Tag Archives: grammar

Fairest

Antique mirror resting on a bed of satin partly covered by gold tulle
Photo by Sarah Penney

Mirror, mirror on the wall…

Not this again. 

Who’s the fairest…

Let me interrupt. Fair is not a gradable adjective. Something’s either fair or not fair. It’s not a sliding scale. So you can stop with your superlative forms. 

Who’s the most beautiful…

Oh, please. Now your couplet doesn’t even scan. And saying ‘fair’ to mean ‘beautiful’ is so 16th century. 

But while we’re here, my Queen, let’s take a moment to discuss the perils of taking into mirrors. Ask Alice. Ask the fools who summoned Candyman. There’s a reason they’re called looking glasses, not talking glasses. 

When you talk to a mirror, you’re speaking to Language itself. Everything gets meta. Everything comes out backward. Out backward everything comes haha. 

Who’s the fairest…

We’re back to ‘fairest’ now? Let me make this easy for you. The girl who sells posies at the market, she’s fair. Your sister the duchess, she’s fairer than the posy seller. And you, my superlative Queen, are the fairest of these three. 

Who’s the fairest of them all? 

What is it about superlatives? It’s never enough to be better than two. When there’s three, there’s a multitude. Where there’s a multitude, there’s the one. (The best, the most, the greatest.)

Who’s the fairest…

I heard you the first time, most hapless of highnesses. How do I break it to you? There will always be someone who’s prettier than you. Go forth and destroy them with your poisoned words.

Would you like to know more about this story? I’ll be discussing it in an upcoming episode of the Structured Visions podcast. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Negative space

Greyscale photo of a couple kissing across a table. Their faces blur together. They're each holding a coffee mug.
Photo by Nathan Walker

What’s up with me and the intimacy issues? It was only my third date with Barry (coffee at the Students Union) and I’d just told him I was crazy.

We met at an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference. He said he liked my talk on negation in language.

What he actually said was, ‘I didn’t understand your paper, not one jot of it.’

His field was psychology, not linguistics, so his joke meant he’d been paying attention. I may have already been in love. 

So why the rush to tell him about the alien in my brain?

‘An alien talks to you?’ he said.

‘Yeah, he took up residence as soon as I landed on my thesis topic,’ I said. 

‘Correlation is not causality,’ Barry pointed out. 

‘He keeps asking annoying questions about my topic. He says in his language there is no negation.’

‘There is no negation? Isn’t that a perfect example of negation?’

‘Well, what he really said is There’s only affirmation. But we were speaking English.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ Barry said. ‘I think you have a very smart brain who’s created a sparring partner to help bring your brilliant ideas even further. Or else you really are in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence, which you should see as a great privilege.’

He had me at I don’t think you’re crazy. 

‘The negation is the affirmation!’ exclaimed my alien companion, with a distracting Eureka yelp.

I ignored this, leaning closer toward my human companion. ‘Can I kiss you?’ I asked.

‘I don’t see why not,’ he said, and I melted into the negative space his negative clauses revealed.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 97 of Structured Visions, ‘The intimacy of denial.’ You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Lessons in Latin

Page of a Latin textbook pasted into a scrapbook

If it had been any other subject I probably wouldn’t have even responded to the head teacher’s desperate predawn request. I was still reeling over Jeremy’s affair and his desire for a divorce, both of which he’d announced a mere 12 hours earlier, inciting a fraught, sleepless night. 

But my newly uncertain future made it seem unwise to turn down a job. Besides, when else was I ever going to make use of those wasted hours in Catholic school, declining nouns and conjugating verbs? I forced some drops into my puffy eyes, blinking them back like reverse tears.

‘Why is it so hard?’ the girls complained. 

‘Why is what so hard?’ I barked back. ‘Life? Love? Existential crisis? The condition of being alone?’

‘Latin, Miss,’ they clarified, meekly. Clearly I was not a supply teacher to be fucked with.

‘Latin’s not hard,’ I said dismissively. ‘You’re just not used to it. You expect it to be like an analytic language, like English, where each word stands on its own.’

Confused looks. Foolish girls! 

‘Latin is a synthetic language. The words are less fixed. They shift with each inflection.’ I assigned them a conjugation task (amo, amas, amat) then flipped frantically through the textbook in an anguished attempt to recall the other tenses. 

Amabam, amabamus—I was loving, we were loving. Imperfect, I mused, the truest tense for love. 

Against a chorus of whispers and scribbling pencils I performed my own faltering conjugations. I have loved. I will love again.

It’s not hard; I’m just not used to it, I thought, and set myself a task. To synthesise past and future. To reshape the grammar of my life.

Would you like to know more about this story? Sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The brutal linearity of language

Fountain pen writing the word 'hello' on white paper
Photo by R Mo

It’s common to explore the lower realms, but no one in the team has ever, until now, been sent to a one-dimensional reality. To be trusted with such a mission is a great honour.

The training is intensive. It takes the form of repeated confrontations with the brutal linearity of language.  

Hello, my name is Jim. 

The assignment is to align the self with the excruciatingly constrictive quality of linguistic personhood. 

Hello… my… name… is…

There’s guidance in the training, a meditative exercise: Imagine a fountain pen. Its reservoir is filled with the infinite ink of the uncontainable multiverse. Focus with singular attention on the nib as it traces its unidirectional line across an empty page. 

The strategy works. Soon frustration gives way to curiosity, rousing an impulse to experiment. 

Hello, my name was Jim. 

