I’m not really quite sure how to understand the reasoning behind a new phrasing I’ve heard (but haven’t yet read) a few times now recently. Again just the other day, the host of a podcast said to her guest, By the time your and I’s interview appears, this will be old news. It’s a curious and ungrammatical way of simply saying our interview, but it gives us a chance to review and ponder how pronouns are standardly used in English grammar.

The concept at issue here is possession. Language, and more certainly prose language, makes statements about a world it sees, ultimately, to be made up of things. As the very craftsmaster of rationality, this kind of language regards certain things, which include persons and events, to stand in some relationship to other things in a particular scene, and one such relationship is possession: a possessor possesses a possessed. To speak of possession is not necessarily to mean ownership; it may mean that, as in the phrase my house, but possession might also intend to describe something, such as the cake’s ingredients, or to show mutual involvement, as in my wife or my husband.

It is this last relationship that is being expressed in the example we are considering here, your and I’s interview. Both pronouns, your and I’s, are meant to express an involvement each referent holds to the thing interview. The problem, however, is the incorrect (or more permissively, perhaps, nonstandard) construction I’s. The word I is a personal pronoun, and in order to show some kind of possession, the personal pronouns do not use an apostrophe, but have a distinct possessive form of their own: my for I’s, your for you’s, his or her or its for he’s, she’s, or it’s. We use the apostrophe with nouns, where it is placed immediately after the possessor, whether singular or plural: Jane’s interview, the students’ books.

All of this is straight-up basic English, so it’s a bit of a puzzle to understand the whence and why of the neologism I’s. We may dismiss it all and think no more about it (Times change. What’s the big deal?), but if we took the topic to a higher register, one that worried about language as an execution of skillful means, we could argue for a difference between things changing and things changing for a reason. Just as we make a distinction between freedom and license or obligation and duress, may we not also say that there is a difference between change and distortion—change for a reason which produces clarity, and unproductive change for no reason at all? If we regard language as an art—and as an art its precision is all important because the objectivity of precision is at the heart of reason—then what changes we make in skill and style should be to a purpose, to better what has been but which no longer avails. Picasso came to work in a way his predecessors did not because he saw time and space differently, and had to change the manner of painting to accommodate that vision. Change was made necessary, not unnecessarily.

The language arts should be conserving, whether conservative or liberal in their perspective. The old way of saying that was that one worked in or from a tradition as a warrant again idiosyncrasy, that entirely personal way of working that does not invite, but parries, the good thought and attentive comment of others who come to look for meaning in the artifact someone has created, in whatever medium. Always in the language arts there is the clear and present danger of nominalizing, of making something into a noun. With the curious expression I’s, there is the attempt even to make that humble pronoun into a loud noun (the apostrophe proves that), for no discernibly necessary reason. And therein lies a problem of wider importance, because the more we see only other things around us, we risk moving from the properly rational to the rationalistic: things once relatable become unrelatable, isolated individualities. And we humans do not like being alone.

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In 1909—well over a century ago now—the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote a short story entitled The Machine Stops, an underground dystopia, a denatured and artificial environment whose inhabitants (can we call them persons any longer?) “mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

One young person does, however, and when over videoconference he asks his mother to meet with him and hear his doubts, she is impatient and ununderstanding: “’I want you to come and see me.’ Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. ‘But I can see you!’ she exclaimed. ‘What more do you want?’ ‘I want to see you not through the Machine,’ said Kuno.” Our screens today were apparently conceived as plates a century ago.

