THE SENSATIONAL SENTENCE FRAGMENT: Yes, it often plays a role in good writing. A surprisingly big role.

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A teacher's typical reaction upon spotting a sentence fragment.

       In some circles—especially in junior-high, high-school, and college composition classes—the sentence fragment is treated a little like dog poop on the living room rug. Most teachers wrinkle their noses at the sentence fragment. This is understandable. Students who write unintentional sentence fragments indicate that they don’t know the three essential elements of a standard English sentence: a subject and a verb in an independent clause.

Examples of typical student sentence fragments (underlined):

Fragment: Beatrice leaped into the cave. Even though, Dante was afraid of the dark.

Fragment: Fluffy licking his nether parts and purring loudly while the mouse frolicked.

Fragment: This was all Bruce wanted. To pass organic chemistry.

     Most teachers would recommend that these sentences be corrected something like this:

Correct: Beatrice leaped into the cave, even though Dante was afraid of the dark.

Correct: Fluffy licked his nether parts and purred loudly while the mouse frolicked.

Correct: This was all Bruce wanted: to pass organic chemistry.

     If I were teaching the students who wrote the fragments above, I too would say that they needed to be cleaned up—not because they are fragments, but because they are fragments that don’t work.

     Some fragments do work. And work well. A fragment doesn’t have to be dog poop.

     Below are some pieces of first-rate writing.  Each has at least one fragment at the heart of it. See if you can identify the fragments. Afterward, I’ll talk about how those fragments work.

    

Take my wife. Please.

—joke usually attributed to comedian Henny Youngman.

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 P.M. And stop them.

—from “Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Time magazine, Dec. 5, 2011, p. 47.

A badly or maliciously programmed bot strain might decide not just to clean up a tire dump but to eat the rubber in tires and asphalt tar binder. Everywhere. Or all the cotton. Or polyester, or insulation on electrical wiring, or ‘paper money.’

—from Enough, by Bill McKibben, p. 90 (describing the potential dangers of nano-size robots).

By the same evening he was able to stand with the doctor’s help and let himself be washed. His legs were thin as sticks, and trembling, but the doctor made him walk upon the spot until he was exhausted and overcome by nausea. His ribs hurt more than ever, and he was informed that they would probably be a torment for months, at every inhalation. He should use his stomach muscles to breathe, he was informed, and when he tried it, it hurt the wound in his abdomen. Pelagia fetched a mirror and showed him the livid scar across his face and his incipient and Hellenic beard. It itched and bothered him almost as much as his scars, and it gave him a brigand’s air. “I look like a Sicilian,” he said.

    That night he was fed his first solid meal. Snails.

—from Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres, p. 342

I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

—from “For Esme—with Love and Squalor,” by J.D. Salinger (first page)

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

—from the “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” chapter in Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. . . .

— from The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 345

Henny Youngman said, "I take my wife everywhere. But she keeps coming back."

    

     Let’s start with the first example (I’ll underline the fragments in the examples):

Take my wife. Please.

     Would this famous joke work if it were written “Take my wife, please”? Not very well. It works best with “Please” as a sentence fragment. Let’s analyze how the joke works. (I know, I know: you should never analyze a joke. Indulge me.)

     When you get to the first period, you think that the original statement (“Take my wife”), and hence the original thought, is complete. The period makes you pause, prepared for a new thought—then boom!, with the perfect timing of a good comedian you’re hit with a punch line that you weren’t expecting. That one-word sentence fragment “Please”—the surprise addition—makes it all work.

      One common kind of effective fragment, then, is the “surprise addition” fragment. With the first period, you make your reader think a thought is over—that’s what periods ordinarily tell us—but then you add a fragment that, as a surprise, really finishes the thought. It’s the period that comes before a fragment that sets up the whole effect.

     The Time magazine example works pretty much the same way:

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 P.M. And stop them.

We readers, programmed to expect grown-ups to encourage students to study more, are not prepared for the government employees to make them stop. Putting “And stop them” in a fragment (instead of attaching it to the previous sentence as standard syntax would demand) makes it doubly a surprise. We expect the thought to be ended at the period after “10 P.M.” So, unprepared, we’re surprised when the fragment—and the idea it contains—jumps at us like a friend popping out of a room we thought was empty. (Note: It would be a better surprise if the writer had left out the heavy-handed spoiler “counterintuitive” in the previous sentence.)

      Remember: The period that precedes a fragment acts to lull the reader into complacency. He thinks the idea is finished. He’s ready to leave the room. Then boo!, you jump at him with the surprise fragment that really finishes the idea.

