Let’s consider again how some of the most common verbs we use work grammatically. In a recent post (Well, Good), we saw that one class of verbs identify their subject with an adjective. Such a verb is called a copula (the word means a rope or link in Latin), and they are very common indeed. The most familiar copula is the verb to be (I am happy, we were surprised), but there are many others: that tasted good, it looked fine, that bell sounds loud. But what does it really mean to identify a subject with an adjective, and why can’t we use an adverb instead: that bell sounds loudly?

An adjective is the name of a quality, a distinctive feature of some kind which a noun is understood to possess. We speak of a sturdy table, and the adjective sturdy means that some portion of the quality of sturdiness (the noun form of the adjective) is a part of the table we are referring to. We can change the degree of the adjective (a very sturdy table, where very is an adverb), and when an adjective precedes its noun like that, it intends to name an attribute, an essential and therefore inseparable quality of the noun to which it is attached. The derivation of the term adjective is instructive in this regard. It means in Latin thrown at or attached to, the notion being that a noun names the existence of an entity (concrete or abstract), and its adjective, if there is one denoted, names one of the qualities which has attached itself to, and therefore now defines, the noun named. When an adjective is placed before its noun, we are to understand that the quality it names cannot be separated from that entity as it is being conceived and defined for a particular purpose in a particular sentence.

Adjectives modify (which means change the way we conceive) a noun, but an adverb modifies a verb (and also an adjective or another adverb). Stylistically it is important to use both adjectives and adverbs judiciously; if instead we write them gratuitously, our language swells and only its mass, not its intelligibility, increases. Grammatically, however, a choice is often possible between an adjective and adverb with the same verb, but which one we choose will change what it is we’re saying. This is why precision is held to be the standard we should aspire to in composing expository prose, whose purpose is to name and explain. Poetry, by contrast, is meant more to evoke and suggest, because its realities are thought, at least as understood classically, to abide elsewhere than in the explicatory world of space and time.

So, for example, in a sentence such as that bell sounds loud, the adjective loud is correct (which means here conceptually load-bearing and structurally crucial) because the intention of the sentence is to name a quality of the subject that bell. The verb of this clause, sounds, is a copula, which is identifying the bell with one of its qualities, loudness. The bell certainly has other qualities (large, bronze, historic), but the writer of the clause that bell sounds loud has selected only the one which is most pertinently involved in the meaning he has wished to convey for the circumstances in which he is writing. In the physics of language, so to speak, a portion of loudness has attached itself to the entity named bell (called a substantive), and the resulting clause connects those ideas through the verbal notion of sounding (in the verb form sounds), that is, causing or making a sound. No object of the verb is named because loudness (in the adjective form loud) is perceived to be an intrinsic part of the existence of the bell itself.

Now all that may seem to overexplain what is obvious to most speakers of English, but it can help us understand why the corresponding adverb, loudly, changes the assertion entirely and perhaps unwittingly, a constant worry when our standard in writing prose is precision. If adverbs modify verbs, not nouns, then to say that bell sounds loudly is not incorrect, but it is asserting a different conception altogether. By virtue of the fact that the adverb loudly points to the magnitude of the action of sounds, the sentence now has to do with the action, not the state, or quality, of the noun bell. To say that bell sounds loud is to indicate the effect of the action sounds; to say that bell sounds loudly, or better, that bell sounds loudly every evening, is instead to refer the reader’s attention to the action itself. When we do that, what in the first statement is a copula becomes in the second an intransitive, a verb of action with no direct object. In language, identity and action are not the same.

It is all too easy to dismiss this line of argument with the objection that it is immaterially theoretical, or that its distinctions are academic (if not even pedantic), or that to impose such laws of grammar on the speaking and writing public whose members know what they mean to say borders on the imperious. But none of those objections constitutes firm ground. Every organized body of facts, which, like all sciences, is what grammar constitutes, must assemble its parts according to some principle, and the traditional explanation given here a certain class of verbs is one such standard. Objections arise when we forget that the study of language is composed both of a science of grammar and of an artful adaptation of those scientific facts to audience and purpose and circumstance. We must have both.

