If a dictionary defines words, what does a thesaurus do? The word means treasury in Latin, and the basic answer, of course, is that a thesaurus synonymizes, that is, it suggests words close in meaning to one another. Some thesauri merely list groups of related words, others discern the subtle shades of meaning between them. It’s the latter we want as writers. If the high achievement of composition is clarity, then finding the right word for the right place in a sentence is an inherent part of writing precisely. Or is it an intrinsic part? Let’s produce our own synonymy for a moment to develop our critical eye.

Something which is inherent is a permanent element of something else, but something which is intrinsic is so inherent that it makes up the very nature of that which it is a part. The etymology can help us see the difference: inherent derives from a Latin verb meaning to cling, and intrinsic derives from the Latin adverb intra, meaning within. We speak of the inherent goodness of human nature, but of the intrinsic radiance of the sun: one may not be good despite one’s human nature, but the sun cannot but always be radiant to be the sun. Both adjectives are related to the more general term essential, and right there—the fact that essential is more general in meaning—is why that word would have made the lesser choice in pointing to the part precision plays in writing clearly. But did my sentence mean that finding the right word was a permanent feature of writing clearly, or did it mean even more than that: that such precision was of the very nature of writing itself? Perhaps the latter would have been a step too far unless I had confined my definition of writing to expository prose. For what of the suggestive heart of poetry?

There is always the danger, certainly, that we chop the logic so fine in finding the variances among words that we end up with little more than a page of linguistic tatter, making distinctions without a difference, or worse, bandying with words for the pointlessness of it. What guards against these faults is the belief in truth, the conviction that what we are articulating corresponds to the truth as we see it, not to the specious as we spin it. And with the conviction of truth comes the imperative to make it known as it is as precisely as we can. As Aristotle said, we humans desire in our very nature to know.

We have our life, however, in a world of appearances, and the universal medium we use to understand that world, language, can be intrinsically ambiguous. The writer’s proper but heavy burden to be precise, as a result, is often transferred to us as listeners and readers to do the hard work of thinking. And prosaic examples abound. What, for example, does this sentence mean: Since the city removed all the parking meters from the central commercial district, business has improved dramatically. Certainly we will say that because the city removed the meters, business has improved, but certainly does not mean solely. The subordinating conjunction since can be used not only causally but temporally as well: from the time the city removed the meters, business has improved—the cause of which might have been an aggressive advertising campaign, lower inflation, higher consumer confidence. Cause and time are different relations between things which must be kept distinct.

And that is not an unindifferent conclusion. Unindifferent? Another synonymy presents itself, this one to exercise our critical skills too. To differ means to draw apart, to notice the way in which one thing is not another of its kind. To be indifferent, then, (the prefix in– often, but not always, means not) is to be impartial, unbiased, not noticing anything which would distinguish one thing from another. And so to be unindifferent is not to be impartial, which is, through the double negative, to be partial, which is what I am saying is not the case in maintaining that cause is one thing and time another. Thus we should beware of too much negativity.

If we cannot distinguish between truth and appearance, it is in the very nature of things that unrest will arise, within us and among us. And that is why so much emphasis has traditionally—anciently—been put on the study of language. Words fasten things down for a moment and help us get our bearings in the world. They constitute, though, a double-edged sword, because trying to hold down life cannot be done. Still, as the philosopher and teacher Richard Weaver said in his essential Language is Sermonic, “the word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances,” and it seems that an intrinsic part of our need to know is to know stability amidst all that worldly change as well.

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In the study of language, a distinction is made between persuading and convincing. To persuade someone is to induce one to act, whether physically to do something or mentally to believe something. To convince, on the other hand, is to show the reasons something should or should not be acted upon. In the traditional scheme of the first three liberal arts, called the trivium, after grammar comes logic, the art of reasoning, and then rhetoric, the art of persuasion. And that order is important. As C. S. Lewis says in his study The Discarded Image, grammar teaches one how to talk, logic teaches one how to talk sense, and rhetoric teaches one how to talk sense with style. Each study must complement the other two, thereby forming a trivium, a corner in our mind where three roads meet.