Bill McKibben's book Enough examines the dangers of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

      The Bill McKibben example, from his thought-provoking book Enough, works in a similar but not exactly the same way:

A badly or maliciously programmed bot strain might decide not just to clean up a tire dump but to eat the rubber in tires and asphalt tar binder. Everywhere. Or all the cotton. Or polyester, or insulation on electrical wiring, or ‘paper money.’

     Here the reader thinks it’s bad enough that the insane nanobots (which were programmed just to clear up one pile of rubber tires) go crazy and start eating more nearby tires and even the roads. After the period at the end of the first sentence, we readers relax a bit, digesting a pretty frightening image: crumbling roads, cars with disintegrating tires. But surprise!, the thought is not over. “Everywhere.” This first fragment is the first surprise: It’s not just the tires and roads in one area the nanobots will eat; it’s the tires and roads all over the world. Yipes! It’s worse than we thought. Then, as we think that that thought is finally over (because the thought in English sentences is supposed to be over at the period), we get more: the bots will eat all the cotton, too! Then another added fragment: and they’ll eat all the polyester or all the electrical stuff or even all the money. This paragraph ends with three fragments that build on each other, until finally, shaken out of our period-ends-the-thought contentment by each new fragment, we realize that in a nanobot world (according to McKibben) people will be naked, powerless, and destitute. Everywhere.

     The McKibben example thus illustrates another kind of effective fragment: The “don’t relax yet—it gets even worse” fragment. The thought in English sentences is supposed to be over at the period. But not when you add a fragment.

Louis de Bernieres' novel Corelli's Mandolin is a modern classic. Skip the mediocre movie. Read the great book.

      The example from Louis de Berniere’s beautiful, sweet, romantic, horrifying, and funny novel Correli’s Mandolin works still another way.

By the same evening he was able to stand with the doctor’s help and let himself be washed. His legs were thin as sticks, and trembling, but the doctor made him walk upon the spot until he was exhausted and overcome by nausea. His ribs hurt more than ever, and he was informed that they would probably be a torment for months, at every inhalation. He should use his stomach muscles to breathe, he was informed, and when he tried it, it hurt the wound in his abdomen. Pelagia fetched a mirror and showed him the livid scar across his face and his incipient and Hellenic beard. It itched and bothered him almost as much as his scars, and it gave him a brigand’s air. “I look like a Sicilian,” he said.

    That night he was fed his first solid meal. Snails.

    A consummate, almost classical stylist, de Bernieres has few fragments in his work (unlike Time magazine, which uses them a lot. A lot.). De Berniere’s style runs more toward longish, elegant, compound/complex sentences, like most of those in the first paragraph here. That’s partly why the final sentence fragment—the single word “Snails”—is so effective. That long first paragraph and all those richly worded sentences, filled with details of the injured soldier’s condition, have left us readers almost writhing in pain with him. We are even prepared for more graphic and painful detail. But instead, with an abrupt change of pace, we get a new brief paragraph and a short penultimate sentence: That night he was fed his first solid meal. For a moment we think that’s the end (we don’t really need to know what the meal was, after all) or we imagine, for just the briefest moment (before it registers that there’s another word), a mundane first meal like mashed potatoes or lamb chops or cereal. Or maybe a fancy celebratory meal like steak and cake. Then the surprise, both in style and substance: “Snails.”

     Here the sentence fragment is almost magical. The word “snails” is short and plain, after all, and snails as a food is always a surprise, anyway—doubly so in the context of a badly injured soldier’s first solid meal. “Snails” is so strange that it almost makes one laugh.

     De Bernieres is illustrating some other principles here: Syntax, word choice, content, and context all work together in great writing. A great sentence fragment creates surprise in all those areas. First, a sentence fragment by its very nature violates the rules of standard syntax, especially when a writer has been, till then, using much more complex syntax. That’s the first surprise. (“Syntax,” by the way, is just a fancy word for sentence architecture.) Second, a good sentence fragment uses brief, unexpected words—usually simple ones like “please,” and “everywhere” and “snails.” Third, a good sentence fragment usually surprises by its content: Who would have expected the soldier’s first solid meal to be snails? Fourth, and finally, a good sentence fragment surprises by the context in which it’s placed: long sentences, the almost clinical description of pain and convalescence, followed by . . . snails?

     In this case, the fragment “Snails.” also ends a chapter of the book—a chapter otherwise painful in many ways. It’s a perfect snapped-shut, mood-shifting ending for a chapter.

     Let me say a bit more about this fragment. Some of you might be asking this: Couldn’t de Berneires’ last sentence simply have been rewritten in standard punctuation? Like this:

     That night he was fed his first solid meal: snails.