It was once thought that the answer to zeroing out the ambiguity inherent in natural language, the way we unguardedly speak and write, was mathematical logic, whose special symbols could replicate our ratiocination while removing nebulosity. Outside specialized applications, however, that solution drains off the artful humanity inevitably to be found in the peculiar ways we can compose our sentences to match the undulations—the imaginative engagement—of human experience. The laws of grammar, like the laws of any science, have no interest in curtailing one’s perceptions. On the contrary, they make it possible for one’s own perspective to be articulated and understood, because they constitute a common framework on which all can depend to communicate meaning and on which each can rely to sustain an individual vision. Without that tension of stability and change, we are left with either the chaotic or the totalitarian, and neither of those befits a human being.

***

Most of the rules we hear so much about in studying grammar and writing have to do with ensuring precision, which is the central concern of expository writing, the kind of writing we compose most often to present and explain facts and ideas. It seems to be endemically difficult for us to change our mental center of gravity and to realize that others are reading what we have to say from their own perspective, often with an entirely different set of assumptions.

That is the human condition. Being precise, therefore, about what we mean is all important to preclude being misunderstood, something which is in everyone’s interest. A rule we have all heard about from our school days is the one that governs the difference between good and well. In the two sentences I feel good and I feel well, for example, the question is not which is correct; each sentence means something distinct. The real question we should be asking is, what do I want to say? Precision, once again.

Let’s begin by looking at the verbs. We may classify verbs into two large groups, verbs of action and verbs of state. Those verbs of action which necessitate a direct object are called transitive: I feel something on my arm, and verbs of action which do not require a direct object are called intransitive: I feel strongly about this. Verbs of state, however, do not involve any kind of action; instead, they point to the state of being, mind or body, of the verb’s subject. In the sentence I feel well, no action is being indicated; the subject only wishes to say something about himself, specifically something about his physical or mental condition. A verb of state, called a copula or linking verb, most often identifies its subject with an adjective in the predicate, and that is the role well is playing in I feel well. As an adjective, well means being in good health.

What, then, is the difference between the statements I feel well and I feel good? Nothing more than the difference in meaning between the two adjectives. The verb feel remains a copula in both these sentences, but while the adjective well means being in good health, the adjective good refers not to one’s physical or mental condition, but to the subject’s moral condition, or more expansively to the integrity of the subject (we speak, for example, of a good car, referring to its mechanical reliability). In strict usage, to say I feel good means I regard myself as a good person. When someone asks us how are you? and we answer I’m good, we are answering a question the person is probably not asking. Most often one will pose that question to inquire about our well-being, not about our moral stature or personal integrity, and so the right and proper (and many will say too right and proper) reply would be I’m well.

And what about a sentence like he walks well now after his hip surgery? Here the word well is not referring to the subject, he, but to the verb, walks, which means that well can no longer be an adjective (because adjectives do not modify verbs), but has taken on the function of an adverb answering the question in what manner. And indeed a quick look at the dictionary will confirm that the word well can work grammatically as an adjective or an adverb (and also as a noun, a verb, and an interjection!). The important procedural observation to make in all this is that a word is used grammatically (within defined limits) as the structural circumstances of a sentence require. Or, to say the same thing differently, we can only know the part of speech of a word by first examining how it is being used in a particular statement.

After all of this is said and done, though, the question of how exactly we need to write or speak in a particular circumstance will have to be answered by each one of us individually but advisedly. There are some who believe that under no circumstance should the traditional rules be relinquished, and there are others who will say, as does one guide to writing of a half-century ago, that “grammatical rules are not something that has been revealed to us, but simply generalizations about the way people use words” (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage). My own view is that respect will dictate—respect for the exactitude necessary to the purpose and circumstances at hand. The range of linguistic usage slides from casual to formal, and a delicate sense (called taste) of the where and why we are composing our language will help us decide on the proper choice of words (called diction). A written composition tends very often toward the more formal side of the scale, and a relaxed conversation with friends over coffee will tend in the opposite direction. It can get tedious being the same person all the time.

