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Not Entirely Correct

Imagine two friends engaged in a conversation about politics. One expresses his view that corporate tax rates have never been higher and the other replies, Well, that’s not entirely correct. With this simple response, the speaker has risked conjuring the Furies for a crime of confusion, and it might help us all to sort out what exactly is going on here.

It is important always to remember that language carries meaning in a context. Words and phrases work by virtue of their relationship and proximity to other words. Together they weave a mental world (indeed the word context is derived from the Latin texo, to weave or to braid), and that world of woven meaning binds together only to the extent that its implications make sense. An implication (that word too, meaning entwined, derives from the textile arts) is what is suggested, and as close readers, we expect to be able to follow the thread, as we say, of an argument or statement.

In our example, our first friend has begun with a strong thread: corporate tax rates have never been higher. The statement can easily be confirmed or disproved; with some quick research, we can know with certainty whether, in fact, the corporate rate is unprecedentedly high. The assertion, in other words, is categorical and unqualified, and that should determine the nature of his friend’s reply: either accept the fact and offer an argument despite it, or deny—and prove the denial—that it is a fact at all.

Instead, however, the friend of our corporate friend has sewn some confusion with the adverb entirely. Adverbs modify adjectives (as they do verbs and other adverbs), and some adjectives, like unique, complete, perfect, cannot be modified because their meaning cannot be qualified: either something is or is not unique, complete, or perfect. Such words are called absolute adjectives. But other adjectives, like correct, can become absolute when the context renders them such. So when our speaker asserts that his friend is not entirely correct, the adverb entirely means to say that his statement is not correct in every respect. But in what other respect could this categorical assertion be understood? Either the corporate tax rate has never been higher or it has. His reply, in other words, has not been woven into what his friend actually said; he has assumed a qualification it does not admit.

Now there is a way to defend our second friend, and that is by saying that his reply is more rhetorical than it is logical; that by rejoining that’s not entirely correct, he meant only to politely introduce a correction, and that had we more of the conversation, we would see that he went on to offer qualifications to the outright view of his interlocutor. That, indeed, would satisfy our worries and return the Furies to their lairs.

But close readers and listeners pay attention to what someone has stated and build their replies accordingly. This requires us to be aware of both the denotation of statements, their direct and indicative meaning, and also their connotation, what statements concurrently suggest and imply. We can rightfully speak of linguistic worlds of meaning, and the linguistic world, like the real one, can be a confusing place if we do not first launch from what someone else has actually said, taking into account the actual assertion and its implications, and then adding our thread to the weave they have begun. Otherwise, we are soliloquizing, and our conversations will become merely patchworks.

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Parallelism

We human beings seem to have an innate need for order. The deliberate arrangement of things, whether furniture in the living room or ideas on a page, signifies meaning to us. Design, we sense, reveals an intelligence, and that too seems to be an inborn obligation that pleases us when we find it.

One way to bring order to the expression of ideas in writing is to maintain grammatical parallelism. Indeed, to secure this is a major reason for studying grammar. Parallelism means here correspondence, the placing of like grammatical constructions in different but related positions. Take, for example, this sentence a student recently wrote in a paragraph about foreign political dissent:

Protestors fabricated stories on the internet and plastered every wall in the city with posters accusing the police of brutality. Ironically, they were doing exactly what they had accused the government of doing: propaganda.

In the first of these two sentences, the author has set the scene by denoting two actions with transitive verbs (verbs that have a direct object): protestors, he maintains, had fabricated stories and plastered every wall. His next sentence then builds on that idea, and it is cemented nicely to the first sentence by beginning with a reference to what they were doing, pointing once again to action. In fact, as that second sentence continues, the writer reinforces the idea of taking action by repeating the word doing in the prepositional phrase of doing right before the colon.