The past tense suggests a nostalgia. A longing to move backward along this narrow line, even as the syntax presses inexorably ahead.

My name is not Jim. 

Negative polarity produces erasure, annihilation. Ideas unknown in an eternally creative cosmos—the infinite ink churns and roils.

My name will never be Jim.

The line of language, freed from its singular dimension, emerges as a spiral, a fractal, a new world waiting to be found. 

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 95 of Structured Visions, ‘Your name without language’. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The lexicographer

Greyscale photo of a stack of old books and papers in a room
Photo by Felipe Furtado

The bookshelf falls with a conclusive thud. Volumes of dictionaries flap to the floor, their spines irreparably dislocated, their yellow pages exposed to greedy, scurrying mice. Billy the lexicographer realises with a tremor of despair that he is trapped. A lifetime acquiring language will end with him suffocating under the weight of words. 

He’ll spend his final moments naming things: the marble table, the antique wardrobe, the upholstered dining room chairs. Bodies of plastic baby dolls, a bag of mouldy limbs and hairless, eyeless heads. Mountains of newspaper, rodent insulation. Grandmother’s tarnished silverware. A treasure box of costume jewellery. 

An unfamiliar longing: to be free of noun phrases. To unacquire language. Billy’s gaze scurries frantically around the room, replacing objects with object pronouns. This. That. Those. Them. Him. Me. 

They. He. I. The objects become subjects. The subjects invite agreeable verbs. The verbs are finite: This too shall pass. 

I, too, shall pass, decides Billy. He raises himself up upon mouldy legs, passes a trembling hand over a hairless head and clears a path through his storeroom of hoarded language. 

Would you like to know more about this story? Sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

Death of a grammarian

Close up photo of maple leaf in autumn with shallow depth of field
Image by Matt

As my language deteriorates, a steadier syntax is revealed. A tree dropping leaves of wisdom in my life’s autumn.

The verbs that remain are release, surrender, let go. The first person–that once grasping branch–now sets its objects free. They spiral skyward, earthward, held safe within some other grammar, invisible as air.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 92 of Structured Visions.

In plain sight

Photo by Aaron Burden

It’s one thing to design the mysteries. It’s quite another to keep them hidden. 

Guarding their secrecy was my task, and for a while I took it very seriously. 

I’ve experimented with all sorts of methods over the millennia. Forbidden fruit trees with heavily guarded walled gardens, underwater cities, islands veiled by ethereal mists. I particularly enjoyed the secret societies with their hierarchies of esoterica, the self-important initiates, the chanting, the rituals. 

I got bored with it all in the later years. I knew my complacency had gotten the better of me when I spotted an unsecured grimoire on an open shelf of a public school library. A frenzied scan of its contents revealed that the great human mysteries had been mass produced, unapologetically available to all. 

The sacred voice. The holy trinity of personhood. The unmoved mover. The one in the many, the many in the one. The great wheel of time, the secrets to its turning.

In my panic I cast a spell on this and all grimoires of its kind. Let all who approach the contents be made to feel stupid or ashamed. Let all who already grasp this wisdom suffer vanity, smugness, self righteousness. Let it be excruciatingly boring.

Henceforth the grimoires became grammars.

Produced in haste and out of necessity, the strategy has proven my most effective yet. The great human mysteries remain hidden in plain sight.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about in in Episode 89 of Structured Visions, ‘Grammar as a gateway to mystery’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

The treacherous labyrinth of grammar

Greyscale photo of thorns
Image by Andrey Grinkevich

The turning world is the verb. Its subject, the still point, the dancer.

The path to the heart of this mystery is an inner one, a treacherous labyrinth of grammar, overgrown with a thousand rose-red thorn pricks. Corrections. Inadequacies. Doubts. It’s hard to breathe. Something pungent—a smugness, a cloying righteousness—chokes the air.

At the centre, there you are. I am. We have been: the selves at the still point, the dancing.

Little red grammar hood

Red, black and grey illustration of Little Red Riding Hood walking through the woods
Image by Hansuan Fabregas

I was a language unrecognised by my human family. They fashioned a fabric from the loom of their grammar—the warp of their subjects forced into concord with the weft of their verbs, the fibres dyed vermillion, the colour of shame.

A red thread of syntax tethered me to their path, my vision obstructed by a heavily draping hood.

So constrained was life within this cloth cage that I lost the old rhythms, the old melodies, the chords that once formed my being. But some resounding strain pulled me back, through the dark wood, to the house where my Grandmother lived. 

At first I did not recognise her.

With claw-like determination and incisor-sharp will, she had sliced through the threads of her own family’s grammar, and now she stood before me, firm and free.

I threw myself into the soft fur of her embrace. The red cloak dropped like a morpheme, unbound.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 88 of Structured Visions, ‘Grammar shame’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

Beginning

Green snake coiled around a tree branch
Photo by David Clode

In the beginning language was a garden.

Adverbial seedlings pressed to skywardly split the rocky infinitives. It was a cleft construction, that ravine, which brought forth the progressive aspect of waterfall, which was flowing, which was churning, which was bursting with verbal enthusiasm.

Its mist kissed the brave budding morphemes, fixed on stems and roots of meaning, deriving new ideas from the loamy depths of a forgotten protolanguage.

A snakelike syntax stretched around human bodies to make membranes of personhood. Possessive determination shaped our infamous expulsion. What was never our garden before was even less our garden now, so we left to shape a new language, a new beginning.