     Yes, it could have been written that way. But the effect would not quite have been the same, for at least two reasons. First off, the colon would tell the reader instantly to expect a description of the meal. The period does not prepare you for that. That means the colon would have undermined the surprise factor just a bit. And second, leaving “Snails” between periods, like a sentence unto itself, forces the reader to invent the sentence elements (subjects, verbs) and the implications that might go with it. For example: “Of all things, the meal was snails” or “How strange that snails were the meal” or “Surely no one would have expected that the meal would be snails” or “It was a gross meal of snails.” In other words, the special oddness of snails (or, if the previous context of the novel calls for it, the special appropriateness of snails) is emphasized by the fragment far better than it would be if the word simply finished the previous sentence by coming after a colon.

    

J.D. Salinger's short story "For Esme—With Love and Squalor" is one of the great stories of the 20th century.

       The J.D. Salinger quote offers a differ kind of fragment:

I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

     Here, the fragment at the end is not, I think, so much designed to surprise the reader as to reflect the state of mind of the writer/narrator. We will come to learn that the narrator of this famous and moving short story is a soldier psychologically damaged by war. This paragraph, which comes on the first page of the story, helps begin to establish the soldier’s mental state. He’s self-conscious about his writing and its effect (especially on the groom). He’s thoughtful and nostalgic (thinking back six years). He wants to come across as a bit rebellious (he doesn’t care if the groom is upset by what he’s writing; he claims that he wants the groom to be upset). He even claims he’s not trying to please anyone. This is an odd claim. So odd, in fact, that he stops, pauses, and then, almost as if to explain his motives to himself, writes his sentence fragment: “More, really, to edify, to instruct.” Here, once again, the period before the fragment is the key: It is the pause during which the writer himself literally stops to think. He wants to consider what he is about to say. He wants, in fact, to consider, or reconsider, his purpose in writing. The fragment is his syntactically stumbling attempt to do that. (Note how chopped up the fragment is by commas.)

     A fragment, then, surrounded as it is by periods, can indicate that a writer’s (or narrator's) progress has been put on pause. It can give the impression of a writer stepping back, gathering himself, and mulling things over before he moves on. Perhaps even searching his soul a bit.

Henry David Thoreau knew the power of the sentence fragment.

      If Salinger’s sentence fragment reflects the narrator’s self-consciousness and tentativeness, Thoreau’s does just the opposite. It is a self-confident and assertive shout-out in the middle of a paragraph.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

     Here the fragment—“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”—bursts out as if the writer simply could not contain himself any longer within the strictures of standard English grammar. And of course, such a fragment also does what most sentence fragments do: It gives extra emphasis to the idea within the fragment. It’s like putting it on a billboard in the middle of an otherwise empty field.

    (Question for students: Later in the paragraph, Thoreau writes, "Simplify, simplify." This is not a fragment. Why not?)

Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible looks at missionary life in Africa.

     Finally, we have the long paragraph from Barbara Kingsolver’s spectacular and profound novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Our circle was so large the shouts we heard from the other side seemed to come from another country. Soon all sound was swallowed by the fire. It did not roar but grumbled, cracked, shushed, sucking the air from our throats and all speech with it. The flame rose and licked the grass and we all moved forward, chasing the line of brightness ahead of us. Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass, leaving nothing of life behind. Nothing but hot, black, bare ground and delicate white filaments of ash, which stirred and crumbled under the trample of bare feet. Now the men rushed ahead with bows cocked, impatient for the circle to shrink toward its center. Smaller and smaller the circle ungrew, with all the former life of a broad grassy plain trapped inside. The animals all caught up in this dance together, mice and men. Men who pushed and pranced, appearing to us as dark stick puppets before the wall of fire. The old people and children came along slowly behind. We were like odd ruined flagpoles, bent double, with our bright clothes flapping. Slow scavengers. We fanned out across the hissing black field, picking up charred insects. Most common were the crisp nguka caterpillars, favorite snack of Anatole’s schoolboys, which resembled small twigs and were impossible to see until I learned to sense their particular gray curve. We picked them up by the basketful until they filled my mind’s eye so completely I knew I would see them in my sleep. . . .

     This excerpt illustrates, finally, one other use for sentence fragments: They speed the prose along, often with an intentional unruliness. More particularly, they can help generate scenes of hurry, tumult, even chaos. Here Kingsolver is describing a nighttime hunt-by-fire in Africa, the fire being used to flush out animals. The narrator is a child, for whom the scene is new and confusing. The sentence fragments, usually lacking the verbs that would make them complete sentences, come at us like sudden fire-lit images. It’s almost as if the writer is too rushed or overwhelmed to fill in the verbs. Syntactically unregulated themselves, such fragments mirror the disorder at the heart of a scene like this.

