I’ve waited to discuss the most important of our modal auxiliaries, the word that is the past tense of will, and also therefore the marker for our conditional tenses: would.

We call ’em conditional because they hold true only if certain conditions are met.  Typically, we have a contrary-to-fact statement in one clause (which grammarians used to call the protasis) and the conditional in the next (which grammarians used to call the apodosis):

“Mr. Priscian,” said the doctor, “I’m afraid you are suffering from a compressed apodosis, just between the neck and the spine.”
“Oh dear, I knew I shouldn’t have gone cliff jumping!  But can’t you stretch it out again?”
“Well, Mr. Priscian, if we knew how to do that, we would give you a couple of turns on the rack and send you straight home with some pills.  As it is, the best we can do is alleviate the symptoms.”
“And that’s your best protasis?”
“Had I a better one, I’d certainly tell you.”
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“Never begin a sentence with and,” my college freshmen have been told. This is another one of those rules that somebody must have dreamed up in a rage of vengeance: a schoolmaster named Ichabod, disappointed in love, glowering down on his young charges, and thinking, “Yes, I shall make their lives miserable!

I am opening my Bible to the New Testament, at random. I read: “And he said unto his disciples, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.” I read: “And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?” I read: “And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink.” If it is good enough for Almighty God, it had better be good enough for a dusty old English teacher.
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I like how hillbillies pronounce this relative pronoun: hwut. It’s truest to the spelling and the history of the word. Wally Cleaver pronounced it that way, too. He said hwen and hwere and hwy? A well-brought-up lad he was.

The monks who introduced the Roman alphabet into England, to evangelize the pagan Saxons and teach some of them to read, were faced with an obvious problem. How do we use these Roman letters to signify sounds and sound-combinations that don’t exist in Latin? They actually did a phenomenally good job of it. They heard the Saxons pronouncing words—quite a lot of them, and some very common words among them—that began with an aspirated w. Round your lips, make as if you’re going to hwistle, blowing air out and saying witch. Did you hear it? You just turned it into which. Do the same with wail. Shazzam!  You have pronounced whale.
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“Never begin a sentence with but.” So my college freshmen tell me. They also tell me that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat (everybody knew it was round), that women in the Middle Ages were no better than cattle (they had more freedom than they would enjoy until the twentieth century), that people in the Middle Ages were morose and grim (they were boisterous partiers who loved color), that they were morbidly fascinated with demons (they portrayed demons as ridiculous stooges), and they were oppressed by their kings (most of the kings were weak).

Again I open my Bible at random: “But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” And again: “But woe unto you, Pharisees!” And again: “But I know him, for I am from him, and he hath sent me.” If it is good enough for Almighty God, it is good enough for a freshman, certainly.

There never was such a rule in English grammar. Nor was there ever such a rule in classical Greek, or in Latin. It is the quick and natural way to begin an adversative sentence, one that shifts direction from the previous, or contradicts it, or backs away. Unless you have a particular reason for preferring the slower comma, however, comma, not only may you begin a sentence with but: you really should do it. I tell my students this all the time. But they are slow to turn from their old ways, the reprobates.

The verb wax, meaning to grow, has only a few surviving uses in English. The moon waxes and wanes. And people wax . . . some adjective, usually describing their gestures or their speech. Note: adjective, not adverb. It’s often misused. If John is waxing eloquently, maybe he is reciting the Gettysburg Address while polishing his Camaro. If Mary is waxing poetically, maybe she is reciting Hamlet’s soliloquys while polishing the coffee table. That is, she’s waxing the table, and she’s being poetic about it. But wax, meaning to grow, always takes an adjective, just as grow does. You can grow angry. You can’t grow angrily. That makes no sense. Therefore you can wax poetic, or wax lugubrious, or wax nostalgic, or wax suspicious. 