But it’s subtle, and the choice requires discretion and perspicacity, as a teacher once made crystal clear when he admonished me after I objected to a change he had made to my essay: “And who told you that you could have only one written voice?” Indeed, but to realize such finesse is a challengingly new level to play the language game at. But, then again, who ever said we shouldn’t be subtle or challenged?

***

The British author P. L. Travers, famous for her Mary Poppins books, wrote many other works for children and several nonfiction titles as well. Among the latter is her About the Sleeping Beauty, and there, in an afterword appended to her own version of that traditional story, Travers makes this arresting observation about her “love for the fairy tale”:

It began in me quite early, before there was any separation between myself and the world. Eve’s apple had not yet been eaten; every bird had an emperor to sing to and any passing ant or beetle might be a prince in disguise. This undifferentiated world is common to all children…. But the grown-up view of things-as-they-are, limited as it is in dimension, lit by a wholly rational sun and capable of explanation, is different from that of a child. For a child this world is infinite, the sun shines up from the abyss as well as down from the sky, the time is always now and endless and the only way to explain a thing is to say that it cannot be explained.

I was asked recently what value there was in learning another language. The question was posed seriously, not in scoffing at those who take the trouble to learn syntax and vocabulary when online translators are easily at hand, but in wondering honestly about the purpose of learning to read and speak and write a language not natively one’s own. Why isn’t our first language enough? I gave the question some thought, pulled down a philosophical discussion about it which only lead into thicket, and then, looking for something else entirely, I saw Travers’s work fall open on the table. From singing birds and princes in disguise to a grown-up view under the rational sun—what could all that have to do with the value of acquiring some facility in another language?

Nothing more and nothing less than that we are human by virtue of language and we each are the human we are by virtue of the language we speak. Which means that if we can use another language, we might be able to give ourselves a way to become someone else for a time. That adult world of naming and causing, effecting and affecting, that sophisticated world lit by the light of the mind where everything has an explanation—how is that world created but by words and syntax, which are not universally identical but grown and shaped in local conditions and historical events? The language we each are raised up with is truly our world, but if we take the trouble to learn a different language, we travel to another place, remaining ourselves in our central awareness of being, but dispossessing ourselves of all the peculiar ways of seeing the world which our first language determines and restricts. And inevitably so, because form, linguistic or otherwise, delimits possibilities in order to make something—make us—peculiarly what it is.

But those singing birds and beetle princes? Well, they are not part of our adult rational world, but still they are real, or so at least said those cultures (and so say still those children) that understood in their innocence (the word means unhurt) the inherent constriction of the rational. For when we name some object or event in our world (and what is language if not a collection of names), we make something what it is by saying in effect what it’s not. That’s a coffee cup next to me there, so don’t think it’s anything else. I’ve rationed it off, sectionalized it from the rest of experience by virtue of that word cup—and that is what we mean by a rational world: clear-cut and defined, permanent and explainable, reliable and real.

But not really. All that definition and permanency could very well be an illusion—not a delusion, but an illusion, a playing at (the original meaning of the word). And how do we know that what we call the real world might be an illusion in this etymologically proper sense? Well, all we have to do is try to bring before ourselves something which always was what it is now and which will always be so. But we will look long and far for such a perduring thing. And the realization that we’ll never find such an object then puts us in quite a curious place: that the imaginative world of the fairy tale just might itself be an articulation of an abiding world where anything, as in the dreams which will come to us tonight, is possible, while that grown-up world, made firm and sure by language, is the ever-changing place of play and pretense: for how can anything or anyone pretend to last forever? To believe otherwise is what the ancients called hubris, and it is the fraught dream of the powerful then and now.