     

      So. Sentence fragments. Not dog poop at all. Rare gems, instead.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The terrible beauty of metaphors and similes

Metaphors and similes are the tactical nuclear weapons of writing.

“In midafternoon. . . a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills.”— E.B. White describing a thunderstorm, from the essay “Once More to the Lake”

“She then blew a note on her pitch pipe, and the children, like so many underage weight-lifters, raised their hymn-books.”— J.D. Salinger describing a children’s choir, from “For Esme with Love and Squalor”

“It was like saying good-bye to a statue.”— Ernest Hemingway describing a man in a room with the corpse of the woman he had loved, from A Farewell to Arms

“[In the hospital] people didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.”— Joseph Heller on why being in a hospital is healthier than being outside one, from Catch-22

“She often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”— Virginia Woolf describing a housewife and mother, from To the Lighthouse

“It was as though he had fallen into a sewer.”— William Faulkner describing a man beginning a complicated relationship with a woman, from Light in August

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”— Mark Twain, from his Autobiography

“[T]he second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window.”—John Updike, describing a baseball game, from “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”

    I have written in previous posts about what I consider to be “The 5 Rules of Good Writing.” (See, for example, this link.) It is more difficult—probably impossible—to say what makes great writing. Nevertheless, I think I’m safe in saying this: Great writers give us great metaphors and similes.

    Metaphors and similes are the tactical nuclear weapons of writing: their power is so great that, in general, they should be used only sparingly.

"She often felt she was nothing but a sponge. . . "

    A metaphor, of course, is a direct claim that two apparently different things are the same. “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man.” Here, obviously, Twain is equating biographies with clothes and buttons. He doesn’t say that biographies are like clothes and buttons. He says they are clothes and buttons. This is, when you think about it, a bizarre and ridiculous claim. At first, our (literal and logical) left brain tells us, “Wait, that’s just not true!” Then a small explosion occurs in our more imaginative and open-minded right brain, and his point seems absolutely true—indeed, more true than what we thought was true before we read his words: biographies really don’t get down to the real person; they deal only with a person’s superficial trappings. The metaphor has changed the very geography of our thinking, like mountaintop removal by explosive.

    Likewise, when Virginia Woolf says the housewife in To the Lighthouse felt she “was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions,” the woman’s identification with a kitchen cleaning object is written as absolute. This is jarring at first, then eye-opening, then (especially in the context of the novel) downright tragic.

    This is that. That’s what a metaphor claims. One thing that makes metaphors so powerful is that the metaphor is a literal lie: This really isn’t that. Biographies are not clothes. The housewife is not a sponge. There really aren’t any snare drums or cymbals in a thunderstorm, and there are not really gods up there licking their chops. And yet, thanks to the flexibility of the human mind, the lie of the metaphor transforms instantly into a truth so powerful that, after a good metaphor, how we experience the world is changed forever.

". . . like so many underage weightlifters."

    A simile is a more modest metaphor. A simile doesn’t say the two things apparently different are the same, just that they are like each other. Similes often use the word “like”: “Like so many underage weight-lifters.” Salinger doesn’t say the children in the choir are weightlifters, only that they are similar to them. The effect isn’t quite as dramatic and intense as a metaphor; rather than blowing up the mountain, a good simile more or less re-landscapes the yard. A good simile can still bring a smile—or goosebumps. Updike’s comparison of a poor-fielding shortstop to an open window is outright funny (and it’s done without the word “like”; there are other ways to make a simile). Heller’s description of a human body that has just plummeted to the sidewalk—“like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream”—and Hemingway’s “like saying goodbye to a statue” bring goosebumps of two different kinds.

    I’ve talked here about “good” and “great” metaphors and similes. I’m not smart enough to fully explain what makes metaphors and similes great, but I can say a few things with some certainty:

"Dead as a doornail" is a simile that is as dead as . . . what?

1) Good metaphors and similes are original. This is the most important thing about them. When we see a metaphor or simile that we’ve read or heard before—an unoriginal one—it undermines our respect for the writer; we think of him as having stolen another’s idea and trying, like a shady car dealer, to sell it to us as new.

     Besides, clichéd metaphors and similes simply do nothing for us. “Dead as a doornail” was a brilliant simile the first time it was used. The second writer to use it was a clever thief who knew a good thing when he stole it. All the writers who’ve used it since simply lack imagination or are too lazy to engage their imaginations at all. “Dead as a doornail” is such a dead simile that it doesn’t even spark an image in our mind. Who even knows what a “doornail” is anymore? Here are some other once-alive, now-dead similes and metaphors: “don’t sit there like a bump on a log,” “she’s as big as a house,” “he’s a bear of a man,” and “she’s a peach.” Dead language.

