We forget too often that the written word is merely (merely!) an attempt to represent the spoken word in the absence of a human presence before us. The technique of writing includes the device of punctuation to replicate the pulsations of breath which bring life to that presence, and that is why there is some truth to associating commas and periods with the pauses and breaks in our voice. Some truth, not all, because when high emotion alone irregulates our breath, clarity is obscured and confusion ensues. Feeling and reason both must be present, on the principle that life itself comprises both.

But imagine what is involved in composing and punctuating a sentence with an eye to imitating the living voice so faithfully. A writer, as a human being, has, moreover, more than one voice, indeed, as many voices as presumably one person has a personality for every new situation lived through. This is why we have to be fair in reading literature that might at first appear off-putting, for if we are able to attend closely to the construction of an author’s sentences, we can give ourselves the chance to experience a mood, or perspective, or even a way of being which we might otherwise not have the occasion to realize.

To illustrate this, let’s consider a passage from the writer W. Macneile Dixon’s essay “Wordsworth.” Dixon was writing as an academic in Great Britain toward the end of the Second World War, and this essay appears in his work entitled An Apology for the Arts. His title should alert us to the serious frame of mind we will likely need to put on (an apology is a serious explanation of the rationale for some study or undertaking), and indeed his foreword opens with this grand sentence: “For some years before the era of our present troubles I entertained myself with the idea of devoting a quiet retirement to the writing of a slight book upon a great subject, no less than the place and significance of the arts in human life.” The war dissolved that dream, but did not enervate the author, for the stateliness of the third paragraph of his essay on Wordsworth will fix the attention of anyone reading attentively:

Here, then, are three great things. The poetry of Wordsworth is sincere, we can trust it; it is lucid, we can understand it; it is original, there is nothing elsewhere like it in the world. It may fail at times in other qualities, but these are its abiding attributes; to these it owes its unceasing and unchallengeable power. And in no single poem are they more admirably blended than in The Prelude, where the poet speaks of himself and is himself.

The first sentence merely bridges us to this third paragraph from the second, where the writer had already but more covertly mentioned the poet’s three attributes of sincerity, lucidity, and originality. Dixon’s second sentence in this passage, though, is nothing short of statuesque, and it arrests our attention; we’re caught first by the punctuation and then we hear interiorly Dixon’s own sincere voice which his punctuation scores on the page. His third sentence continues with a concession, always a strong move in persuasion, and ends in a description of the poet’s absolute (unchallengeable) power. And to preclude our thinking that Dixon has lost himself in a reverie of uncritical adulation, he returns to the clear, solid ground of specific detail: we will see evidenced all he claims in Wordsworth’s one poem, The Prelude.

There is something important to learn here: close reading, reading which comprehends both content and structure, can open unfamiliar worlds for us. Dixon’s passage is more than one person’s enthusiasm for a great traditional poet; it is an enthusiasm understood, an energy rationally controlled. That second sentence, with its three pairs of clauses organized by semicolons, asserts both opinion and reason. Dixon believes Wordsworth’s poetry is sincere because we can trust it; that it is lucid because we can understand it; that it is original because we cannot find anything like it elsewhere. The semicolons take the place of those omitted conjunctions, and his voice here written on the page replicates, with the help of that punctuation and phrasing, the meaningful cadence of his own interior voice as he was constructing a sentence to embody that rhythm. The semicolons stop the rush of each opinion, and each clause following glides the thought down to a rational conclusion. This turns what might otherwise strike us as idiosyncratic suggestion into intelligent and animated insight.

Dixon’s skillful construction has produced a statuesque sentence whose form represents a dignified, considered conclusion about one great poet’s work. Statuesque, dignified, pleasing in form—these are qualities at the base of the classical conception of art, and it seems Dixon was able himself to effect the kind of art he wished to explain and defend in his work.

***

A friend of mine asked me the other day to explain the difference between I used to run every morning and I am used to running every morning. She understood, of course, the different meaning each had, but she wanted to know how the grammatical structure changed in order to change the meaning so clearly. The question of structure always involves thinking, so how could her question not be interesting?

Let’s begin by reminding ourselves that a thought, as opposed to a suggestion, is expressed in language by a clause. A clause, in turn, has two parts, a subject and a predicate, the subject naming what we want to say something about, and the predicate, with its verb, saying what we want to say about its subject. Every clause expresses a thought, and a sentence will therefore have as many thoughts as it has clauses. We should remember, too, that a thought in natural language is to be distinguished from a proposition in the technical language of logic, but let’s leave that for another day.

When we speak of the verb of a predicate, we properly mean what is termed a finite verb, because there may very well be another verb (as there is in each example) which is completing the meaning of the finite verb but not actually making a predication itself. A finite verb is so called because it is specific (that is, finite) as to the person, number, and tense of the subject. Another verb in the same clause and depending on that finite verb is called an infinitive. A finite verb actuates the meaning we comprehend in a clause, and an infinitive, if there is one, will round out the meaning of that thought.

