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October 30, 2017 - January 8, 2021
For example: Here’s an explanation of the rhetorical term syllepsis: “the use of a word that relates to, qualifies, or governs two or more other words but has a different meaning in relation to each.” Got that? Now let’s say I continue with “. . . such as when Benjamin Franklin said, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’”
Sometimes two examples are better than one, because they allow the reader to triangulate on which aspect of the example is relevant to the definition. What if I add “. . . or when Groucho Marx said, ‘You can leave in a taxi, and if you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff’”?
Ironically, the field of linguistics is among the worst offenders, with dozens of mystifying technical terms: themes that have nothing to do with themes; PRO and pro, which are pronounced the same way but refer to different things; stage-level and individual-level predicates, which are just unintuitive ways of saying “temporary” and “permanent”; and Principles A, B, and C, which could just as easily have been called the Reflexive Principle, the Pronoun Principle, and the Noun Principle.
In a loose, conversational sense, some implies “some, but not all”: when I say Some men are chauvinists, it’s natural to interpret me as implying that others are not. But in a strict, logical sense, some means “at least one” and does not rule out “all”; there’s no contradiction in saying Some men are chauvinists; indeed, all of them are. Many linguists refer to the two meanings as the “upper-bounded” and “lower-bounded” senses, labels borrowed from mathematics, and I could never keep them straight. At last I came across a limpid semanticist who referred to them as the “only” and “at-least”
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Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”
Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion, in which if you close your eyes and someone taps you a few times on the wrist, then on the elbow, and then on the shoulder, it feels like a string of taps running up the length of your arm, like a hopping rabbit. OK, now I get it—a person’s conscious experience of where the early taps fell depends on the location of the later taps.
When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it.
There are two ways in which thoughts can lose their moorings in the land of the concrete. One is called chunking.
Thus we can hold in mind just a few of the letters from an arbitrary sequence like M D P H D R S V P C E O I H O P. But if they belong to well-learned chunks such as abbreviations or words, like the ones that pop out when we group the letters as MD PHD RSVP CEO IHOP, five chunks, we can remember all sixteen.
Our capacity can be multiplied yet again when we package the chunks into still bigger chunks, such as the story “The MD and the PhD RSVP’d to the CEO of IHOP,”
Mnemonists, the performers who amaze us by regurgitating superhuman amounts of information, have spent a lot of time building up a huge inventory of chunks in their long-term memories.
Even when we have an inkling that we are speaking in a specialized lingo, we may be reluctant to slip back into plain speech. It could betray to our peers the awful truth that we are still greenhorns, tenderfoots, newbies. And if our readers do know the lingo, we might be insulting their intelligence by spelling it out. We would rather run the risk of confusing them while at least appearing to be sophisticated than take a chance at belaboring the obvious while striking them as naïve or condescending.
The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.
as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of.
This transition, another staple of the cognitive psychology curriculum, is called functional fixity (sometimes functional fixedness).
We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.
Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth.
the unconscious mastery of language that is our birthright as humans is not enough to allow us to write good sentences.
Literary analysis, poetics, rhetoric, criticism, logic, linguistics, cognitive science, and practical advice on style (including the other chapters in this book) need to refer to things like predicates and subordinate clauses, and knowing what these terms mean will allow a writer to take advantage of the hard-won knowledge of others.
Thinking of grammar as the original sharing app makes it much more interesting and much more useful.
The three nouns in the chapter title refer to the three things that grammar brings together: the web of ideas in our head, the string of words that comes out of our mouth or fingers, and the tree of syntax that converts the first into the second.
Long before the invention of the World Wide Web, cognitive scientists modeled human memory as a network of nodes.
We have learned to associate each thought with a little stretch of sound called a word, and can cause each other to think that thought by uttering the sound.
The code that translates a web of conceptual relations in our heads into an early-to-late order in our mouths, or into a left-to-right order on the page, is called syntax.
Different languages have different grammars, but they all convey conceptual relationships by modifying and arranging words.
Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words.
the engineering design behind a sentence—a linear ordering of phrases which conveys a gnarly network of ideas—is
the rules of syntax don’t specify the order of words but rather the order of categories.
it’s determiner, not modifier. How do we know? Because determiners and modifiers are not interchangeable. You can say Look at the boy or Look at that boy (determiners), but not Look at tall boy (a modifier). You can say Look at the tall boy (determiner + modifier), but not Look at the that boy (determiner + determiner).
Just as a “rook” in chess is defined not as the piece that looks like a little tower but as the piece that is allowed to move in certain ways in the game of chess, a grammatical category such as “noun” is defined by the moves it is allowed to make in the game of grammar.
Another is the grammatical process that inspired the linguist Noam Chomsky to propose his famous theory in which a sentence’s underlying tree—its deep structure—is transformed by a rule that moves a phrase into a new position, yielding a slightly altered tree called a surface structure.9 This process is responsible, for example, for questions containing wh-words, such as Who do you love? and Which way did he go? (Don’t get hung up on the choice between who and whom just yet—we’ll get to that later.) In the deep structure, the wh-word appears in the position you’d expect for an ordinary
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This demandingness is called government, and it can also be seen in the way that verbs and adjectives are picky about their complements.
When enough careful writers and speakers fail to do something that a pencil-and-paper analysis of syntax says they should, it may mean that it’s the pencil-and-paper analysis that is wrong, not the speakers and writers.
You may be inclined to agree with the writer Calvin Trillin when he wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”
I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic.
In a right-branching tree, the most complicated phrase inside a bigger phrase comes at the end of it, that is, hanging from the rightmost branch.
English is predominantly a right-branching language (unlike, say, Japanese or Turkish), so right-branching trees come naturally to its writers.
a left-branching structure can give the reader a headache. The most obvious examples are iterated possessives such as my mother’s brother’s wife’s father’s cousin.
Left-branching trees are a hazard of headline writing. Here’s one that reported the death of a man who achieved fifteen minutes of fame in 1994 for hatching a plot to get Tonya Harding onto the US Olympic skating team by clubbing her main rival on the knee: ADMITTED OLYMPIC SKATER NANCY KERRIGAN ATTACKER BRIAN SEAN GRIFFITH DIES
A blogger posted a commentary entitled “Admitted Olympic Skater Nancy Kerrigan Attacker Brian Sean Griffith Web Site Obituary Headline Writer Could Have Been Clearer.”
Linguists call these constructions “noun piles.”
My favorite explanation of the difference in difficulty between flat, right-branching, and left-branching trees comes from Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks, who takes a flat clause with three branches, each containing a short right-branching clause, and recasts it as a single left-branching noun phrase: “When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.”
In 1950 the linguist Robert A. Hall wrote a book called Leave Your Language Alone. According to linguistic legend, it drew a dismissive review entitled “Leave Leave Your Language Alone Alone.” The author was invited to reply, and wrote a rebuttal called—of course—“Leave Leave Leave Your Language Alone Alone Alone.”
The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily recovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge.
using a comma to separate a subject from its predicate or a verb from one of its complements is among the most grievous sins of mispunctuation. You can get away with it when the need for disambiguation becomes an emergency, as in George Bernard Shaw’s remark “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches” (and in Woody Allen’s addendum “And he who cannot teach, teaches gym”). But in general the divisions between the major parts of a clause, such as subject and predicate, are comma-free zones, no matter how complex the syntax.
TEXTRON MAKES OFFER TO SCREW COMPANY STOCKHOLDERS.
The romantic movement is characterized, as a whole, by the substitution of aesthetic for utilitarian standards. The earth-worm is useful, but not beautiful; the tiger is beautiful, but not useful. Darwin (who was not a romantic) praised the earth-worm; Blake praised the tiger.
English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new. How can a writer reconcile these irreconcilable demands about where the words should go in a sentence?
In fact, it’s the hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language.
Carve the notch above a sentence that does not elaborate or follow from the one that came before.
