One Day in the Life of the English Language

A Microcosmic Usage Handbook

Frank L. Cioffi

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780691165073
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400865758
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A one-of-a-kind handbook that uses a day in the life of written English to illustrate the benefits of effective grammar

Generations of student writers have been subjected to usage handbooks that proclaim, "This is the correct form. Learn it"—books that lay out a grammar, but don't inspire students to use it. By contrast, this antihandbook handbook, presenting some three hundred sentences drawn from the printed works of a single, typical day in the life of the language—December 29, 2008—tries to persuade readers that good grammar and usage matter.

Using real-world sentences rather than invented ones, One Day in the Life of the English Language gives students the motivation to apply grammatical principles correctly and efficiently. Frank Cioffi argues that proper form undergirds effective communication and ultimately even makes society work more smoothly, while nonstandard English often marginalizes or stigmatizes a writer. He emphasizes the evolving nature of English usage and debunks some cherished but flawed grammar precepts. Is it acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition? It is. Can you start a sentence with a conjunction? You can. OK to split an infinitive? No problem.

A grammar and usage handbook like no other, One Day in the Life of the English Language features accessible chapters divided into "Fundamentals," "Fine Tuning," and "Deep Focus," allowing readers to select a level most suited to their needs. It also includes a glossary, a teachers' guide, and a section refuting some myths about digital-age English.

Chapter 1

Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form

Why Learn the Parts of Speech?

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions—isn’t all this just mumbo jumbo? Words just stand for things, right? So why bother with all this jargon?

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift deals with this very issue. The “scientists” in part 3 of his 1726 novel have worked out a curious system of communication: people can carry around objects that they can show one another and thus mutely communicate. Speaking words wears out the lungs, the scientists have concluded. No need for multiple parts of speech here—people just show each other objects (nouns) and get their ideas across through those things. Only “women … the vulgar and illiterate … the common people” rebel against this innovation. Swift’s joke is that nouns can’t convey meaning by themselves, so using the system burdens one with donkey-loads of items. Here is how he describes it:

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever… . since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. (Swift)

The joke is that in a materialistic culture, the things that people own speak louder than what they say. As we acquire more stuff, we become more communicatively burdened or blocked—less articulate, maybe less human.

It’s also fairly clear that whatever “communicating” is taking place has to be fairly primitive. From a linguistic perspective, the whole project of communicating through only nouns would be limiting, if not impossible. Swift’s scientists have engineered a ridiculous method: that’s also what makes the passage funny. In English, fortunately, words are not just denotations of things. We use words for action, for joining, for emphasis, for description, and even for abstract ideas. Perhaps wealthy “sages” don’t have to do too much communicating and have all the time in the world, but the rest of us regular folks, Swift’s “common people,” don’t. So we need multiple parts of speech.

Naturally this leads to the complications inherent in language use, which Swift’s “sages” seem to be rebelling against. One of the problems with parts of speech, for example, is that we can’t definitively divide up the dictionary into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like. Words find their ways into multiple categories. Any noun can probably be a verb, at least in some context: almost every day on my New Jersey Transit train, I hear the announcement, “The last car will not platform at New Brunswick,” using a new verb, to platform, which means to stop at a place where, when the doors open, a platform will be right there, level with the floor of the railroad car. An example I recently heard on the radio also comes to mind. A man who bought his mother’s old car complained about how much he had to pay her: he said, “My mom bluebooked me on the car” (“My Big Break”). (And, curiously, many verb-derived words, called “verbals,” function as nouns, or as adjectives, for that matter.)

Some linguists don’t see the parts of speech as being as separate and distinct as I do (or as distinct as perhaps you were taught). Rather, they envision nouns, verbs, prepositions, and the like as existing on a “quasi-continuum.” This view, put forth in the 1970s by John Robert Ross, is sometimes called “squish grammar” or “fuzzy grammar,” and in it Ross posits a kind of hierarchy of parts of speech: verb—participles—adjectives—prepositions—nouns:

Proceeding along the hierarchy is like descending into lower and lower temperatures, where the cold freezes up the productivity of syntactic rules, until at last nouns, the ultimate zero of this space, are reached. (317)

Verbs have many tenses and forms (conjugations), while nouns can be only singular or plural. Ross concludes that “the distinction between V[erbs], A[djectives], and N[ouns] is one of degree, rather than of kind” (326), an idea that you might find persuasive and possibly helpful in terms of envisioning how the language works.