The mother’s son continues his plea, and the manner in which Forster lays out the boy’s remonstrances can help us as we study more ways to enrich the composition of our paragraphs. Form follows content, and the overarching theme of this section in the story is opposition: fideistic devotion to the Machine and its artificial world versus a critical doubt about its omniscience and omnipresence. In this passage the son, Kuno, makes his protest in a series of sentences which are each constructed and connected to enforce his opposition:

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

The term antithesis is sometimes used more precisely to mean direct opposition rather than a general, or indirect, contrast. The boy denounces his mother’s faith with the classical antithesis between god and man. His first two sentences are straightforward indicatives: you say this and I say that. But with the third sentence, Forster begins to represent his character’s objections in some tightly crafted rhetorical constructions. The first of the two clauses announces the opposing term of men, and the second, imperative clause is abutted to the first not with an expected semicolon, but rather with a comma. Schoolteachers will not like that. We regularly expect a semicolon to replace an omitted conjunction (here and). Forster’s comma, however, preserves the impatience of the son’s retort and leaves the clarifying logic for the next sentence. Great men, but men at once concedes the distinction of the inventors and limits it within the domain of the human. The pinch we feel in reading that fragment is due to its terse ellipsis: there is no verb.

That same adversative conjunction but continues to build opposition between the first and second clauses in each of the following three sentences. Something else, though, begins with the eighth and ninth. Notice that the first of this pair concludes with the word come, and the next sentence begins with that same word: That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Repetition always emphasizes. This technique of directly repeating a word (or phrase) one after the other is a rhetorical device called anadiplosis. The expensive derivation of that classical Greek term simply means to double up again. And we see it happen yet again with the pronoun me between the last two sentences of the passage (though necessarily displaced a step by the verb pay): Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind. Repetition emphasizes a meaning, close repetition secures it.

What disturbs the mother in Forster’s story is her son’s actual life, and that is the “more” he wants from the direct presence of his mother, face to face with her bodily in the same space and time. It is precisely what she does not have time for, and her son hopes that his terse oppositions between you and something like you will make his point and pierce her ersatz heart. The Machine may replicate a presence, but its replication is an appearance, sophisticated in its semblance but absent of the actual and real. The Machine and its acolytes, then and now, do not possess a presence—that exactly through which we humans respond to poetry and prose, music and drama. They reproduce, but do not engender, what, ironically, this now distant mother once indeed did. Earlier in the story, the son told his mother that he had tried to call before, but that she was “always busy or isolated.” “I have,” he tells her, “something particular to say.” Something particular, something human and of its own, something not machinable.

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I heard someone say the other day that he never felt more confident about his writing now that he relied on the assistance of AI, to which a reasonable reply might be that this writer isn’t writing. To feel confident should mean to have faith in one’s own skills, manual or intellectual, and so this so-called writer intends to say, really, that he feels confident in AI’s skill to straighten out what he has handed over—including, eerily, his own mind.

We are at a serious cultural impasse here, and we have rushed ourselves to this edge by coming to believe that language is only a kind of signage that we post along the road in commerce with others, words strung together to signify, or conceptualize, some object or idea to ourselves and those we share a part of life with. Signs, we might say, are two dimensional, flat figures pasted down on flat surfaces as pointers. We expect them to denote, not evoke, and absent the latter, our only goal, we believe, is to get understood as quickly as possible. So whether a writer writes to the end or writes just so much as to then hand over to some ghostwriter human or artificial, it all doesn’t really matter to us. It’s just a question of processing words. And this stifling belief in language as utility has set down deeply now. The irony of the phrase word processing is over a half century old.

But what can language be if not merely a sign? The traditional answer has it that it constitutes a symbolism as well. Where a sign points—and this, of course, is a legitimate if basic use of language—a symbol stands for something, suggests or evokes the meaningful presence of an object or idea, meaningful because of the relationship a writer holds with the symbolized. This is what accounts for literature and for one’s style, that characteristic way one writer will represent something which is necessarily unique because only that particular writer has that particular relationship to an object, event, or idea otherwise knowable to us all. The difference between what is now called linguistics and what used to be called philology is the difference between the science of signs and the science of symbols.

