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.

***

The department of language study which has to do with spelling and punctuation, capitalization and formatting and myriad other miscellaneous but essential matters of presentation is called mechanics. As the indispensable Garner’s Modern American Usage puts it, the mechanics of language constitute the “devices that lend clarity to writing.” Too often we mistake such niceties as superfluous rules of etiquette, and we slip twice if we forget that being clear and precise is of preeminent importance in writing, and that the point of etiquette, linguistic or otherwise, is to make smooth the path for someone else to understand all that we are saying.

One such mechanical device that is often unsure to writers involves the use of the apostrophe. This mark is most often used to indicate the possessor of something, and its bent shape (‘) can be used to remember that it is pointing to the possessor, whether singular or plural. (The term apostrophe means in Greek to bend or twist or turn away, and so the graphic idea is that the mark is pointing away from what is possessed and toward its possessor.) Thus, to speak of an actor’s costume (where the apostrophe is pointing back to a singular noun) means that one actor possesses one costume, but to speak of the actors’ costumes (where now the apostrophe points to a plural noun) means that there are a number of costumes belonging to a number of actors. And, indeed, if we were referring to one costume shared by many actors who played the same role at different performances, we would say the actors’ costume—one costume belonging to a number of actors. (And this is probably the place to remind ourselves that the apostrophe is never used with pronouns to show possession: its, not it’s. The latter form does exist, of course, but as the contraction for the pronoun and verb it is.)

Now a question commonly arises when the possessor ends with the letter s: should it be the bus’ tire or the bus’s tire? The buses’ tires or the buses’s tires? With mechanical questions like this (grammatical, not automotive), the source to refer to and to keep consistent with is one of the many style guides written by academic and institutional authorities. These will differ in some points according to the kind of writing they are meant to address, and so we are to choose one (or accept as directed the one) to follow—and this is most important—consistently. So, for example, on this question of forming the possessives, The Chicago Manual of Style succinctly defines the governing rule: “The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s, and the possessive of plural nouns (except for a few irregular plurals that do not end in s) by adding an apostrophe only.”

Thus, we should write the bus’s tire and the buses’ tires. But, as the Chicago Manual illustrates, we should also expect to see the unexpected: a bass’s stripes (with the unusual three instances of the same consonant), children’s literature (where the possessor children is a plural noun formed without the s), and Williams’s reputation (where the surname ends with an s before another s is added to indicate its function as the possessor of the reputation). Pages of permutations on this theme (mechanical and syntactical) are covered in the Chicago Manual, and so it is better to know where to turn for an answer when a question arises rather than try to remember every last rule in abstracto. Hence the immense importance of turning to the index of such comprehensive works first.

Amidst such great detail we can risk missing the forest for the trees, but if we remember that the minutiae of any craft well understood serves a higher purpose, we can learn to find the answers we need efficiently and unpedantically. The caution we should observe, however, is making things up as we go along. Over one hundred years ago, the American literary critic Irving Babbitt, in his Democracy and Leadership, was concerned about the unfettered development of what has come to be called the “creative imagination.” His conservative (or probably better called now traditional) preoccupations worried over the social effect the absence of reasoned common standards might have. At the heart of his political worries over what an “anything goes” attitude might produce was his contention that we cannot justifiably introduce a new way of doing things without first knowing what we are departing from. Says Babbitt: “it is impossible, let me repeat, to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless one can discover in life somewhere an abiding unity with which to measure its mere variety and change.”

Babbitt’s cultural observation (in that work and also in his Literature and the American College) is relevant to our topic of linguistic mechanics here. Change is inevitable—changes in punctuation, capitalization, and all the rest of the details that make for clarity—but what changes we make must be apprised in light of the reasons we have been doing things as we have. If we can’t find a reason, or if we have no good reason for changing a long-standing custom, then it might just be better—in the preeminent interests of precision and courtesy—to leave miscellaneous matters as they stand and follow the rules. There are opportunities enough elsewhere to be iconoclastic.

***

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?

***