If we look now at the predicates of the example sentences, we see that the finite verb of the first is used, and the finite verb of the second is am; the singular subject I remains the same for both. The transitive verb to use originally meant to accustom or habituate oneself to something, and when we now employ it with an infinitive, it conveys the idea of customary, ongoing past action: I used to run every morning means, more fulsomely, I once accustomed myself to running every morning. Some languages (Latin, French, and German among them) have what is termed an imperfect tense, whose special role is to describe this habitual past action, that is, action which is deliberately not being portrayed as complete, or in grammatical terms perfect. English regularly translates this tense it does not have in its standard six-tense scheme with the used + infinitive construction.

In the second example, however, something related but grammatically quite distinct is underway. To say I am used to running every morning is to assert a present state of being with the verb to be (am), and to identify the subject with an adjective in the predicate, used. If we remember the original definition of the verb use, the meaning becomes clear quickly: I am accustomed to running every morning. The word running here is a gerund (a noun built from a verb), and the preposition to shows, as it often does, the object, or destination we might say, of a quality named by an adjective: what it is I am accustomed to is running every morning.

Notice, importantly, that the tense of the finite verb of the first sentence is simple past, and that of the second is simple present. We can certainly change the latter to a simple past should the facts warrant it (I was accustomed to running every morning), but the verb used must be in the simple past (and only the simple past) in the special construction of used + infinitive to indicate ongoing past action. One last point to remember: the construction is used to, not use to. The latter is not Standard English.

And just what is Standard English? Let’s leave that for another day, too.

***

In order for us, students of any age, to find and keep the energy we need to stay at our task, we must know the purpose we are working for. This is decidedly true in the study of language, whether we are learning a new one or learning again the rules and graces of our own native speech. For us in the contemporary world, language study is now almost entirely instrumental; we’re inclined to take the trouble if we can see the skill it will give us in the real (read economic) world, but who really has the time or inclination to study a language for the intellectual life it opens on to? Let’s be realistic, after all.

It might be time, though, to be a bit more idealistic. We should be skilled, of course, in whatever we wish to do well (and if we don’t wish to do it well, we shouldn’t be doing it at all). But a skill is properly applied to a well-defined and therefore limited activity. We might choose to learn to cook to be able to prepare a tastier meal, or we might study marketing to launch a new online store. The study of language, too, will produce a skill, but it can and should and will do much more than that. That more, however, is not actionable, unless we include—and traditional cultures did—those intellectual practices which lead to some fundamental understanding about the way things are, to a comprehension of the larger questions which concern us, to what, in the end, is properly termed insight, wisdom.

But do we even use the word wisdom credibly anymore? It derives from an Old English verb meaning to know (and still further back from a Latin verb meaning to see), but we call wise someone who knows not just how to accomplish a specific task, but who sees both the cause and consequence of a condition or action. Wisdom implies a moral quality, which skill does not. To possess such insight (again the idea of seeing) and to have it at hand when it is called upon requires perspective, a triangulation of sorts in which we use a third point to find our bearings and discern how to proceed. Regarded from this higher, humanistic point of view, the study of language, which would now be properly called philology (an almost obsolete term now meaning the love of language and literature), would confront us with the possibility, indeed the adventure, of understanding the whys and wherefores of our thinking, and from there guide us into the reaches of what may exceed the material world we are so familiar with, that world which Wordsworth said was too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

To believe such things, we must be more than practical: we must turn unabashedly toward the ideal. We must be prepared to work out the implications of grand words like education and democracy and citizenship, and understand them to mean more than a sentimentalized hope. We can often find the perspective we need to revivify fundamental ideas by triangulating historically, so to speak, in order to see what others thought of the same grand ideas we may be hesitant to speak too loudly about in the practical world of getting and spending. Some do, though, have the resoluteness required. Here, for example, are the opening two sentences of an article entitled “The Importance of Foreign Language Study in the General Scheme of American Education,” by the University of Wisconsin linguist Charles Purin. It appeared in The Modern Language Journal over a century ago, in 1920:

Ever since the birth of institutions of learning the study of foreign languages has always held an important place in the general educational scheme of all civilized nations of the globe. To eliminate this important discipline from the curricula of our schools in order to make room for some of the so-called “practical” disciplines—a demand which has been seriously raised here and there—would mean to slight deliberately the best interests of the commonwealth by weakening the fabric both of education and of citizenship.

