mysteriously goes away.
This is how we produce human beings who fail the Turing test.
Posted by: Clifford Simon | Apr 27, 2008 4:38:43 PM
Oh, Clifford, the grammar checker is indeed the most inane thing on the computer! You must already know grammar quite well to know whether it is telling you anything accurate, and, if it *does* happen to be right, you have to know grammar quite well to fix the error. In other words, it is only "helpful" to those who don't need it in the first place . . . It is the first thing I look for to turn off when I get a new program, and I tell my students to do the same. (Well, actually, worse might be the new documentation programs, in which you put the information and it formats your citation. But you have to know what information it actually needs, and if you know that, you don't need it to do your formatting for you . . . These are banned from our classes.)
Posted by: Beth | Apr 27, 2008 4:47:09 PM
>>From it I learned about the rare "past future" and "past future perfect" tenses, in English<<
What tense is the verb "ustacould," as in: "I cain't run as fast as an armadillo any more, but I ustacould."
Posted by: Bobby Neal Winters | Apr 27, 2008 5:06:56 PM
Bobby,
My spellchecker, set for Standard Texan, changed your "an armadillo" to the more correct "a armadillo."
Posted by: o.h. | Apr 27, 2008 5:39:18 PM
"But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them."
No name for whom or what? the students? the mistakes? Perhaps But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name would suffice. :)
Posted by: Bill Daugherty | Apr 27, 2008 6:15:26 PM
I give up - what is a participle?
No, honestly, I am hopeless at grammar and probably couldn't use a comma correctly to save me soul.
One thing I've long been curious about - my essay for freshman english didn't qualify me to skip the normal sequence, but my essay for the honors scholarship not only got me the scholarship but a place in the freshman honors sequence (so I didn't have to take freshman English after all).
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | Apr 27, 2008 6:17:25 PM
Oops - I also can't proof my own typing!
K
Posted by: Kamilla | Apr 27, 2008 6:18:18 PM
Where English grammar is not taught ( nearly everywhere these days) learning Latin is certainly a useful substitute for understanding the construction of one's own language. A child exposed to Latin for a short time will quickly understand the various parts of speech - adverbs, tenses,moods,etc - as well as the delightful discovery of the majority of words he/she uses every day.
Posted by: William Rush | Apr 27, 2008 6:22:03 PM
>>>I'd like to tip my hat here to the inanest invention ever: the grammar-checker. <<<
I turned mine off as soon as it appeared in MS Word. To demonstrate its inadequacy, I typed a number of paragraphs by famous authors into a word document with the grammar check on. Amazing how illiterate people like Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Shaw and Hemingway were.
The worst thing about the grammar checker is its abysmal leveling of style. Once people begin relying on it, they begin to sound just like Bill Gates, or USA Today. I suspect that the authors of the revised Ruthenian Divine Liturgy had their going full blast while they were writing it, because that's precisely the style in which it is composed.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 27, 2008 6:52:46 PM
While I don't dispute the value of studying Latin (I took it for four years in high school and loved it), why should it be the language of choice for giving English speakers a familiarity with grammar? Why not German? In spite of centuries of Latin and French accretions, English is still classed as a Germanic language. Some students might be pleasantly surprised to find out, as I often have, why.
I never have understood why the passive voice is verboten. What on earth do we have it for then?
Posted by: Chuck | Apr 27, 2008 8:29:26 PM
O.H., that only works if you put the yogh (3) in front of the 'a' in armadillo.
I was one of the people who had parents and grandparents who spoke proper English, with the result that I got through elementary and high school English by going by what sounded 'right'. And I read a lot, many things not from the 20th century, so that helped. But as a result, my grammar is less than perfect, and that made Hebrew and Greek more incomprehensible than they should have been. Though I would add that languages are not learned as computer code, but as actual spoken language. I fear that Biblical exegesis is affected by the language-as-computer-code model. I suspect we'd miss things in Shakespeare if we tried to understand it in that way. I digress.
If it is good enough for Tolkien, it is good enough for me, though. He knew the language better than most of us.
Mr. Rush, perhaps that might work for Old English, but modern English is a pidgin tongue, and Latin doesn't really apply very well.