But that is what language does and must do: set the world up as a stage, believable for a time, but thankfully not believable always. And if we can command, to some working degree at least, another language, modern or ancient, we get a ticket to go to another play and see how those actors, those nouns and verbs and all they do together, make appear real what surely—just look around—will not last. All the world’s a stage, said, of course, Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players. There is no performance without language, and every language will perform the world differently. So another language is another conceptual costume whose colors and folds and decorative buttons give us another character to watch—or even to play ourselves—while we look day by day for the really real.

Most importantly, then, it is language which keeps us awake—something priceless indeed. But is there an edge to language and its wakefulness, a border past which the nouns and verbs of any language have no literal reference? Do we eventually reach a point in our mindful landscape where the linguistic sign turns into shimmering symbol? At the conclusion of her afterword about the story of Sleeping Beauty, Travers makes this enchanting point:

Are we dealing here with the sleeping soul and all the external affairs of life that hem it in and hide it; something that falls asleep after childhood, something that not to waken would make life meaningless?

Well, if that is true, then in learning another language we might be dwelling closer to that border and hem of all languages, beyond which lies, so fairy tales and poetry and music intimate, something so real that our waking, rational, linguistic life—just like those plays we watch on stage—is but a purposeful illusion.

***

The study of language is not the study of etiquette, anymore than is the study of carpentry or surgery or flight. That is to say, when we study a language, and more particularly its grammar, we should be concerned not so much with how we appear to others, but with understanding the objective structure of the language we use, because how we put its elements together determines what exactly it is we are saying and implying. And that is not always clear even to ourselves when we overlook the connection between language, thought, and culture.

The mature study of any subject, even etiquette, includes both a science and an art, and determining the balance between those two forces has a long, sometimes inglorious but certainly continuing, history of hot and cold war. The language battle has been marked out between the prescriptivists and descriptivists, purists and nonconformers, those who believe there is one right way to write and speak, and those who believe we speakers and writers are the only ones to decide what’s right, if indeed there even is a right at all. In the concluding chapter of his Grammar and Good Taste, Dennis Baron summarizes that historical linguistic conflict like this:

As we have seen, language reform in America is nothing new. It has been with us since colonial times, and despite its past failures, it is as strong today as ever…. Like the purists of the past, today’s reformers play on our sense of linguistic insecurity, the feeling that many Americans have that their language is somehow not quite up to snuff, that it is out of control, riddled with errors, or simply unskillful and gauche. It is a feeling of guilt that is sometimes conscious, but more often not, an uneasy sense that our commas, both literally and metaphorically, come in all the wrong places.

Linguistic insecurity (indeed any insecurity) is a woeful condition to suffer, and we can drink a tall draft of warm cure for it if we can remember that the scientific half of the study of language, like the science underpinning any body of knowledge, has its definable elements whose names we can methodically learn and whose functions we can clearly observe with a little hard thinking which any of us can resolve to undertake. It does not matter that once English was written and spoken differently, and that the English of three centuries ago was not the English of today. This appeal to historical change is sometimes used in favor of the write-and-speak-however-you-like side in the battle, but those soldiers forget that we write and speak to communicate a meaning we assume is recognizable by others, which after all is why we’re writing or speaking in the first place. The palmy days of believing that asserting ourselves is truth enough are now well past their noon, as is the wish to learn how to keep in conformity with the hollow gestures of linguistic propriety. We are recognizing again that there is, after all, a truth to be understood or misunderstood. A simple example will remind us of this.

Say, for example, you go away for the weekend and ask me to water your garden. You are diligent about your vegetables and flowers, and when you return I say that I just watered the vegetables. Now did I mean that I only recently watered the vegetables, or did I mean that I watered only the vegetables, leaving the flowers alone for some reason? I just watered the vegetables versus I watered just the vegetables: is there not an intelligible difference between those two meanings, and a difference of some material consequence should you water your garden again too soon or too late?