The word is very old indeed. It was our original general word for growth, of plants, children, animals, nations, whatever. It is cognate with German wachsen, to grow. It used to be a strong verb, too—the German linguist’s term for verbs that don’t fool around with piddly dental past tenses, but change their own darned vowels, take that! The Anglo Saxon weaxan had the past weox: he weox eald, he grew old; cf. German er wuchs, he grew. Does it have any relations in Italy and Greece? Quite a few. The old Romans used the letter v for the sound we denote by a w: so that Caesar’s boast, Veni, vidi, vici, might still at that time have been pronounced wainy, weedy, weeky, which does not actually impress the ear with power; and that may explain why he had to cross the Rubicon. In any case, we look for Latin cousins of our w words among their v words. And sure enough, we have vigere, to thrive; and the kinfolk in that clan, from which we derive Modern English vegetable and vigor. So if a man waxes vigorous, we can say he waxes waxy: a heck of a lot of growing going on there.

You’d never believe how much time I spend with my college freshmen, unteaching them what they’ve been taught in high school. For instance, they tell me that you should never use the pronoun you in an indefinite sense, meaning someone or one. If you do, you’re a stylistic redneck.

“One must lift the tip of one’s nose to the cup, just so,” says Monsieur Lemonnier, removing his pince-nez for the purpose, “and flare one’s nostrils so as to let the bouquet of the wine enter into one with the most effective effluvia.”

“Enter into one what?” says Bobby Joe.

The indefinite you is perfectly fine for almost all kinds of writing. Oh, not for the description of scientific experiments, I grant. “Well, first you drip this red stuff here into that there tube”—I don’t think that will do for a journal article. But for popular writing, and even for conversational writing admitting of a high intellectual tenor, the use is admissible and often preferable to the alternatives. In those cases, it beats the heck out of all those ones.

There’s a new Bible translation that drives me nuts: “And he sent his servants to them, to gather the produce of the land.” How did that boring business-word get in there? The Greek was karpous, fruits, literally things you pluck off a tree. The Romans had their verb carpere, to seize, to pluck, which survives in the proverb carpe diem, seize the day—grab the fruit and enjoy it.

But the Latin word for fruit, frux, wasn’t related to what you do with fruit when it’s ripe. It was related to what the tree does: it bears fruit. We borrowed words directly from the Latin for the sugar that fruit contains, fructose, and for the virtue of stretching the fruit of your labors, frugality, and for making something else bear a lot of fruit, fructify. We had already had the word fruit, from the Norman French invaders; that word came from the Latin fructus.

Do we have any words in English that the fancy-dancy French fruit displaced? After all, there were fruit trees in England before the French got there, and it doesn’t seem likely that the Saxons said, “Go pick me one of those things there that hang from that there tree.” What does Grimm’s Law say? Never eat an apple from an ugly old lady. Actually, it relates Germanic consonants to their Latin / Greek kinfolk. Grimm’s Law says that Latin f = Germanic b. We are looking, then, for a Germanic word beginning with b, followed by r and a vowel (or a vowel and r; they change places a lot), followed by a back-of-the-mouth consonant. Is there such a word? Sure: Old English byrig, mulberry: Modern English berry. But that wasn’t the old word for fruit in general. That old word was aeppel: Modern English apple. That’s the origin, there, of the idea that Adam and Eve ate an apple. What they ate was a fruit. It could have been a peach or a pear or a pomegranate—or an apple.

Sometimes my college freshmen tell me that they use a thesaurus to find synonyms, so that they don’t have to use the same word all the time. Using the same word, they’ve been told, is repetitive, and repetition is bad. Well, that’s complete nonsense. I’ll turn to repetition in later lessons. For now, I imagine Jesus saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Those who mourn are going to be happy too, because they will be comforted.
The inheritance of the earth will belong to the meek, and that will be most fortunate for them.
People who hunger for righteousness will experience a favorable state of affairs . . .
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“Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return,” said the Lord God to Adam after the first sin. It’s a fine translation of the Hebrew, that dust; it suggests transience and insubstantiality. By the nineteenth century, in Britain at least, the word came to denote garbage of any sort. So Mr. Boffin in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend is called The Golden Dustman because he has inherited several enormous mounds of dust, apparently worth a great deal. The first time I read the book, I wondered—what on earth could be so valuable about dust? We would now call it trash, as Shakespeare did. “Who steals my purse steals trash,” says the evil Iago, and that’s a phrase that strikes the British ear as decidedly quaint. The boy in the back row sniggers. “Trash? Wha’ in all Lon’on is trash?”