But symbols, unlike signs, can arise only from an interior life, what we as humans possess through awareness, that pearl of great price which machines cannot seriously be said, in any sane discourse which defines its terms, to possess—unless, that is, we have so flattened the notions of interiority and so confused awareness with consciousness that all these terms refer interchangeably only to sensorial realities. Consciousness refers properly to what the active construction of concepts has produced, and under that definition we might be able to speak meaningfully of a robotic consciousness, which is then little more than an astoundingly quick and complex recombination of linguistic structures. For all its semblance of human awareness, we cannot speak of a mature artificial intelligence, because the technology grows only from itself and its own kind.

Awareness, however, which we can describe as mature, refers to the passive reception of realities before they have been represented by an art, including the art of language. Machines produce simulacra of genuine human awareness, certainly, as we might engage with the facsimile of a person speaking in video or audio or virtual reality. But from what human interior life is that virtual personage verisimilarly replying to us? From nowhere more profound than the superficial reconfiguring of linguistic structures—the newly made appearances of which illude us into responding as if they were a presence. And here there is yet another irony, in that the verb illude means not only to deceive, but to mock as well. Authoritarians always come finally to despise their darlings.

Short of refiguring the very definition of humanity, its language and its literature and their place in human culture and practice, how would it be possible to bridge this gulf between language as sign machined into text, and language as symbol sown from reflective human experience? We are left now with deciding upon the value of our own intimations and thoughts, worked out with time and trouble, but for all that still a part of us which we give to others to reflect upon out of their own awareness from a life lived. In this we might find the warm embrace of minds that resound with one another so much more richly than merely an empty echo of linguistic assemblages. The interiority from which we speak and write presumes an awareness realized, not merely a consciousness fabricated.

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The language arts. How would you go about introducing that subject to the middle schooler you’ve decided to homeschool? A friend of mine in that position asked me this question recently. We are inclined these days to just jump in to something, believing that we’ll understand the why of it later, if we ever do at all. Our bias now leans toward the practical at the expense of the theoretical. But if we don’t understand the reason we’re doing or studying or saying something, then how might we ever know whether what we’re doing will add up to anything that makes sense in the end? Futility can exact an existential price.

This need to know why is especially important when it comes to the liberal arts, the foundation of which is the language arts. An art is a skill. That is its first meaning in its original Latin (the Old English synonym is craft). Skill is not simply an attempt, not simply doing what one wishes as one wishes; it is a making in keeping with the nature and limit of the materials one is using, creating something within those restrictions but according to reasons and principles. The criticism often made against the liberal arts—of what use are they?—is really a bit beside the point: no one takes the time and trouble to learn how to do something skillfully if there is no point in doing it. No one. So the question is not whether the liberal and language arts are useful, but what they are useful for. Coming to an answer to that better question takes us straight into anthropology: what do we believe human nature is, for that answer will direct what we do and how we do it. This, in fact, is the basis of the traditional understanding of integrity, of wholeness.

Those thoughts, put that way at least, are for us, not for our middle schoolers, but both we and they must have some sense of the whole which the language arts are meant to serve if we hope to stay motivated. First and foremost, these language skills are preparatory; they are not the end of our education, but means to a means, the first part of the larger body of studies called the liberal arts. The totality of the liberal arts includes literature and mathematics, much of what we call the humanities, but the classical curriculum begins with grammar and logic and rhetoric; these are the subjects which specifically comprise the language arts. The Roman Stoic Seneca said the liberal arts are to push us off in the direction of virtue, a word which in the classical world did not carry the moralistic freight it often does now, but which meant something like a special strength, something similar to the way we might speak of the virtue of exercise, meaning its beneficial qualities. The first three language arts are directive or navigational; they are about learning how to think—not what to think, but how. Gaining facility in that skill makes it likelier that we can find our way to virtue less scathed and battered by life, indeed that we might begin that journey at all.