     On the other hand, Faulkner’s simile for a man beginning a difficult relationship with a woman—“It was as though he had fallen into a sewer”—is spectacularly and terrifyingly fresh. It raises in our imaginations all the emotional muck and darkness and stench of a bad relationship that is hard to climb out of. The fresh simile takes our imaginations beyond the plain language itself into the poor man’s future life.

2) Good metaphors and similes compare things that really are alike somehow, in ways we have never noticed ourselves. Part of the joy they bring is our having the similarity pointed out. Young choir members lifting hymnals really do look like “underage weightlifters.” The build-up to a thunderstorm really is a series of different drum sounds. A dead person really is like a statue, though it takes a courageous writer to say so.

     A curious phenomenon is this: Almost any two things are alike, if you turn them into a metaphor or simile and then let the reader’s imagination go to work. I tried to come up with some bad similes and metaphors here, comparing things that were incomparable, and they all turned out to be kind of interesting: “John is asparagus.” “My living room is a sewing kit.” “English Composition is a stick of TNT.” “Life is like a toadstool.” But for such out-of-a-grab-bag similes and metaphors to work, they would probably need some explanation—and having to explain them can be as deadly to metaphors and similes as to jokes. (Teachers: It can be an enjoyable and illuminating exercise to play a kind of "MadLibs" game with metaphors and similes. Have two students write down nouns without showing them to each other. Then make a metaphor or simile of them. Thus "cricket" and "thermometer" become the metaphor "A cricket is a thermometer." This seems silly until you remember that the rate a cricket chirps is affected by the temperature! You and your students will be surprised by the effectiveness of even random comparisons like this.)

3) Good metaphors and similes usually anchor an idea—often an abstract idea—in the concrete. That is, they give us something to see, taste, touch, smell or hear in our imaginations. Instead of the abstract "bad weather," we hear E.B. White's concrete drums; instead of the abstract "shortstop incompetence," we see Updike's open window; instead of an abstract "bad relationship," we smell Faulkner's sewer and feel its muck. (For more on the importance of concrete writing, see this link.)
     It is possible, though rare, to reverse this approach to metaphor and compare the concrete to the abstract: "The paper boy's old bicycle sat on the driveway like red reliability." "The carrots he left uneaten were guilt on porcelain." "Her wrinkled face was his wealth." This comparison of the concrete to the abstract is actually rather enjoyable to pull off once in a while. (The foregoing examples are my own.)

4) Good metaphors and similes resonate throughout the whole piece of writing. It turns out as Salinger’s great short story "For Esme, With Love and Squalor' goes on, for example, that one of the young choir members—Esme herself—really is lifting a rather large amount of emotional weight in her life; she is an underage weightlifter in more ways than one. And the wife and mother who is the main character of To the Lighthouse finds herself surrounded by the mundane appurtenances of household life—things like sponges—and is, at times, taken for granted by her family and friends, as if she were nothing but a piece of kitchen equipment herself, good mainly for cleaning up their messes.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

     All the examples of good metaphors and similes I’ve mentioned till now are from fine prose. It’s the poets, however, who are the great masters of metaphor and simile. The opening stanza of one of the most important poems of the 20^th Century will serve as an example:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

    This is the beginning of “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats. To understand the metaphor at work here, you need to know that a “gyre” is a spiral that gets wider and wider as it goes upward, and that in the sport of falconry, the falcon leaves its handler and flies in wider and wider circles, higher and higher, until it locates a prey, which it seizes and brings back to its handler, who calls to it. Yeats is describing a world that he sees as falling into chaos and violence. The metaphor that begins the poem is of a falcon that has flown so high, in circles so wide that it has lost contact with the voice of its master—its “centre.” The falcon is now lost. This is Yeats’s metaphor for a world that has lost its bearings, that is spinning out of control, that has nothing—no “centre”—to give it meaning and order, no words to console or control it. The world Yeats describes is as lost as a falcon, wild and confused, without a voice of reason to return to.

      The rest of the poem is equally powerful, with equally powerful metaphors: the “blood-dimmed tide,” for example, and, at the end, a “rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem” to begin a “second coming” that is not glorious, but horrific. This poem has been said to define the entire 20^th century, with its world wars, its holocaust, its many civil wars, its atomic terrors. When I went to last fall’s “Rally for Sanity” on the Washington Mall, among the thousands of people there, I saw at least half a dozen signs quoting this poem, signs saying, “The centre cannot hold,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The lost-falcon metaphor has, for millions of readers, defined a century. “The Second Coming” was, amazingly, written in 1919.