To give you some idea of how slippery all these categories are, let’s look again at “Garden Path Sentences,” which I introduced above. These are confusing, leading the reader down the wrong path, often because the reader misapprehends key words’ parts of speech. In the sentence “The old man the boat,” for example, most readers take in the first three words as article, adjective, noun, and expect the next part of the sentence to be about what the old man does. But the sentence should be taken in as article, noun, verb, with the meaning “The old people make up the crew of the boat.”

Here’s the key: you need to figure out how words fulfill varying duties within a sentence. You need to intuitively grasp the inner workings of the English sentence.

While I can’t cover every case, every nuance of the language (I refer you to Jespersen, Quirk et al., or Huddleston and Pullum for authoritative and complete guides), I can urge you to scrutinize more self-consciously both your own sentences and those of others. Seeing sentences as composed of various elements that work and interconnect in clearly established and logical patterns will, I hope, transform the way you envision and use language. But the goal isn’t to make you into a pedantic nitpicker; instead, it’s to help you see and internalize the patterns of the English sentence. I want to sharpen your understanding of the language you produce and the language you encounter, to make you a better listener, and to enhance your writing’s communicativeness, exactness, and power.

Fundamentals

Nouns

Definition: Typically defined as “a word for a person, place, or thing,” a noun is usually the easiest kind of word to add to your vocabulary in a language. Remember that a “thing” might be an abstract concept, that is, something intangible, imaginary, or even nonexistent: liberty, hatred, righteousness, hell, nirvana.

Verbs

Definition: A verb is usually described as a word denoting action. Verbs can also show a state of existence (with a to be verb, such as am, are, is, was, were, been, being) or possession (variations of to have). The International Herald Tribune article “Pardon of Jailed Official Angers Sarkozy’s Foes” includes the following sentence, whose verbs denote slow-motion, offstage-sounding action, but action just the same:

Jean-Charles Marchiani, 65, helped free French hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and Bosnia in the 1990s, and served in the European parliament and as a governor in the south of France. (Derschau)

Helped free and served constitute the “action” of this sentence. Verbs can be words of “action” that’s internal, action that is metaphoric, action that doesn’t involve movement, or action that takes place over a long period of time.

Verbs embody and depict events taking place, incidents occurring, states of mind, and states of being. They show, as if filmically, what happens, is happening, happened, will happen, could happen, would happen. They also can “link” one noun to another or to an adjective, setting up a rough equivalence.

Nouns and Verbs Together

Typically a noun and verb work together to create a sentence. But the noun has to function as a subject, and the verb must function as a predicate. The noun has to be the entity doing the action or existing, while the verb enacts what that noun is doing.

We know we have a full sentence via something called “sentence sense,” a term that some teachers and writers use, suggesting that recognizing a sentence is like smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing, or balance: it can’t be taught; it’s almost instinctive, innate. It’s sort of a seventh sense.

Here is one way to envision a sentence: If you enter a crowded room, and you have only a brief window of time to speak (i.e., a short interval during which everyone will momentarily hush and listen to you), what kind of utterance should you make? Only a full sentence will effectively convey a relatively clear and complete idea. This could be simply an interjection—“Yes!!”—or it could be an imperative (command), such as “Get out!” or “Party!” all of which are complete without additional sentence elements. Were you to shout something that could not be construed as a sentence, it would probably provoke puzzlement or laughter: “Mxyzptlk!” And a declaration such as “Among!” or “Perhaps!” might have some limited communicative value, though I’m not sure either would convey a “relatively clear or complete idea” to a roomful of people. Perhaps this marks a limit to the crowded room scenario.

Think of a sentence as a Stand-Alone Linguistic Unit of Thought or Expression: a SALUTE. In what I am calling a “typical sentence,” a “SALUTE,” you need a subject (note that in the command form this is implied: “[You] get out!”); you need a verb working with that subject; and that verb needs to have a tense: past, present, or future (or a perfective variant, i.e., with had, has, or have). But remember, the sentence has to be a SALUTE. It’s something that might depend on antecedent or subsequent language, but it does not have to do so. While it is almost always offered within the context of a paragraph...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Navigation Tips
• Introduction
• 1. Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form
• 2. Words That Modify and Orient: Adjectives, Adverbs, Conjunctions, Prepositions, Articles, Interjections
• 3. Who Is He/She? Pronouns
• 4. Punctuation, Part I—The Comma: Promiscuous Uses
• 5. Punctuation, Part II—The Colon, Semicolon, and More Mysteries of Punctuation
• 6. Diction: Sentences as Clockwork
• Appendix I: Fifteen Myths of Digital-Age English
• Appendix II: Using This Book to Teach College Writing: A Microguide
• Fifty Key Terms: A Microglossary
• Works Cited
• Index