If it is true that in most of what we write we are trying to explain something—a set of facts, our thoughts, our beliefs, it can be helpful to remember that our readers are reading in a certain frame of mind to understand us. When we are explaining something, we are properly appealing to their rational mind, and in that way of thinking a most extraordinary assumption is always at work: the world is made up of things.
To thingify the world (and, yes, that is a verb) is to see our everyday experience as made up of discrete entities: this is this and that is that, and with a noun for this and another for that, we come to understand the world as a place where one independent entity stands in some relationship to another. Such a view might have its metaphysical shortcomings, but it is one effect of language, and an effect which produces, many believe, the very consciousness that distinguishes the human being as human.
To so naturally and regularly reify the world like this means that our readers are expecting us as writers to be the first to take on the responsibility of clearly separating the things we wish to write (and speak) about rationally. This is the reason defining our terms is so important, because to define a portion of our experience with a word (the verb means in Latin to put a boundary, a finis, around a portion of experience) is to stabilize it for a while in order to say something consistent and rationally coherent about it. In defining we abstract and isolate, and if those two words have a clinical coolness about them, that is no coincidence: nothing can live separated from other things, not even ideas. But they can be talked about.
To do that, writers rely on their skillful control of three linguistic elements: word, phrase, and clause. Each of those elements separates one thing, one perception, from another in a sentence, and that rational cooperation sometimes must rely on punctuation as well. The marks of punctuation, and most commonly the comma, serve to isolate what we are thinking about, and part of our dexterity in punctuating a sentence depends on our judgment as to whether or not certain ideas need to be separated for the reader. Take, for example, the rule that a comma should not separate a subject from its predicate. In the sentence wind and rain swept over the region, no comma is necessary (or acceptable) between rain, the second term of the compound subject, and the verb swept. The rule has its reasons (as all rules should), and to separate with a comma ideas which logically need each other, as do subject and verb, is to needlessly cause trouble and unnecessarily invite confusion.
But what about a sentence like this: The fact that so many tornadoes arose so quickly across such a wide swath of land unaccustomed to violent weather caused some to pick up their lives and settle elsewhere. In an earlier time, a comma would have been felt necessary between weather and caused, the better to isolate the entirety of the long subject phrase from the predicate’s assertion about it. Nowadays, however, for reasons I would suspect more psychological than logical, we apply the no-comma rule vigorously, accepting the punctuation of this example as it stands. As one usage manual explains the temptation to yet add the comma: “In contemporary prose the comma after a subject is likely to be a half-conscious apology for carrying the subject to such length and complexity that the reader can but finish it with a gasp of relief” (Wilson Follett, Modern American Usage, 1966).
Still, some effort to distinguish the elements of that sentence seem necessary, and if we don’t wish to assert our creative rights and override the contemporary rule, we could call up a squad of parentheses to fight the fight: The fact that so many tornadoes arose so quickly across such a wide swath of land (and in a region unaccustomed to violent weather) caused some to pick up their lives and settle elsewhere. This device, along with the addition of a few words to articulate the thought more exactly, accomplishes the separation of the subject phrase without resorting to a comma, neatly achieving the clarifying goal of isolation.
Isolation, separation, a world made up of things—all these are really just cold and sharp-edged ways of saying that clear writing makes distinctions, which is the very essence of thinking and the expository writing which expresses it. Not the entirety of human experience, of course, but on that principle lies our search and work for a more cooperative and peaceful civilization where things are put back together more rightly.
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In the basement of Kresge Hall at Northwestern University, professor Stuart Small – wise wizened denizen of the Classics Department – sat and smoked while reading his Catullus poetry. I had used the word “thing” which he denigrated saying “there are so many more interesting words in the English language than to call something a thing.”
Such were my memories reading your para 1 and then I sat bolt upright, at the first sentence of para 2: “thingify” (and, yes, that is a verb). By paragraph’s end you had linked said action to “the very consciousness that distinguishes the human being as human.”
A tour de force for a grey Tuesday morn. Kudos.