Monroe Beardsley was an American philosopher of art, and early in his career he wrote an introductory work on critical reflection entitled Thinking Straight: Principles of Reasoning for Readers and Writers. Originally published in 1950, Monroe’s text is still available and worth the study. He explains “the nature of thinking that is cogent and effective because its steps have a logical order,” and he begins by making clear the often confused difference between the practical logic he is about to teach and rhetoric, its countervailing discipline:

To regard a piece of language from the rhetorical point of view is (in one good sense of this term) to take an interest in its persuasiveness. Will it in fact get the voters to pull the top lever? Will it sell quantities of Chocolate Malted Soy Bubble breakfast cereal? Will it win the debate, or the trial? These are questions for the rhetorician: He is concerned to discover general principles governing the use of words for getting people to believe or feel or act. The logician is not concerned with what actually persuades, but with what ought to persuade; he inquires…not whether in the ‘making of a president,’ a successful ‘image’ is projected to the electorate, but whether a plausible case has been made out for voting one way rather than another…. Rhetoric studies persuasiveness; logic studies convincingness—but remember that the logical question is never ‘Will it actually convince?’ but…’Should it convince?’.

If such a plea for reason and clear-mindedness strikes our skeptical and overadvertised, postmodern minds as hopelessly ideal, then perhaps it is time finally that we reconsider the virtues of idealism. That term, setting aside its strict philosophical definition, refers to the pursuit of an ideal, a standard of excellence which shows the direction in which one should think and will and act, whether that goal is regularly or can ever be realized in the dispensation we inhabit. Without idealism, even under this common definition, we foreclose the possibility of happiness, because that inalienable human aspiration depends upon order, the groundwork of reason and critical understanding.

If instead, though, we decide to pursue our happiness by unreasonable self-assertion alone—I want what I want because I want it and I know what is true because I know it—then only those of us who are sufficiently willful for a time will enjoy happiness, chimeric though it be. For the traditional point of the study of logic is to direct our emotions and their rhetorical imaginings toward what is constant and orderly, peaceable and true.

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If I happen to say that the planet Neptune has sixteen moons, I am making a specific, or finite, qualification to the noun moons. If I go on to say that I believe the universe is infinite, I mean to say that there is no specific measure which can be taken of its extent. The stem of both these adjectives, fin, derives from the Latin noun finis, meaning border or end or limit. We limit something by putting a border around it, and thus we define it; and if we cannot define something, literally or conceptually, we say that it is indefinite.

The terms finite and infinite have found their way into traditional grammar, and knowing what they refer to can help us design our sentences in more interesting ways. When we are revising and ask what the verb of the sentence is, we’re really asking what the finite verb of the clause is. We say, for example, that the sentence I opened the kitchen window has one clause because the subject I is paired with the predicate opened the kitchen window, and if we wish to be quite precise in our analysis, we’ll say that the finite verb of the predicate is opened—finite because a subject (I) and a tense (simple past) can be specifically identified for it. Every finite verb form has its corresponding infinitive form, which merely names the action, unassociated for a moment with any subject or tense. The infinitive is the form which appears listed as the headword in a dictionary; for the finite form opened, the infinitive would be to open.

A finite verb form, then, constitutes the gearwork of a clause, whether independent or subordinate, putting the assertion into motion. Note closely right here, though, that in the sentence I just wrote, the finite verb is constitutes and the phrase a finite verb form is its subject. But what, then, is putting? We certainly perceive some sense of action in the closing phrase putting the assertion into motion, but neither a subject nor a tense is readily apparent for the word putting. The answer lies in an entirely distinct category of verb forms called nonfinite or infinite, of which there are three: the infinitive, the gerund, and the participle. The nomenclature of nonfinite or infinite immediately tells us that these forms are unspecific, and that means that they are not working to produce a clause, as do finite verbs. Instead, they make up phrases, and that changes their operative value from assertion to modification. An infinitive (to open), as we saw above, simply names the verbal idea, and that is the function of a gerund (opening) as well. Both of these nonfinite verb forms, therefore, can be called verbal nouns because they are built from verbal material.

The form putting, however, is called a participle, more exactly, a present participle. It too ends, like the gerund, in the suffix –ing, but unlike the gerund, which is a verbal noun, the participle is a verbal adjective. It can be said to modify (but not assert) a subject, and it can be said to refer to relative, not actual, time. Under those defining restrictions, then, we cannot say that the phrase putting the assertion into motion is making a finite assertion; to do that would require that we attach a subject and refer to an actual phase of time as, for example, in it puts the assertion into motion. With that change, we have revised a participial phrase into a clause, and have transformed the original simple sentence into a compound one: A finite verb form, then, constitutes the gearwork of a clause, whether independent or subordinate; it puts the assertion into motion. (Note that there is now a semicolon in this revision to take the place of the understood conjunction and between the two clauses. Placing a comma there instead of a semicolon would have created a run-on sentence.)

