There are regions in the land of grammar that make for rugged terrain. One is the infinitive and another is the conditional sentence, and where those two masses meet the land gets steep. You can find a sentence there like this one, which is similar in construction to one I read recently in the news: …
Author Archives: rultimo
Animation
The term agency is used regularly in language study to distinguish between a logical subject and a grammatical subject of a clause. We say, for example, that an older couple purchased the house next door, and the subject of that sentence, older couple, is meant to represent the real, actual entity which purchased the house. …
Slow Readers
Reading literature is a slow business, unhurried, steady, pick-and-shovel work through an often at first unyielding field of words. Forgetting that makes what is valuable a frustration, and we risk leaving the literary land before there’s fruit to harvest. The American author O. Henry (the pen name of William Sidney Porter) was a prolific writer …
Sharp Writers, Sharp Readers
Sharp writers make fine distinctions and sharp readers find them. In a collection of his work entitled What Are People For? (1990), the Kentucky novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry, long a steward of both the land and traditional thought, opens his essay “God and Country” with this careful sentence: The subject of Christianity and …
Reading Patiently
I had occasion in a recent post (The Mystery of Reason) to quote the British philosopher A. E. Taylor, who was commenting on the riches to be found in a certain dialogue of Plato. His sentence was as difficult as his insight, and it bears understanding to know how the author composed that sentence, because …