Now many of us, many, many of us, would no doubt say the former when we meant the latter, overlooking, because of the simplicity of the circumstance, the technical rule that an adverb should stand immediately beside the single noun it intends to modify, and that if it takes another position, as it does in the first example, it intends to modify the entire predication (a construction called a sentence adverb), not just a single word. That’s the rule, that’s the way the objective science of the language as we have inherited it in the form we use it today requires if we incline toward preserving and conserving those techniques which will conduce, if we all agree to play the same game by the same rules, to precision to reduce the chances of ambiguity and unwanted consequence. As one usage guide puts it, “A misplaced adverb simply does not say what the speaker intended it to” (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage). And is not being understood the intention we all have? Even the charlatans intend their lies to be understood.

But insecurity? Feeling unskillful and not in control? How long can one feel inadequate when, with some diligent application, we can learn a skill and master it confidently? And diligent might just be the right word here, for it means originally to value, to love, reflecting, as Merriam-Webster says “the fact that devotion can lead to energetic effort.” What keeps the battle raging between right grammar and wrong, good usage and bad is our reluctance to remember that anything that is intelligible, any coherent body of thought which makes sense by remaining self consistent, has a solid core of principles together with a pliable molten mantle of choices and changes to be made according to purpose and effect in a given circumstance. It is always the segregating either-or demand that gets us in trouble. Better is the both-and perspective, both understanding the rules through a study of the principles of language and achieving from that knowledge an insight into when those constituting regulations may, or even should, be overlooked for the time and circumstance and purpose at hand.

The antidote to fighting—with ourselves or with one another—is a kind of serious play, where a line of rules is respected in order to concentrate an energy that will rise to something higher. We might even call it an objective subjectivity of sorts, wherewith we can live out together what seems to be some of our deepest needs: being understood and therefore belonging. The author Robert Pogue Harrison puts it this way in his Juvenescence: A Culture History of our Age. He is speaking of how important it is to preserve the continuity of culture—the embodiment of our being with one another—generation over generation, and he has just referred to the idea of amor mundi, love for the world as the means to such continuity:

It is that love, and that love alone, that takes custody of the world’s future. Nothing serves to bind human beings together as a polity more intensely than a heightened awareness of world-belonging. Only a shared world offers people what their shared humanity needs most, namely a sense of cohesion between the living, the dead, and those to come.

Is there culture without language? I don’t think so. And that is one reason at least why we should care to understand it and understand it with care.

***

I have long looked for a better way to explain a compositional figure writers use to heighten the effect of a phrase, and I think I finally found it the other day in a work by the poet Mary Oliver. First, though, an example to illustrate it.

At the close of the first chapter of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, protagonist and businessman George Babbitt has just dressed for the day and is about to walk downstairs to breakfast. His attention is caught for a moment by a gleaming skyscraper he sees in the distance out his window, and the sight of its “shining walls” and fire-white cornice speaks to him of integrity and decision and strength. He stands in reverence of it and of the city it rises from—both symbols to him which resonate with an almost spiritual profundity. The scene and chapter conclude with this sentence:

He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad “Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo” as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.

The compositional figure in question appears in the last five words of the final clause: a hymn melancholy and noble. The elements of the phrase are simple enough: one noun with two adjectives modifying it. But a closer look (and perhaps our ear caught it in the reading) reveals something odd. We usually expect adjectives to precede the noun they modify, so why doesn’t this final clause read as though it were a melancholy and noble hymn? Why did Lewis instead arrange the phrase at the end to have the adjectives follow their noun? Indeed, he did the same thing earlier in the sentence with the phrase a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men, where the three adjectives passionate, exalted, and surpassing describe, but again follow, their noun faith. His phrase religion of business hints at an answer, and at a reason for the lofty, almost reverent tone.