If we are reading this passage closely, which means in part that we are giving ourselves over to the carry of the sentences, we should be able to sense ourselves stirring mentally a bit from all this movement. The sentences are propelling us somewhere, and our expectation, however unconscious, is that all these actions will lead to yet another. This conclusive momentum, in fact, is the reason the writer rightly felt the need for a colon at the end of the second sentence. A colon presents or unveils or exemplifies, and that is just what we think the writer is about to do: specify the action common between the two contenders. But the bullet does not reach its target. For instead of finding after the colon a verb, the grammatical element that would stand in correspondence with all the previous ones, we find the noun propaganda. The writer did not maintain grammatical parallelism to the very end. This simple slip has taken the propulsive energy out of the passage, and we have fallen before the mark.

In every end, however, is a beginning, and the revision here is a very simple one: propagandizing. This verbal form of the noun will keep the entire passage in parallel, and the reader will sense accordingly a strength and control in idea and expression. The revised second sentence, then, would read: Ironically, they were doing exactly what they had accused the government of doing: propagandizing. The concluding construction after the colon now matches in both form and meaning the like elements that have accumulated across the two sentences leading up to it.

Parallelism is primary in bringing order to both our thinking and writing. For an interesting and informative discussion of the subject (and just about any other topic related to grammar and writing), I would recommend Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner. A usage manual should sit shoulder to shoulder with a dictionary on the shelf, and Garner’s is an excellent one to always have at hand.

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Reticent or Reluctant?

Word study plays an important part in the craft of writing. What, after all, are we writing with but words? When we say that someone has a rich vocabulary, we mean that they have at hand the tools to make distinctions that would otherwise pass us by. Where we might use a more general term, they have found the more specific and precise: an incisive writer rather than simply a good writer, or a captivating performance rather than merely an interesting one.

With wealth, however, comes responsibility, and possessing a wide vocabulary should mean using it judiciously: keeping one’s verbal accounts in order and employing the right word at the right time. This can be tricky, because words carry both a denotative and connotative meaning. To denote means to indicate, so the denotative meaning of a word is its primary, specific, unadorned meaning, the idea it points to irrespective of a context: a house is a building one lives in. The connotative meaning of a word, on the other hand, is the suggestion or implication a word carries with it, that array of unspoken ideas which color and surround it. Should a storm one day destroy my neighbor’s house, I might cry out to you that his house is gone!, but I would mean then by house not only the building he lived in, but the very place where he dwelled and raised and loved his family—his home.

With this awareness that words carry both a denotative and connotative intention, we are put under an obligation to keep to those meanings unless we have new insight to convey. And simple confusion is not new insight. Take, for example, the two adjectives reticent and reluctant, two words that are frequently blurred. If someone is reticent about his opinions, we mean that person is reserved in character and generally inclined toward remaining silent. If we say that he is reluctant to give his opinion, we mean he is hesitant or even unwilling to state his mind on the matter we are discussing. The two words have distinct denotative differences, and although they share some ground (when we are hesitant we are often quiet), to confuse the two is to dull the blade and saw, not slice.

Writing with clarity and strength is a matter of making distinctions, and such distinctions involve both the denotative indications and the connotative overtones of the words we use. Blurring distinctions and confusing words is more often a matter of not being aware of their denotative meaning, something we can rectify quickly by turning to the dictionary. Not to recognize, of course, that the world and our perceptions of it are constantly changing is to risk isolating ourselves into a fixed and rigid and unforgiving dogma about language and its proper use. But change for the sake of change, and not for the sake of a more perspicacious statement, is to make our common work of understanding unnecessarily more difficult.

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Concrete and Abstract

If someone said to you, there was police activity in the alley last night, would you know what happened? You would not. If a coworker told you that there are a number of issues and aspects that have come up related to the development of the project you both are working on, would you know without any question what that person was referring to? You would not. Both of these statements have pulled you up into the murky, misty skies of impressions and notions.

One of the great principles of writing and speaking is clarity, and from the grammatical point of view, clarity is secured by achieving a balance between the concrete and the abstract. These two terms are used to classify nouns, the words that name things. Concrete nouns name things we perceive with one of our five senses. We can see or touch a tree, so the word tree is a concrete noun. We can taste an apple, smell a rose, or hear the thunder, so apple, rose, and thunder are all concrete nouns. Concrete nouns keep us in the world of actuality, the empirical world we have awareness of through our senses.