Knowing a little about these infinite verb forms can open a whole new world of more precise and subtle language. We can replace an infinitive with a gerund: to walk to work takes too much time, becomes walking to work takes too much time. We can replace a subordinate clause with a participial phrase: because I cooked the rice in advance, I was able to prepare my dinner quickly, becomes cooking the rice in advance, I was able to prepare my dinner quickly. Or we can use the present participle to build the progressive aspect of a verb: he arrives this afternoon is made more vivid with he is arriving this afternoon. Each of these changes refines the perceptive quality of the statement: precision lies at the heart of style.

Infinite constructions, particularly with the participle, give us a way to suggest an assertion without explicitly stating it, as a clause would accomplish. This brings color and nuance to an otherwise black and white perceptual world, helping us write more nearly in accord with the world as we know it—complex but variegated, present but suggestive of so much more.

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In an earlier post (All That Is Implied), I had occasion to mention the British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood. Best known, perhaps, for his work in aesthetics, Collingwood made no bones in his essay “Form and Content in Art” about the difference between the romantic and the classical artist:

Romantics are obviously warm-blooded and excitable people, and they often accuse classical art of being cold and passionless. That is a mistake, but a natural mistake. The classical artist is cold-blooded about his subject, but he is not cold-blooded about his work. The romantic portrait-painter falls in love with his sitter, and hopes that this will make the portrait a good one; the classical portrait-painter does not fall in love with his sitter because he is already in love with his art.

How might this distinction apply to the study of language? Collingwood believed that these two perspectives must complement each other in the successful work of art, whether statue, painting, or paragraph. He says elsewhere in the same essay that “a classical art that was not romantic would be an art with perfect form and no content, perfect mastery of its materials and no subject matter, a perfectly expressive language with nothing to express.” His argument is the traditional one that there is an essential difference to be made between form and content, that is, between what we see and what meaning that form conveys to us. The work of art embraces them.

So important is that distinction, though, that If we forget it, we risk being confused and carried off by the emotions that attend on what presents itself to our senses. The great philosopher and Indologist Ananda Coomaraswamy. magisterial in his perspicacity, made the same point in his essay “That Beauty is a State.” Note his reference here to the artist’s subject, not object, that is, content, not form:

In all ages of creation the artist has been in love with his particular subject—when it is not so, we see that his work is not ‘felt’—he has never set out to achieve the Beautiful, in the strict aesthetic sense, and to have this aim is to invite disaster, as one who should seek to fly without wings.

And a page earlier in the same essay, he says this, where his words loveliness and beauty (this time not capitalized) refer respectively to form (or what he calls expression) and content (theme):

The vision of beauty is spontaneous…. And we know that this state of grace is not achieved in the pursuit of pleasure; the hedonists have their reward, but they are in bondage to loveliness, while the artist is free in beauty.

What is lovely to you may not be so to me, but that is of no ultimate matter if our eyes are set on the meaning, the content, of whatever form we individually encounter. And that realization has implications for language and learning. The traditional curriculum named liberal is so called because its study is intended to free one from the merely personal (the expressive), to direct one’s attention instead to the ideas (the theme) which anything particularly attractive to us may embody.

That is why it is futile to argue whether theoretical learning—in language, the rules of grammar and sentence construction and usage—is more or less important than the practical. Theory and practice, like form and content, are correlative, two sides of the same one coin. We can no more do without one than the other. This is the point the poet and writer Mark Van Doren makes in his Liberal Education about the curriculum traditionally called liberal:

Liberal education is nothing if not practical. It studies an art, or a system of arts, designed both by nature and by man to secure that human beings shall be precisely and permanently human.

And he sees this value of the human as the message the ancient Oracle of Delphi was enigmatically pronouncing to one seeking wisdom:

If the student wonders whether his own being [that is, the personal] is end enough, that is because he does not yet know the difference between himself as individual and as person. ’Know thyself’ was an oracle addressed to the individual, charging him to become a person; to know, as a matter of fact, almost everything other than himself, to know the world for what it is, for what it ‘honestly and deeply means,’ and above all to substitute for the inquiry ‘What do I think?’ the inquiry ‘What can be thought?’ The emphasis is not upon his reason but upon reason; not upon himself but upon his kind.