". . . like a patient etherised upon a table."

      Another poem that transformed the way the world saw itself in the early 20^th Century begins, not with a metaphor, but with a simile:

Let us go then, you and I,           

When the evening is spread out against the sky           

Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . .

     This, of course, is the beginning of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written by T.S. Eliot in 1917. It is a poem that describes a man looking for meaning and direction in his life, frightened and bored and both oversensitized and desensitized by crippling self-consciousness. He is not your traditional grand hero of poetry; he is, in fact, one of poetry’s great anti-heroes. The simile “like a patient etherized upon a table” is a stark, unpretty, modern simile like none other that had ever appeared in literature before (at least not in great literature that I know of). The entire atmosphere of the world Eliot invites us into is like an anesthetic ("etherized"), and the time and place—by extension, the age and the world—are rendered numb, helpless, vulnerable, inert, deeply sick and in need of a cure, “like a patient etherized upon a table.” Like Yeats, Eliot was describing an entire generation that was struggling (especially given the horrors of World War I) with emotional deadening, self-questioning, and sickness of heart. This is simile at its most powerful.

"Out, out, brief candle!"

     Perhaps the greatest giver of metaphors and similes in English is, yes, our friend Shakespeare. From “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to “it is the east, and Juliet is the sun,” Shakespeare was such a fountain of phenomenal metaphors and similes that it’s difficult to know where to begin praising him. I’ll settle here for looking in astonishment at these ten famous lines from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

     My god. The passage starts with the metaphor that the future days of our lives (“tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”) will be nothing but a creature that “creeps.” Shakespeare reduces time itself to mere “syllables”—sounds without meaning. Any one life is but a “brief candle,” while existence itself is a kind of darkness—a “walking shadow.” “Shadow” could also mean a ghostly figure, and the ghost itself is just an actor (a bad one, at that) who shows up briefly on stage and then is seen no more—a terrifyingly accurate depiction of a person’s life and perhaps of human life itself. Finally, life is a “tale told by an idiot,” loud and passionate and irrational, “signifying nothing.” Our life is nothing but a meaningless story, told in furious jibberish. Yipes. It’s hard to make yourself brush your teeth or eat your spinach on a day you read such writing.

     Some might accuse Shakespeare of piling on the metaphors and, indeed, mixing them here. (To call John an asparagus in one sentence and a cauliflower in the next would be to mix your metaphors.) But Shakespeare’s many metaphors here echo and resonate with each other: meaningless syllables foreshadow “a tale told by an idiot” and the “light” from our yesterdays is reflected later in the candle and countered by the walking shadow. The meaningless syllables even echo the witches' weird incantations ("Double, double, toil and trouble") in Act IV of the play, and the candle reflects that seen earlier, when Lady Macbeth wanders the castle at midnight with one in her hand.

     This is metaphor-making at the highest level. We are not the same after hearing "it is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing." Shakespeare has cast one of our deepest fears—that life is absurd, meaningless—in the eternal bronze of metaphor.
     If I might mix my own metaphors, let me put it this way: Great metaphors and similes remap the world and offer us new candles by which to navigate it.

Shakespeare—the great maker of metaphors.

IN DEFENSE OF THE UNCOMMON WORD

Hemingway (above) and Faulkner (below) may have disagreed about each other's writing, but both believed that the right word is always best, even if readers have to look it up in the dictionary.

    On Facebook recently, a writer friend recalled an exchange of insults between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Apparently Faulkner claimed, disparagingly, that Hemingway “has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” In reply, Hemingway said, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

     I don’t know if either writer actually said either of those things. If he did, I’m surprised. As great prose stylists, they both practiced the following rule of good writing:

     It doesn’t matter if a writer uses a word that is universally known or one that most readers have to look up. The object is to use the right word, however common or uncommon it is.

     (For affirmation of this idea, see the Mark Twain quote on the right side at the top of this blog page.)

     As E.B. White puts it in The Elements of Style, and many others have echoed, it is, generally, best to use “plain” words instead of “fancy” words. Don’t write “utilize,” for example, if “use” will do; don’t write “prevaricate” if “lie” will do; don’t “perambulate” where you can just as well “walk.”

Hemingway was famous for his “plain” style; Faulkner, for his “fancy” one. In fact, however, if you turn to any page in Faulkner, you’re unlikely to find a word you’ll have to look up.* Both Hemingway and Faulkner are wonderful examples of writers who used the right word, and most of their words are familiar to most readers.

     Occasionally, though, any good writer will use words that are uncommon—that he knows many readers, even educated ones, will have to look up. This blog post is a defense of the uncommon word.