Posted by: labrialumn | Apr 27, 2008 8:51:12 PM
O.H., that only works if you put the yogh (3) in front of the 'a' in armadillo.
I was one of the people who had parents and grandparents who spoke proper English, with the result that I got through elementary and high school English by going by what sounded 'right'. And I read a lot, many things not from the 20th century, so that helped. But as a result, my grammar is less than perfect, and that made Hebrew and Greek more incomprehensible than they should have been. Though I would add that languages are not learned as computer code, but as actual spoken language. I fear that Biblical exegesis is affected by the language-as-computer-code model. I suspect we'd miss things in Shakespeare if we tried to understand it in that way. I digress.
If it is good enough for Tolkien, it is good enough for me, though. He knew the language better than most of us.
Mr. Rush, perhaps that might work for Old English, but modern English is a pidgin tongue, and Latin doesn't really apply very well.
Posted by: labrialumn | Apr 27, 2008 8:52:09 PM
I always thought "Don't start a sentence with and or but" was one of the old Latinate rules like "Don't split an infintive" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition," not a new-fangled one. I have certainly heard it treated as such. But of course (not to be rude) since Dr. Esolen's youth, we have had a few decades for the new-fangled to become old-fashioned.
I wonder what Dr. Esolen would think of the website Language Log. They seemed a be a little too relaxed about standards for his tastes, but he would approve of their extended crusade against those who stigmatize the passive voice (and often don't even understand what the term means). Here are some (of their many) humorous and insightful takes on the subject:
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/004456.html
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000991.html
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003722.html (with cartoon!)
In this post, they attempt to trace a history of the entire misbegotten notion:
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003380.html
Posted by: James Kabala | Apr 27, 2008 8:52:51 PM
Here's another good one: http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000869.html
Dr. Esolen would likely approve of the closing polemic.
I've forgotten (although I once knew) how to make links that work, so just use copy-and-paste to read the posts in question.
Posted by: James Kabala | Apr 27, 2008 8:57:26 PM
Passive voice is essential in some cases and appropriate in others. However, it has a wondrous history of being effectively used to obfuscate agency, and so must be used carefully -- one of my children showed this at the ripe old age of two when, having been thoroughly instructed and fully understanding that he was not to dump all the contents of his toybox onto the floor, he wandered into the kitchen and said plaintively, "My toybox got dumped onto the floor, Mommy . . ." No one, least of all he, did the dumping -- it just happened! Kind of like tuition gets raised, bills get passed, companies get downsized . . .
Also, stylistically passive voice is more cumbersome and indirect and so as a *general* rule it is easier for readers to process active voice; also, the verb is stronger in active voice -- agents do things, instead of things just being done. But of course, when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, and the emphasis should be placed on the thing or person done *to*, then passive is the best choice.
(Just in case anyone wonders, "get" is used to form passive voice in some informal contexts; yes, "be" is the usual passive marker. This is the sort of thing that drives my poor neophyte grammar students crazy. But Tony's linguistic knowledge is so light years beyond mine that he would drive me crazy in a grammar class!)
Posted by: Beth | Apr 27, 2008 9:44:43 PM
Grammar is a ton of fun, isn't it, Beth?
I really enjoy learning odd things about the language we use all the time. For example:
The infinitive without "to": I heard him sing.
Or the future tense to express probability: That'll be the mailman.
Or the dialectal double modal: I might could fix that for you.
Or English's attempt to import a future active participle: I'm going to see the movie. I'm fixing to move to Hoboken.
Or English verbs or verbals with active form but passive or middle meaning:
Trout is good eating.
Football is a lot of fun to play.
She sure looks good.
That bread is not to eat.