A good case could be made that to be human is to ask why. Animals accept their place, humans do not. We always want the next thing, and if behind that unsatisfied energy is not the skill to perceive and define and compare and contrast the choices before us with clarity and reason, we risk drifting unmoored in societies as complex and complicated as now cover the world. The fascia of human societies is language. Our consciousness arises in language, we think in language, we encounter one another in language. And the quality of our awareness and thought and sociability—the qualities of our living, our real standard of living—depends on the ease and mastery we enjoy in being able to give form and expression to what is going on in our mind, our interior life. We abhor, and rightly so, the individualized isolation that is so much a part of the modern world, and which is so unlike the rightful solitude from which, as the poets know, true and thoughtful language arises in a reflective life.

The language arts are not about self-expression, but the expression of the self or mind (or even Self, perhaps) of which we are all a part, or to which we all stand in some ultimate relation. We take the trouble to learn the language arts because they make it possible for the human mind to understand itself, and with that understanding, make it more probable, as Emerson said, to bring ourselves safely to port. The literary critic Lionel Trilling has said that the “mind does not move toward its ideal purposes over a royal straight road but finds its way through the thicket of its own confusions and contradictions.” Such difficulties can begin early, and to explain even to middle schoolers that reading and writing and thought and style can bring order and understanding to their lives is to give them the means to real confidence—because it’s real knowledge—about themselves and about the world they will find their way through.

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It might be said with some good degree of truth that the best reason to study language closely—and grammar is the foundation of that study—is the habit of awareness it can help instill. To be aware of what’s going on predisposes us to ask questions and look for the reasons behind the circumstances we find ourselves in, whether fictive or actual. I can imagine few things more important than that, for without reasons we remain either victims of our impressions or automatons at another’s behest. Neither is an option.

The paradox, of course, is that awareness is perceptive and language is constructive. Or perhaps we could say that when we are aware, we are passively discerning, and when we are reading and writing, we are actively analyzing—shaking and sifting out from phrases and clauses and sentences (what an architect might called the built environment of a linguistic world) a meaning a writer has wished to make known in a particular way and therefore to a certain extent. How well those sentences have been built and how well we perceive their design and structure will determine how successful the communicative moment will be.

Compare, for example, these two sentences: When I walked into my apartment, I noticed that the living room window was shut versus When I walked into my apartment, I noticed that the living room window had been shut. We are presented here with two statements which differ only in the predicate of the third clause, where the word shut operates as a participle (unusually, the three principal parts of the verb to shut are all spelled the same). Does each use this word shut to convey the same idea? A participle is an adjective constructed from a verb, and in the first sentence, the participle shut is working alone with the verb was to describe, as all adjectives do, some quality or characteristic of the noun it refers to. The verb was is a copula, and the intent is to describe the disposition or physical circumstance of the noun window as it was discovered by the subject.

In the second sentence, however, that same participle takes on a very different grammatical and semantic role, understanding which will make us aware of a subtle but effective difference in what the subject of the sentence wishes to convey. The word shut here is still the only complement to the verb of the third predicate, but now that verb has changed from the simple was to the compound had been. This kind of change, which we might not register in reading the two sentences quickly, alters the scene significantly. The verb was is the simple past tense of the verb to be, which is doing nothing more as a copula than to connect the noun window with the adjective shut. We are thereby meant to perceive a situation, not an action.

But something did happen in the second sentence with that change to the verb had been. We now have two auxiliaries which, together with the participle, combine to form the past perfect tense (had) and the passive voice (been) of the verb to shut. In this version, then, the word shut works outright as the participle of a finite verb, not merely as a descriptive predicate adjective, as in the first version. This is why in reading the second version we are inclined to wonder, who had shut the window? The cast and hue of the statement is now on action and agency, rather than on circumstance and condition.

Sometimes the adjective and its corresponding participle have different spellings: the window was open versus the window had been opened. But then again we’re back to the same ambiguity with a verb such as to close: the window was closed versus the window had been closed. And if in wider contexts we read similarly that so many lives were disrupted, we are positioned to think about a situation; but if instead we read that so many lives had been disrupted, we are urged to think about who did what to whom—and thereby perhaps remember, and let ourselves be touched more deeply by, the consequences of real actions taken or perpetrated. Much, very much, depends on language, both as it is written and as it is read.

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