An adjective which precedes its noun is called an attributive (or adherent) adjective, and those somewhat off-putting terms are nonetheless instructive for us. An attribute is an essential, inseparable feature of something which clings to (or adheres to) that of which it is a part. Attributive adjectives are definitional, and so the ordered phrase they produce appeals to our logical, thinking faculty. Logic has nothing to do with feelings; it has everything to do, though, with the clarity and precision necessary to satisfy the first question of reasonable discourse: what are you talking about? And so had Lewis arranged that last phrase in the more common order of attributive adjectives preceding their noun, he would have intended simply to bring our attention to what Babbitt was whistling: a melancholy and noble hymn which arose on the sight and symbolism of the great office tower in the distance.

But Lewis wanted to do something more than define the object of Babbitt’s attention. When an adjective does not precede but follows its noun, it is termed an appositive adjective. An appositive (meaning literally put next to) is any element which stands beside another word, working there in such a way as to suggest, but not explicitly predicate, an additional meaning about the noun. A hymn melancholy and noble logically means a hymn which is melancholy and which is noble—but the attributive adjectives do not make those predications outright; they suggest or hint at a full and clear logical statement, but the absence of those complete predicates, with subject and verb stated, works against logical thinking and in favor of an emotional appeal or deeper tone. The writer has left out words in the belief that his readers will supply what is otherwise logically necessary for a complete thought. Such an omission of words is called ellipsis, and since our natural language is not a scientifically logical algorithm, ellipsis and the suggestion it depends on hold a respectable place in expository composition; they are part of the way we humans are alive and aware in our workaday world. Life is more than an equation to be solved logically without remainder.

These two ways of arranging adjectives, attributively and appositively, reflect, in other words, the two great manners of our human experience: thinking and feeling. To say what something is, to denote it and define it, is to set our rational thinking in gear, our logical if precisely this, then precisely that train of reasoning that clarifies both the things and the events which make up the world. But merely to suggest what something might be, to require our readers to supply what is missing logically and in so doing draw them into a written world and its intricate network of connections and implications without telling them what’s what—well, that is to call up feeling, and satisfy thereby the more we are looking for in literature and poetry.

And so in arranging this last phrase appositively, Lewis wants us to hear—not see or think about, but feel—all that the phrase suggests in consequence of its literal denotation: the businessman Babbitt was so moved by the symbolic sight of that office tower in the distance that his worldly soul reached to the only music it could recognize in the moment, the lyrics of a popular love song current in the city about him, a love song which was more than a popular jangle for him, but a veritable hymn, a hymn which was melancholy and which was noble. Lewis only suggested those two last explicit clauses—and that is the precise function of attributive adjectives—because he wanted the magnitude of Babbitt’s shallow religiosity (a weakened spirituality) to impress itself deeply upon us. This was Babbitt’s very depth, and it is all the likelier we will feel that, as close readers, when we are drawn into the syntax and urged there to sense the irregularity of the word order and allow its resonance to affect us. With that feeling felt, we can then ask our reason to investigate the meaning of it, for feeling and reason are never to be very far from each other.

And that is what I learned to explain from the magnificent American poet Mary Oliver in her indispensable A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry. She says there that ellipsis “is trying to imply a weighty “something” that has not been said but that the poet wants felt.” Wants felt. There is the key. Oliver’s own work is known for its concrete simplicity, and in the same passage in which that sentence appears, she calls ellipsis “a construct of weakness.” But she as a poet was speaking of poetry, not prose, and as such she had no truck with what is called poetic diction, language in which, she says, “all freshness is gone” because the imagination can no longer respond to the overtraded images.

Expository prose, though, because its fabric and canvas, its warp and woof, are subjects and predicates, thoughts and reason—because of this basis it can afford a judicious risk of implication and suggestion, and when that is done as masterfully as Lewis has accomplished it, the effect can arrest our attention and force us to listen for the deep tone, what has been called the feeling tone, of our otherwise natural, but sometimes too rigorously rational, language.

***