Or English verbs that denote the removal of the noun from which they come:
peel
shell
core
skin
bark
husk
shuck
stone
pit
juice
bone
gut
scalp
Or English iterative / frequentative verbs in -le or -er:
flutter
shiver
quiver
shuttle
chuckle
stutter
stammer
stipple
dapple
wiggle
shimmer
glimmer
clatter
piddle
waddle
Or English words in wr- denoting twisting:
wren
wrestle
wring
wire
worry
wrath
write
wrench
warp
wrap
wry
wrought
If only teachers who love language and grammar could get hold of our kids when they're young -- to show them how it all works in the quirkiest ways -- gerunds with objects and adverbs, a clause for a subject with three clauses embedded within it, "the" as an adverb, "this" as an adverb, "that" as a conjunction, "yo" as an adverb in Philadelphia, why we say "adder" instead of "nadder," and "apron" instead of "napron," why there's a "w" in "whole" when it's the same word as "hale," why we say "groom" instead of "goom," and "bird" instead of "brid," and what's the difference between a shirt and a skirt or a dike and a ditch, or why birds shriek and screech instead of shreeching and skrieking ....
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Apr 27, 2008 10:03:22 PM
Oh, Tony, thanks for that list! Some of those I'd never thought of (the "wr" list -- how cool is that?!). Sadly, most students just think it's too hard to learn, or pointless, or nerdy . . . as you say, they need to be caught young, as I'm sure I was, though I don't remember when. I do recall a high school teacher who made us memorize poetry and read Winnie-the-Pooh to us, just because she loved the sounds of Milne's words . . .
Posted by: Beth | Apr 27, 2008 10:56:16 PM
There is no better way to learn grammar than to study Latin. Once you understand Latin grammar you can recognize relationships in English or other languages more readily -- that is once you adapt for the fact that most European languages are lazy derivatives in one way or another :-)
If you don't have time to learn Latin, find old books on rhetoric. Some of the best resources on rhetoric that I know are the books written by one of my professors at Penn State, S. Leonard Rubinstein. He is retired but still helping students as a professor emeritus. His books are out of print but still can be found on Amazon. Among his books:
Writing: A Habit of Mind
The Plain Rhetoric
Frameworks of Exposition
But if you think that writing well depends on learning specific techniques and rules, be forewarned: you may may be in for a surprise. Professor Rubinstein insists that thinking well is the necessary antecedent to writing well. This extraordinary professor touched the lives of his students with his zeal for writing and rhetoric. If you google him, you'll find a good number of uplifting testimonies by former students along with articles chronicling his dedication even after having retired some 10 plus years ago. Here's a website with high lights of his career and a photo. Below is a brief bio.
Bio (from Penn State site): Rubinstein, S. Leonard. Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. A.S.T.P, Stanford University; B.L., Rutgers University; M.F.A., State University of Iowa. Fields of specialization: fiction writing, humanities, short story, curiosity. Novels: The Battle Done; The Grave-maker's House (with Robert G. Weaver); Madeleine (with Pamela West Katkin). Textbooks: Writing: A Habit of Mind and five co-authored textbooks. Articles published in: College English, The Writer, AAHE Bulletin, Journal of Teaching Writing, Technology Illustrated, The Underground Grammarian, The American Voice. 260 radio programs: “Odyssey Through Literature.” E-mail: slr4@cac.psu.edu
Posted by: Therese | Apr 28, 2008 12:51:21 AM
Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English by the great grammarian and etymologist Eric Partridge
Does anyone have familiarity with the later editions of this book? Are they as good as the earlier editions, or should they be avoided for one reason or another (PC changes, etc.)?
Posted by: T. Chan | Apr 28, 2008 1:02:52 AM
Oops missed the website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/l/slr4/cac-index.html
PS.. Prof. Rubinstein gave us all this advice:
If you want to be a fiction writer, go live life. Do not enroll in a masters program immediately after graduation. You will only be able to write convincingly about what you know. What you know will be academia and the vicarious experiences you have gleamed from whatever you have read. Go live. Be a cook. Be a professional something. Be a day laborer. Just be and have real experiences.
PPS -- I've always considered my degree in English as a license to break the rules. And I do this frequently to the chagrin of many. Even though I work in a technical field, I have excelled largely because of what I learned in Professor Rubinstein's class. Even though I am more a technology geek, I excel because of a professor who taught me not only who to write well but how to think.
Posted by: Therese | Apr 28, 2008 1:05:08 AM
Everybody: I have somewhere the most excellent English grammar I've ever seen; I'll dig it up and let you know the name soon.
Dr. Esolen, I wait eagerly for your update!
Posted by: T. Chan | Apr 28, 2008 1:14:17 AM
When do you use "the" as an adverb?
