Black Coffee

I was on a flight recently, and when it came time for the beverage cart to come down the aisle, the flight attendant asked the passengers in the row ahead of me, “Would you like something to drink?” The person on her left answered, “Black coffee,” and a few moments later the person on her right said, “Coffee, black.” Curious, I thought. So what’s the grammatical difference between these two constructions, and why might that be?

First, the grammar. In the phrase black coffee, the noun coffee names, as all nouns do, something in the world of human perception, and the adjective attached to it characterizes that thing by specifying the fact that it is black: coffee is one thing, black coffee is another. This is an important point to which we will return, but we should note that when an adjective precedes the noun it modifies like this, it is said to be an attributive adjective, because in that position, the adjective intends (by the customary agreement of English word order) to name an attribute, an essential and inseparable quality of its noun, thereby defining it more exactly. The passenger on the left, then, wanted something—one specific thing, and his word order evidences the way he conceived of it: a single entity known as black coffee.

The passenger on the right, however, had something different in mind. When she answered, “Coffee, black,” her conception of what she wanted was, first and foremost, coffee, which in a secondary conception she hoped would come to her in a state of being black, no cream, no sugar (and, presumably, hot, which I can subsequently attest it was not). When an adjective does not precede but rather follows the noun it modifies, it is said now to be a predicative adjective, because in being placed after its noun, it takes up the position which it would normally have in a clause whose verb is explicitly stated: coffee which is black. Verbs create predicates, and in a standard declarative sentence, the verb and its predicate regularly follow its subject. Thus adjectives which follow their nouns take up that predicate position (absent the verb) and are, accordingly, called predicative adjectives.

Now before we conclude that all this represents precious time wasted over a distinction without a difference, there is, in fact, really quite a lot of philosophy going on here, because all of this points to the central work of language: to name and say something about the connection of one thing we perceive to another. Expository prose is the language of reason, of logic and clarity and rationality, and when we talk about how important it is to be clear in thinking and speaking and writing, we are referring to a world of things which we have, literally, re-created in the construction of our language. Our language is a mental knife, sometimes sharp, sometimes dull, with which we cut up our otherwise living, seamless awareness into discrete pieces, the better to stand away from the world to see it objectively and make comment on it. The verb think, surprisingly, is related etymologically to the noun thing. How we construct our language shows how we conceive the things we’re talking about. But that leaves us with the odd question, what is a thing?

Linguistically, at least, we can answer that question by the way we construct a substantive, a word or phrase or clause which we have composed to name some one thing as we see it in the scene we are addressing. The two phrases, or substantives, we are considering here are fragments of otherwise complete statements: the passenger who said black coffee was abbreviating the simple sentence I would like black coffee—one assertion, while the passenger across the aisle was truncating the complex sentence I would like coffee which is black—two assertions. Both passengers wanted to enjoy the same object, but each conceived of that one thing differently.

Attributing an adjective to a noun is the result of having first logically predicated the adjective of the noun. To say black coffee means that we have first understood—and now assume—the assertion the coffee is black. (Likewise, if we expand the phrase to strong black coffee, that substantive represents a compound of attributes and noun crystalized from the two assertions the coffee is black and the coffee is strong.) What is a predicative adjective in each clause becomes an attributive adjective in the substantive phrase. By this process, we make something else we could say about something into the very thing itself. And that is why we are justified in suspecting that the person who replied black coffee was suggesting the idea that he wanted this one singular, certain, effective, unadulterated, caffeinated thing; and the person who said coffee, black was suggesting instead that her primary concern was coffee, with the preference, but not the pressing need, for it to be black.

And therein lies the importance, really very consequential in matters greater than coffee, of the grammatical distinction between an attributive and predicative adjective. For it is incumbent upon us to understand what exactly someone is talking about, because that will point to the assumptions they are thinking from. The philosopher Emerson in his essay “The Over-Soul” observed, “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree,” and one way we have at our disposal to understand how others articulate the world they see is to watch the way they compose their nouns.

To see things piece by piece is exactly the manner of our reasoning mind with its expository language, the very means we have to think rationally about the world we find ourselves in. But pieces presume a whole, and beyond the rational and all that reasoning can give us lies what Emerson points to in the second half of his same sentence: “but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” Which is to say that our attention and care for language is ultimately in service of discernment, a frame of mind very different from the rational: to discern means the ability to read between the lines. For in the end, life just might be more ironic than we’re customarily inclined to think.

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Reading Closely to Write

Writing Smartly Short Course
Wednesdays, February 5 through February 26, 2025

Beginning Wednesday evening, February 5, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $300, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

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