Abstract nouns, on the other hand, name things we perceive not with our senses, but with our mind. We cannot see or touch or taste or smell or hear an issue or an aspect. These nouns are only ideas residing in our mind. They are, as we say, after the fact. And when we step away from the common world of specific fact—something we must, of course, do as thinking human beings—and resort to abstract nouns too frequently, we are open to the risk of vagueness and generality. The very term abstract denotes in its Latin derivation drawn away from: abs means from or away, and the letters tract are the same as in our word tractor, something that pulls or draws. An abstract noun, therefore, draws us away from the sensorial world into the world of ideas, where indeed our intelligence, but also generalities, lie.

The problem, then, is not that we use abstract nouns; one cannot write or think intelligently without them. The problem is that we use too many of them. Because it is easier to think in generalities, because we believe saying something vaguely is, after all, still saying something, we too often convince ourselves that the reader will figure out what we specifically mean: let’s just get something down and done. That, however, is to transfer our proper work to someone else, forgetting that when we blindly trust the reader to understand our ambiguities, we have forfeited any right of being understood correctly. And that, upon a little reflection, is where very few of us would ever want to be.

There is a proper time and place for general statements and the broader ideas they convey. But there is a proper time and place as well for the specific and particular. The abstraction of police activity in the alley will only arrest my attention when police activity becomes the police arrested three men with guns. Then I know what happened—then I understand. And is that not ultimately the reason we write?

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Breakwaters

Here is a sentence whose punctuation poses an interesting grammatical problem, and where there are problems, of course, there are opportunities:

In fact, they behaved like an authoritarian dictator: questioned people on the street with whom they disagreed, detained people with whom they disagreed, forced out people with whom they disagreed.

The author wants to criticize the behavior of protestors who are protesting the actions of a government, and he is worried that good intent can often quickly devolve into behavior as contemptible as that which it is trying to correct. The grammatical problem lies in the constructions that follow the colon.

The colon and semicolon are what we could call composite marks of punctuation: we stack a period onto another period to build the colon, or onto a comma to build the semicolon. As composites, they are strong and durable, certainly stronger than the simple comma, but they don’t quite yet possess the singular strength of the diamond-like period. This is important to realize because it will help determine the grammar that follows these marks.

In the sentence we are looking at, the author has wanted to follow a triadic structure after the colon: three clauses that each begin with a verb whose subjects have been suppressed (that is, not directly stated): questioned, detained, forced out. Using an elliptical style, he is expecting the reader to supply the pronoun they from the clause before the colon; they who behaved like an authoritarian dictator are the same ones who questioned, detained, and forced out.

Ellipsis—the omission of words you expect the reader to easily assume—is a recognized and effective stylistic device, but it can be tricky to deal with at times. One of those times is often (not always) after these composite punctuation marks. The colon and semicolon act as breakwaters, structures that control the flow of meaning as the reader is carried through the sentence; without them, the clear-cut clarity we expect of our modern prose would roll and wheel and whirl on and on; our sentences would never really organize our thoughts for the reader in a manageable way.

But as a breakwater, the colon (let’s limit our discussion to the mark that appears in the example) has effectively prevented the pronoun they from reaching the three verbs after it; on the other side of this punctuating structure, the reader does not immediately (and there’s the key that always justifies ellipsis) understand who questioned and detained and forced out. The semicolon has checked the flow.

So how change things? The obvious move would be simply to supply the pronoun again before each of the three verbs (they questioned, they detained, they forced out), but the problem with that would be just that: it’s too obvious. Instead, we have here an opportunity to change the three clauses into phrases, and so tell the reader what they did (not how they acted) when they behaved like an authoritarian dictator: questioning, detaining, and forcing out people with whom they disagreed.

The caution, then, is to remember that marks of punctuation like the colon and semicolon create new patches of syntax that are directly related logically to what precedes them, but not always grammatically. As always, an eye to the structure will help ensure a comprehensible and attractive design.

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