Also, Eats, shoots and leaves is a good grammar book.
Another fun point: the English subjunctive.
"I wish I were in the land of cotton."
"Soul clap its hands and sing."
"But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
Posted by: Matthew N. Petersen | Apr 28, 2008 1:24:46 AM
>>Sadly, most students just think it's too hard to learn, or pointless, or nerdy...<<
Maybe it's only true for my local selection, but the majority of "gifted" students were strong in math and science. During a prepared lecture on a poem in Spanish, I started to explain the construction of an English sentence relative to a Spanish sentence, English being in spoken from generally a subject-verb-object language, whereas Spanish has more obvious cases related to Latin, allowing you to place objects prior to their predicates or agents. For example, "le hizo daño" means "to him one made damage", which in English would be "someone hurt him", a very clear subject (someone), verb (hurt) and object (him). My Spanish teacher and I started the rally cry "Grammar geeks unite", as the rest of the class rolled their eyes, complained that it was ridiculous, etc. Please, someone, explain to me how it is not fun to reorganize a sentence without breaking rules and keeping it "functional".
>>The infinitive without "to": I heard him sing.<<
Dr. Esolen, isn't this technically a participle without the "ing"? It is, after all, functioning as an adverb--you heard "him", and how?, sing"ing". How would it function as a true Latinate infinitive? "I heard him to sing"? What?
Kamilla--
A participle is a verb form (e.g. a word made from a verb) that functions as a modifier or the completion of a compound tense. In the sentence: I woke to the sound of singing birds, "singing" is a participle. More precisely, it is an adjectival particple modifying "birds" (in an adjectival prepositional phrase modifying "sound"). E.g., the birds were singing. Ah, and here is a completely accidental, convenient segue into the compound tense. As you can see the birds were is an incomplete sentence, if "were" were functioning as a copula ("to be"), so it requires what it is the birds were--singing.
However, "to be" is also our "helping" verb in English, and it gives us an imperfect tense of sorts. As Dr. Esolen noted, English only has two real tenses, but for the sake of grammar, it helps to recognize ongoing acts in the past--e.g., the birds did not just sing a note and stop, but it was a continual activity--as "imperfect". (It's technically a progressive aspect, as Dr. Esolen also noted--our "other tenses have modal and aspectual shadings.") "Were singing", therefore, uses "singing" as the completion of a verb form, by telling us the ongoing action of the birds.
This can also be done with what you might commonly think of as the "past tense". For example, the word attached is a participle when it is used to passively modify something, like "the attached cape". Likewise, you have "eaten". I had drunk* my fill uses the helping verb "to have" to complete a tense of "to drink": it is done once and in the past. This is a "perfect" tense.
*My self-professed and heartily held grammar-geekery aside, I confess to being hopelessly confused on "drink/drank/drunk" and "swim/swam/swum" type problems. I believe "drunk" is the right participle, but Lord knows it could be "drank". Darn English and its loads upon loads upon loads of irregular verbs. It has me convinced that English doesn't have any "regular" verbs, just a few that have some things in common. They're in communion with each other, but they're not the same denomination.
Posted by: Michael | Apr 28, 2008 1:28:35 AM
This is a blast.
Matthew: "the" is an adverb in its meaning "to such an extent," as in "the more, the merrier," meaning "to the extent that there are more people, to that same extent will they be merrier."
Kamilla: "sing" is an infinitive without "to," in the sentence "I heard him sing". "Him" is the subject of the infinitive; it's the same construction as in Latin "Audivi illum canere." The participle would be an adjective modifying the meaning of the noun or pronoun.