And that kind is the human. All three of these writers are expressing the same belief in the mysterious but fruitful ambiguity of the humanities and the arts, which again all of them see as more than what one makes or learns how to do for one’s own sake and gain. The personal is not enough, and by instead looking to articulate the universals common to each individual, we can speak to the human person who each individual—only an individual by circumstance and happenstance—really is. That is the path on which classical understanding and its romantic freedom may likeliest lie.

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What does it mean to say that one thing implies another? The derivation of the verb is instructive: to fold in, or to enwrap, and the first consonants of its original Latin verb (plicare) can be seen also in our verbs implicate, explicate, and even in the noun diploma, a piece of paper apparently originally folded di, twice. Implication lies at the heart of reasoning, that peculiarly human mental force which tries to find something more in what we have already come upon. In that way we might even say that reasoning is ironic.

All of which can lead us to the question, how much can we see by looking closely at a writer’s language? We see the construction of the sentences on the page, but what can that reasonably imply? The author V. S. Naipaul, for example, opens his autobiographical essay Reading and Writing with this sentence, which if we read it closely, can reveal much about the writer’s written voice:

I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition.

We need read no further to know something of the person we’ve met as we begin this essay. One mark of intellectual strength is the ability to build a linguistic structure that will sustain simultaneously multiple levels of awareness, and if we take the trouble, we can find those ranks here with some quick grammatical analysis.

Naipaul’s sentence begins with a simple, independent assertion, I was eleven, and when we assert, which means to declare something true or false, we are speaking from the rock-ground of rational statement, that level where things make sense to us and where we expect others to be when we live and work cooperatively with them. It is where our everyday world transpires, and our everyday mind sees our everyday world made up of things acting on one another. This sentence begins, then, at ground level.

Immediately, though, the parenthetical phrase no more (parenthetical because it is set off with commas) signals an interior deliberation, and with that we find ourselves having stepped out of the world of the known and into the world of private conjecture. A parenthesis is an aside, a rumination spoken aloud, and it is as if we hear the writer’s mind at work: I was eleven, I don’t believe that I was any older. Had the writer composed his sentence like that, he would have been converting his parenthetical deliberation into a second independent statement; that would have made the two clauses of equal independent rank, keeping both assertions still at rational ground level. Instead, he implied what he decided not to declare.

It would also have been a more prosaic, more common, less interesting because less intellectually rich way of saying what this in fact rich mind wanted to convey. And the same would have been the case had Naipaul applied the predication of the second statement to the first assertion: I was no older than eleven. In this compacted version, any expression of doubt or deliberation is gone; a fact has presented itself to the writer’s mind, and a conclusion was drawn and stated in the predicate. The prosaic is concerned with the obvious, but the style of a sentence (as the demeanor of a person) is sophisticated when all that is known is not necessarily said, but alertly implied.

There follows, then, a subordinate clause, when the wish came to me to be a writer. That construction establishes a third level of awareness, because what is subordinate stands under something superior. Thus far, therefore, the writer’s voice (and since this is an autobiographical essay, we are justified in assuming it also implies the writer himself) has begun on the common ground of a simple assertion, reflected upon itself in the parenthetical, and now returned to augment the original independent thought. When the sentence concludes by next attaching another independent clause after a semicolon, it reveals the sophisticated tenor of the author’s thinking.

A semicolon is a break in the mental flow of a sentence, somewhere in intensity between a period and a comma (both of which marks it contains). It will usually take the place of an omitted conjunction, but here the conjunction and is retained. The effect is to create a diction midway between the formal and the conversational, exactly another instance of a compelling control of levels. The result presented to the reader is of a rich complexity—not complication—which both attracts and intrigues. A much less interesting—because flatter and more obviously sectionalized—way to begin would have been simply to write: I was eleven when the wish came to me to be a writer. Then very soon it was a settled ambition. Naipaul’s mind was too distinguished for such literal plodding.

The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, in his essay “Form and Content in Art,” defined the classical in matters of art as “the spirit of perfect design, craftsmanship, mastery of material and construction; it is the formal spirit, the spirit whose aim is to achieve perfect form, perfect lucidity and expressiveness.” It is concerned, says Collingwood, not only with the what, but with the how, the manner, the form, in which the artist has brought forward a thought. And to the degree that both artist and observer—writer and reader—are concerned to discern what the form might imply, the likelier it will be that the work succeeds in opening hidden new worlds of meaning and pleasure.

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