Purin goes on to assert (in some beautifully drawn phrases) that “a conscious and discriminating attitude towards language cannot be developed through work exclusively in the vernacular,” and that is the case, he says, for both cognitive and cultural reasons: we use our own language naturally and unconsciously, and so have not developed the “close and orderly thinking” we accrue in studying a foreign language, and we insularize ourselves, risking our right and natural human sympathy with other human beings from other unfamiliar places. Purin continues:

The greatest value of the study of a foreign language lies, accordingly, in its humanizing effect. It is the only road to the intellectual and soul life of ancient or modern people. It confers a citizenship with the world and a citizenship with the ages. It makes the individual a conscious part of the great human unity.

The great human unity. Unabashedly ideal, certainly, and it may just be that the close and deliberate study of language—whether another culture’s or our own again—can direct us away from the edge of things at which we find ourselves in the present, tough-minded historical moment. For whether something is practical or ideal depends upon what we believe is in the very nature of things possible. And this is a fruitful philosophical question to ponder with the material help of a language we wield confidently—aspiring even to execute masterfully—through difficult but rewarding intellectual lands. Why, after all, should we wish for less than it is our birthright to possess?

***

The summer months make clear what the winter ones won’t: nothing stays the same. The sun that rose between the branches outside my window weeks ago now rises farther to the south, and the view is no longer the same for me. The leaves on that same tree flutter in even the calmest breeze, and the birds, well, when exactly do sparrows sit still? All this moving about and changing places, this being something from one perspective and becoming something else from another—all this plays havoc with rationality, and it’s enough to make one wonder whether anything permanent can ever really be found to rely on.

If the phenomenal world will not stand still, the rational world, our mind’s world, pulls for the very opposite: clear definition and stable, consistent meaning. The clear thinker’s and articulate writer’s creed goes like this: I have a noun for every possible thing I could ever wish to talk about, and every time I use that noun and attach a predicate to it, I’m referring to the same thing, unless and until I tell you otherwise, whereupon we take a different angle on the subject, move into another world. and see what we might discover together there. That’s the doctrine of logic, and its demand for stable meaning is not so much a contradiction of motion as it is its complement. Stability and movement, the static and the dynamic, both need each other for each to be what they each are. Movement alone is hot chaos; stability by itself is cold death.

To be clear and critically minded about what we want to say means that we must watch the whirling world closely—and then turn away in order to place our observations into rational language, which means, for the most part, into the language of prose, not poetry or song. And placing, I think, is the right word, because we are trying with words and phrases and clauses to re-present, to conceptualize (the best word is prosify) living movement in unmoving language, where a word must mean what it has been defined to mean through the discourse in which it is being used. In his short, fine, and eminently readable guide to clear thinking entitled Being Logical, D. Q. McInerny makes the point this way:

The process of definition, the mechanics of it, is the way we relate to a particular object (the object to be defined) to other objects and thereby give it a precise “location.” In defining a term or word, we relate it as rigorously as possible to the object to which it refers. There are two immediate practical benefits of carefully defining terms. Our own ideas are clarified, and, as a result, we can more effectively communicate them to others.

McInerny goes on to say that terms like wisdom and justice and beauty are in special need of being clearly defined because they can be understood in so many different ways in differing contexts. And not just those terms: what about the freedom and democracy we hear so much about? A good measure of the political acrimony all around us arises not just from these terms being poorly defined, but from the fact that their definition often changes as a heated conversation proceeds. The study of logical thinking—and writing conscientiously is how we acquire that skill—includes the study of illogical thinking, its myriad forms being called fallacies, literally something which is deceitful or deceptive, whether deliberately so, or not. One such fallacy, which is around us at every turn, is called equivocation, and it breaks the heart of clear and stable definition—just what we so desperately need to make sense of all that incessant movement, political or natural, around us.

Among the many technical terms the study of logic employs to keep our thinking straight are the off-putting univocal and equivocal. A univocal term (the word, pronounced on the second syllable, means one voice) has one and only one meaning. Most such terms occur in the sciences, where the context is rigorously restricted. Univocal words, however, can also be found in the common world: a house or a coffeepot are what they are in just about every situation, even though each may take on many different shapes and sizes. On the other hand, an equivocal term (meaning same voice) has a meaning that will differ entirely according to the context in which it is used. A table, for example, can refer to a piece of furniture in one universe of discourse, or to the orderly presentation of data in another.

Most of the words we use are equivocal, and that is why we must be on our guard to avoid ambiguity, particularly so—and here is where the naturally occurring equivocal turns into the fallacy of equivocation—when it appears in the midst of an argument in which we are trying to convince someone of our position. As it happens, an old logic book on my shelf (A First Book in Logic by Henry Bradford Smith) has this unexpectedly pertinent example of equivocation:

When we buy in a foreign country, we get the goods and they get the money, and when we sell in a foreign country, they get the goods and we get the money. How much better, then, to buy and sell in our own country, for in that case we retain both the goods and the money.