Corelli's Mandolin, a beautifully written novel that uses many uncommon words.

     Consider the opening paragraph of one of my all-time favorite novels, Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres:

Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse. He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.

    

    This paragraph is an example of delightful writing, although it uses several uncommon words and phrases: “calving,” “lanced,” “dosed,” “lady of easy virtue,” “Salvarsan,” and—the fanciest—“prestidigitation.” A reader with a good vocabulary would not have to look up any of these words (except for “Salvarsan,” obviously a medicine), but the words are, nonetheless, uncommon. Even the word “fruitful” is used here in an uncommon way; that’s exactly what makes it funny. Are these words and phrases bad because they're unusual? Of course not. In fact, I would claim they are just about perfect here.

     In the two pages that follow the paragraph that starts his novel, de Bernieres uses the following words: “stalagmitic,” “effulgent,” “importunate,” “luminous,” “epiphany,” “exfoliated,” “scurf,” “cankerous,” “obdurate,” “recalcitrant,” “exorbitant,” and “iatric.” I have a pretty good vocabulary, but even I had to look up “iatric” (having to do with healing) and “scurf” (a scaly crust), and none of the other words here are exactly common. De Bernieres uses all these “fancy” words to describe the removal of a dried pea from an old man’s ear. The two pages are hilarious and memorable. We know we are in the company of a first-rate writer; his every “uncommon” and “fancy” word is exactly right.

     Let me repeat: Uncommon words are fine if they are the right words.

     I have some personal experience with this subject. For ten years I wrote a monthly 1,000-word column for the last page of Memphis magazine. The column was supposed to be humorous, and occasionally it was. I managed to syndicate the columns to a few other newspapers and magazines around the country, so I guess they were well enough written. But one column—actually one word in one column—nearly brought my boss and me to blows.

My boss at Memphis magazine, who made me change a word. The result was tragic.

     My boss, the publisher of Memphis magazine, was a Yale graduate, a brilliant editor, a terrific writer, and a nice man. He read everything that went into the magazine before it was published, but he customarily left my columns alone, unchanged. When he read the draft of the column in question, however, he came to me and said, more or less kindly, “You have to change this word.”

“Which word?” I asked.

“This one,” he said, pointing to my manuscript.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t know what it meant,” he said.

“But it’s the right word,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I didn’t know what it meant. I had to look it up. Our readers won’t know what it means. They’ll have to look it up.”

“So what?” I said. “It’s the right word.”

The discussion deteriorated from there. Before it was over, my publisher had polled our entire staff, indeed our entire building, to see if anyone knew what the word meant. No one did. My boss claimed that that proved I had to change the word. I disagreed. In the end, however, I changed it, rather than have my boss murdered.

Here’s the word that caused this brouhaha: “kine.” That’s it. “Kine.” It occurred in a paragraph describing a drive through Vermont. I had written, “Here and there were smatterings of sad-eyed Vermont kine, looking eternally disappointed that they hadn’t been born in Kansas.” To avoid executive homicide, I was obliged to change “kine” to “bovines.” Ugh. “Kine” was the right word. It is an old-fashioned plural for “cow” just as “swine” is a plural for “sow.” “Kine” suggests (to me, at least) an early Flemish landscape painting. That was just what I wanted. “Bovines” was just wrong; “cows” would have been not much better. For 25 years now, I’ve regretted killing “kine,” and I would still argue for keeping it even if only ten people on earth know what it means. It’s the right word. That’s all that matters. Nevertheless, coward that I am, I murdered “kine” to keep my boss alive.

A painting with kine, which is a better word here than "cows."

Even popular magazines, which must appeal to a wide audience, occasionally employ the uncommon word, knowing the majority of their readers will have to look it up. I happily remember a Time magazine article that described the speeches of a famously wordy and gravel-voiced politician as “borborygmic.” I couldn’t find “borborygmic” even in my collegiate dictionary; I had to go to the unabridged. There it was: “borborygmic” means “having to do with the sound made by intestinal gas.” Fantastic! What a beautifully onomatopoeic word for a gassy, growly speechifier! I try to use “borborygmic” at least once a year.

There is, by the way, an epilogue to my “kine” story. About two weeks after the issue of the magazine came out that, tragically, did not contain the word “kine,” our associate editor went on vacation in Hawaii. When she came back, she called my boss and me to her cubicle, grinning ferociously. There she showed us a photo that she had taken on a Hawaiian back road. The photo showed a roadside sign. Illustrated with the silhouette of a cow, the sign read, “Caution: Kine crossing.”

So, writers, fear not the unusual word, the word that your readers will have to look up. Just make sure that your every word is the best word. That’s what Hemingway, Faulkner, and every other great writer before and since have done.