Michael: the oldest verbs in English form their preterite by vowel change. These vowel changes used to appear in seven fairly predictable forms; many of these have been obscured by time. The easiest to recognize are the i-a-u verbs, followed by nasal consonants:
drink drank drunk
swim swam swum
sling (slang) slung
wring (wrang) wrung
ring rang rung
sing sang sung
stink stank stunk
But then some verbs switched from the vowel-change preterite to the dental preterite (our past in d or t):
strive strived strived (older: strove, striven)
thrive thrived thrived (older: throve, thriven)
Alas, some dental preterite verbs acquired vowel-change forms by analogy:
show showed shown (older: showed, showed)
dive dove dived (older: dived, dived)
Some verbs have dental preterite with vowel change; actually, it was the present that endured the vowel change, with the preterite preserving the original vowel:
bring brought brought
sell sold sold
teach taught taught
Other verbs ending in a dental have a dental preterite that has been absorbed into the word:
set set set
let let let
cut cut cut
cast cast cast
Some verbs have adjectival forms that are different from the third principal part, possibly by analogy with adjectives in -en:
drunken (cf. oaken, brazen, wooden)
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Apr 28, 2008 8:41:05 AM
"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" can't even get its own title shipshape.
Posted by: Margaret | Apr 28, 2008 9:16:04 AM
Tony,
You may have done this before. If so, I apologize for repeating it. Could you recommend a good grammar text for the working man who (1) had a poor education and (2) forgot much of what he was taught? I have my good old Strunk and White, but I assume that there may be better sources available.
Thanks,
GL
P.S. My pet peeve is the rule that one should not end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes, it seems to me, that is the least awkward way to write the sentence. I recall that Churchill did it all the time in his epic History of the English Speaking People.
Posted by: GL | Apr 28, 2008 9:40:51 AM
And there's Churchill's famous sentence about that rule: "This is something up with which I will not put."
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Apr 28, 2008 10:39:23 AM
>>> My pet peeve is the rule that one should not end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes, it seems to me, that is the least awkward way to write the sentence.<<<
To me, it all depends on the way in which the sentence sounds, whether the meter is better if the sentence ends with a preposition or without. I am not dogmatic about it, but there is always something vaguely unfinished-sounding when the sentence ends with a preposition.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 28, 2008 11:49:12 AM
No comments on the numbers of sentences in a paragraph? Between forth and sixth grade we were required to add a sentence to every paragraph we wrote. By sixth grade we were generally writing some real clunkers. Being a rebellious twerp I always wrote single sentence paragraphs and pointed out that long paragraphs were not always optimal.
My posting stops here for fear that the grammar police will attack me with wild abandon. But, before I go, I will note that most grammar checkers either do not flag passive voice anymore (for the reasons stated above) or the "feature" can be turned off (MS Word 97 and above).
Posted by: Nick | Apr 28, 2008 1:01:07 PM
Nick,
On the number of sentences in a paragraph, it really depends on how many sentences you actually need to complete the presentation of your idea. I've written paragraphs with fifteen sentences; I've written paragraphs of one sentence. Heck, I've written paragraphs of one sentence fragment.* There is no law about the length of a paragraph. Rather, there are ill-imagined ideas regarding what is "right".
Much like the five-paragraph essay, the five-sentence paragraph (point, three supporting details, transition) is an organizational tool meant to teach students the structure of thought going into an expository or persuasive essay. I don't know when teachers started to think it was a part of the building itself rather than the foundation, as all of my teachers taught it as an end rather than a means. I think it is practical to teach the Five-Five Form (five paragraphs, five sentences per paragraph) so long as it is understood as a building block, not a rule.
*Grammatically, a sentence fragment is not a complete sentence (obviously), but I've used it stylistically, flaunting the rule, as a segue or to condense an idea. For example, when submitting an essay for a college application, the prompt read: If you are interested in a particular academic area, tell us why. Do you have a dream job in mind? My first three paragraphs followed:
When I was five years old, I wanted to be a police officer.Or a Jedi.
Mostly a Jedi, but I was told the likelihood of that happening was about equal to the likelihood of the Seattle Mariners doing something meaningful. I was five, and not very good with similes, so naturally, no one actually put it to me in those terms. Since the 1995 baseball season, however, I’ve often concluded that the unexpected can happen. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi contains a passage wherein the main character (Piscine Moliter Patel, or Pi for short) relates that the problem with modern rationalism is that it concludes that an event cannot occur simply because it has not yet occurred. “If it is not in your realm of experience, you don’t believe it to be possible.” I am, therefore, still holding out for my initiation to the Force and a lightsaber.
The bolded line is obviously a sentence fragment, but it functions as a transition and condenses the idea of fantasy in a concise, precise manner. All this to say: if teachers haven't graduated from the Five-Five Form by ninth grade, they probably shouldn't be teaching ninth grade or anything higher.