That all sounds right and inspiring, but in fact the writer is using the pronoun we in two quite distinct senses. The four instances of we across the first sentence mean a party to a transaction, whether as producer or consumer. But the same pronoun in the second sentence, where it stands as the subject of retain, means fellow citizens, all who reside together in a particular country, whether a party to a transaction or not: same pronoun with different meanings in the same context. The rich thought of language depends on equivocal words, but when such words benight us into confusion, whether knowingly or unknowingly, discord will ensue.

That timely textbook example was published in 1922, which illustrates the point of these observations: nothing seems to stay the same—and yet it apparently does. That’s not a contradiction but a complementarity, and only our minds, made clear and critical with language, will be able to see all that incessant change for what it really is.

***

There is a fine old classic work on punctuation entitled Mind the Stop by G. V. Carey, published in Britain in 1939. A stop is a Briticism for any of the marks of punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, and period) which intend to pause the reader to some degree at some specific point in a sentence. Although Carey’s work is almost one hundred years old and some conventions have changed, consulting the classics can be helpful for the clear-minded perspective they take on questions still current—a perspective often more thorough and articulate than we regularly come upon in current explanations.

Carey is straightforward about the purpose of learning to punctuate. He affirms that “the main function of punctuation is to make perfectly clear the construction of the written words.” The italics are his, and they mean to emphasize the idea, which he had addressed earlier, that most of the marks which we position in a sentence are there to direct the eye, not the ear. This is not to ignore the place (and some argue the preeminent place) of hearing in comprehending meaning, but as Carey estimates, “of all that is written and printed only a small fraction is read aloud,” and observes that “the needs of the eye are not exactly the same as those of the voice.” Structure appeals to the eye, cadence to the ear.

All this is another way of saying that we can look at punctuating a sentence from two directions, one logical and the other rhetorical. Consider this simple sentence: The Columbian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, was born in 1927. Many, many writers and readers both will consider the commas here correct, and they will do so by perceiving an ever so slight pause before and after the name of the writer. Somewhere, out of the mists of time and chaos, there was decreed the fiat (I remember hearing it myself in school) that one places a comma where one breathes. The problem with that proclamation, however, is that it is only half true. The language we read is arranged to represent for the eye the meaning which was originally perceived by the ear, whether the physical vibrations caught for the brain by our bodily ear, or the inner vibrations discerned by the mind as we become conscious of meaning. The ear’s discernment is closer to insight than logic, and the converse is true for the eye. We need to breathe and we need to indicate that sometimes with a comma, but if we take a breath in the middle of a group of words which work together logically, then the old decree is not serving the commonweal.

The pair of commas in our example sentence, then, lets our ear favor its wishes at the expense of clear thinking. Commas cut, and they especially cut away from the structure of the sentence information which is deemed merely additional but not essential. But when we excise the writer’s proper name with commas, notice what results: the Columbian writer was born in 1927. This not only puts the reader into the position of wondering which Columbian writer we are talking about, but it also logically implies that there was ever only one Columbian writer, and the reader would of course know the person meant. In other words, the commas have removed essential information: the name of the particular Columbian writer we are referring to who was born in 1927.

That illustrates what is called logical punctuation, but what about the rhetorical, a comma, for example, which is placed (or omitted) for reasons of personal taste (including the rhythm of breathing) in circumstances where no ambiguity, no crashing into critical thought could result? In a recent post, I wrote the following long sentence. The context is not important for our present purposes (you may read the complete post here), but note the comma I placed immediately before the verb helps:

Taylor himself no doubt believes that his own reconstruction (referring to what the reader will have learned from him in the first two chapters) has of course been successful, but the fact that a hypothetical sentence does not speak to the reality of either its condition or its result, helps Taylor to blunt an otherwise too forward self-assertion.

The ultimate subject of that verb helps is fact, and that noun is defined by the lengthy clause (beginning with the subordinating conjunction that) which follows it. This means, then, that the twenty words before the verb helps comprise the subject phrase for that verb. Now that’s a long way to travel in a sentence before meeting a verb, and so my own unconscious proclivity was to place a comma after the subject phrase so that my readers could catch their breath before taking a few more steps up and into the predicate, where they may finally find rest. I did not (and do not) believe I impaired the logic, but a good many editors will make it clear to me that the rules dictate no comma should stand between a subject and its predicate. Alas.

This tension between steel rules and pliable exceptions is a part of any creative work, work of any artistic sort which intends its spectators to see meaning amidst the objects and events of life. No such effort runs continuously without its difficulties, and if we can remember that, we will be able to work—to write—with less frustration, disappointment, and near despair. Says Carey in summary:

Stops should be used as sparingly as sense will permit; but in so far as they are needed for immediate grasp of the sense or for the avoidance of any possible ambiguity, or occasionally to relieve a very lengthy passage, they should be used as freely as need be.

To relieve a very lengthy passage. Indeed.

***