A kine sign.

*It was Faulkner’s syntax—his sentence architecture—that was often “fancy,” not so much his vocabulary. More on syntax in a future post.

WHY I MISS THE SEMICOLON

VT Coach Seth Greenberg bemoaning the loss of the semicolon?

I miss the semicolon; this little dot-and-squiggle of punctuation is both subtle and useful, but rarely spotted these days except in emoticons. It seems most writers—including the pros at newspapers—are afraid of the semicolon. Too bad. Or, as the kids might put it: ;-( .

            Consider the following:

            1) Virginia Tech lost 82-81 in double overtime.  After the game, Coach Greenberg spent twenty minutes alone in his office before emerging to talk to reporters.

            2) Virginia Tech lost 82-81 in double overtime; after the game, Coach Greenberg spent twenty minutes alone in his office before emerging to talk to reporters.

            For those of us raised with semicolons, the difference between the passage with the semicolon between the independent clauses and the passage with a period is subtle, but distinctive. In the first version, with the period, there are two separate, not necessarily connected subjects: the overtime loss and the coach’s alone time. In the second version, with the semicolon, we are urged (by the semicolon) to connect the coach’s desire for privacy to the fact of the overtime loss. In other words, in the semicolon version, we have a sadder coach, devastated by a close loss. That semicolon adds an element of emotion to the story that the period leaves us to guess about.

            A semicolon between two independent clauses suggests a cause-effect, contrast, balance, or other connection between the ideas in the independent clauses. 

Without semicolons, the elephant was lonely and depressed.

Here are some other examples:

The elephant was lonely and depressed; he paced the perimeter of his cage from sunrise to sunset. (Cause-effect)

John watched movies in his spare time; Joan read books. (Contrast)

The front hall was full of shoes; the dining room was full of books; the kitchen was full of unopened boxes of appliances. (Balance)

The train was two hours late; Marie felt a headache coming on.

The President proposed budget cuts; the Speaker of the House, tax increases. (Note the understood verb “proposed” in the second clause here, allowing it to be a complete independent clause.)
            Chapter One was slow; Chapter Two was boring; Chapter Three was simply unreadable.

Semicolons help control the winds of prose.

One reason for the demise of the semicolon, I think, is that inexperienced writers have a bit of trouble with the following rule:

 Place a semicolon (or a period) before a conjunctive adverb that comes between two independent clauses. Some common conjunctive adverbs: however, therefore, nevertheless, thus, furthermore, moreover, otherwise, consequently. Place a comma after the conjunctive adverb. (See my blog post of May 4, 2011, for more about conjunctive adverbs.)

           The following examples are correct:


          “The storm brought hail the size of golf balls; however, all the tulips survived.”

          
          “The wind was blowing up a gale; therefore, we decided not to go sailing.”

           
          “You had better study for the test; otherwise, you’ll fail.”

Note: A period could also be used where semicolons appear in the three examples above, but a period slightly undermines the logical connections between the two clauses, so a semicolon is a bit better.

Prose with proper semicolons is a breath of fresh air.

Warning: Be sure there is an independent clause on either side of the conjunctive adverb before you add the semicolon.

           Correct: “I love onions. My girlfriend Gail, however, won’t touch me after I’ve eaten them.”  


         (No semicolon is needed before “however” here, because "My girlfriend Gail" is not an independent clause. It would be okay to replace the period after "onions" with a semicolon, however.)

Additional warning: Do not use a semicolon if there is already a coordinating conjunction between the two independent clauses. (The coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so; they are easily remembered by the acronym FANBOYS.)

          Correct: “I mailed my girlfriend her birthday card on Sunday. The post office lost it, however, and now she is mad at me.”

            The one exception to this rule applies when the first independent clause has many commas in it. In that case, a semicolon can help your reader navigate the sentence by clearly showing where the first independent clause ends:

            Correct: “The undergraduate volunteers built houses, painted the exteriors and the interiors of those houses, and planted trees and bushes in the yards, where domestic animals were often penned; yet the village elders seemed to ignore the students’ work, either out of shame or out of apathy.”

            Semicolons are also handy—indeed, necessary—in one other writing situation:

To avoid confusion, use semicolons to separate items in a list when the items themselves contain commas.

           Example: “My three best friends are John, a tennis pro; Harry, a butcher; and Joanne, a cello player.”

            If the semicolons here were replaced by commas (a common error), readers might think the writer is describing six separate people instead of just three people and their respective professions.

           

            I’m fond of semicolons, which link things together or mark the boundaries within some sentences; in a sense, they are the buttons on the clothes of prose.

Semicolons are buttons on the clothes of prose.