Posted by: Michael | Apr 28, 2008 1:22:21 PM
I'm sorry to say that I had to look up what a participle is when I first read the post. But at least I looked it up. And it turned out that my vague intuition as to its definition was correct.
Try writing those three thoughts in a single sentence. They would definitely lose their punch.
Posted by: Ethan C. | Apr 28, 2008 1:59:28 PM
Michael wrote,
>>> flaunting the rule <<<
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Can we add this one to the "notes on diction" thread?
Posted by: Matthias | Apr 28, 2008 2:43:38 PM
Matthias,
Yes, we should. Not to gang up on Mike, but very few people know about the word "flout".
Flaunt = to show off, as of a mink stole
Flout = to scorn, as in disobeying a law
How about these?
few (for number)
less (for degree or amount)
i.e. (that is; explanatory)
e.g. (ex grege; for example, for illustration)
one biceps, two (in English) biceps (the word "biceps" is singular, meaning "two-headed," because there are two ligaments that attach the muscle to the elbow, I'm guessing)
one homo sapiens (already singular; "homo sapien" is not possible, and even "homo sapiens" is rare enough!)
flammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire"
Posted by: Tony Esolen | Apr 28, 2008 4:15:12 PM
>>>few (for number)
less (for degree or amount)<<<
When my younger one was little, she used to get many and much confused, as in, "How many monies do you have?" and "How much dollars do you have?"
>>>lammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire"<<<
I like "pyrophoric", myself.
>>>one homo sapiens (already singular; "homo sapien" is not possible, and even "homo sapiens" is rare enough!)<<<
Of course, most people believe they are hetero sapiens.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 28, 2008 4:29:08 PM
"flammable = a nonsense word, invented for posting on gas tanks and so forth, lest people get the wrong idea from the real word, "inflammable," meaning "prone to catch fire""
But then there is no protection for the grammar geeks, who will assume that "flammable" means essentially NOT "prone to catch fire"!
Posted by: Bill R | Apr 28, 2008 4:32:34 PM
Dr. Esolen, Matthias-
I confess to recognizing immediately what Matthias meant, recognizing the use of "flaunt" as contrary to its classic definition. I bow my head not in shame, for it is common, accepted usage that I grew up with, but in properly chastised humility and recognition that I should choose my words more carefully. Good thing it isn't contrary to my commentary on paragraphs.
Posted by: Michael | Apr 28, 2008 4:36:14 PM
I wish that rule #3 had been stated this way: "The passive voice is to be avoided."
Dr. Esolen points out the confusion over flammable/inflammable. Where I come from, "thaw" and "unthaw" are used synonymously, but that may just be a regional peculiarity.
Posted by: cnb | Apr 28, 2008 4:44:04 PM
I believe you are wrong about "flammable," Dr. Esolen. According to some online dictionaries I consulted it is about two hundred years old in English. It comes from Latin "flammare" just as "inflammable" comes from Latin "inflammare". I don't think the ancient Romans had issues with fuel tanks.
Posted by: Matthias | Apr 28, 2008 5:47:26 PM
The debate over the word "flammable." My six-year-old son was just asking me this morning the origins of the word "poop." I used this as opportunity to tell him about etymology and the good old Oxford English Dictionary. (I looked up "poop" today and found no meaning linked to that word which relates to the one he had in mind. I'm taking home the relevant volume for him to see -- of course, he'll not be able to read it, but perhaps he'll get the idea. I see it as an opportunity to take advantage of a normal six-year-old's obsession with bodily functions to teach him about something that may benefit him more later in life. ;-))
In any event, in light of Matthias' post, I looked up "flammable." It has, according to the OED, the same meaning as "inflammable" and has been in use since at least the 19th century.
Posted by: GL | Apr 28, 2008 6:39:45 PM
So "flammable"/"inflammable" has a much better pedigree than a similar-looking pair, "regardless"/"irregardless", which also look like opposites but are in fact synonyms. In the latter case "irregardless" really is a late vulgarism (1930s according to one online dictionary).
Posted by: Matthias | Apr 28, 2008 7:05:30 PM