The word is a distant cousin of ancient Greek thymos, meaning “spirit,” not in the sense of one’s soul, but rather what we’d call drive, ambition, fire. How do we get from there to here? Grimm’s Law helps, as always. Grimm’s Law says that if you sprinkle fairy dust over your shoulder—no, it doesn’t say that. It relates the Proto-Indo-European th to Germanic d. In one of these essays I’ll explain why. So what shows up in Greek and Latin as th will reliably show up in Germanic as d. Hence all we have to account for now is the nasal consonant m.

“But wait!” says a homeschooled lad in the sixth grade. “You mentioned Latin th. But there aren’t any original Latin words with a th. Everybody knows that!” Quite so, young man. And that requires explanation. When a sound should show up in a language but doesn’t, we have two ways of accounting for the absence. One is that the sound simply dropped out. People found it hard to say, maybe, or they figured they could do without it, or nearby speakers of a different language didn’t use it: so we no longer pronounce the k in knee. The other is that the sound was transformed into another and somewhat similar sound. Children help us out here. When my son was a very little boy, he’d say “fin” for “thin” and “vat” for “that.”  He was substituting a labiodental unvoiced spirant (f) for the interdental unvoiced spirant (th). That sure clears everything up! Try it, though, and you’ll see how it could happen. The Romans had no words beginning with th, but they did have a lot of words beginning with f, not all but some of which corresponded to Greek words in th. So then: Greek thymos = Latinfumus, smoke; English fume comes from the French, in the Middle Ages.
Back to dust: what happened to the m? Well, we know it was there, but by the time of Old English it had dropped away. But the Germans, a little more isolated, preserved the nasal consonant: Dunst: dust, mist, fume. All of which suggests a revision to the old folk song:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and dust –

No, it doesn’t work for me either.

We in English have an odd and useful tool: a possessive that can be appended to an entire phrase, rather than to just one word.  Look at the following:

Il figlio del re d’Inghilterra (Italian)
Le fils du roi d’Angleterre (French)
Der Sohn des Koeniges von England (German)

In each case, the possessive applies to the noun alone.  In the Romance languages, the possessive must be marked by a prepositional phrase: The son of the king.  In German, the possessive is typically marked twice, by the word order, and by our well-known s on masculine or neuter singular nouns.  It’s how we form our possessives: we add an s, but unlike the Germans, we add it to all nouns: It’s women’s night at the Colonnade.  The Germans can say, too, Des Koeniges Sohn, the king’s son, but that’s unusual, and for special emphasis.

What none of those languages can do is what we do all the time:
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It may please some of my readers to learn that the word whore and the name Cher are etymologically related. But how?

The first thing we need to clear out of the way is that w at the beginning of whore. It doesn’t belong there. It’s orthographic kudzu. It’s linguistic wisteria. It’s a parasite. People in the late Middle Ages no longer pronounced the w in words like who and whose, so they ended up putting it in print where it had never been before, to begin words that should have begun with hoor hu. The Anglo Saxon word is hure (German Hure, in pristine condition).
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The Passive Voice is abused when the agent of the verb is not general and is indeed of consequence, but the writer wishes to obfuscate. Bureaucrats and politicians abuse the passive all the time, to hide responsibility.

Consider the following sentences:

The committee members, by a vote of 5 to 4, decided that the school nurse should immediately inform the police that Mr. Jenkins had been found smoking marijuana with several of his students.

It was decided that the authorities should be informed of an apparent misdemeanor.

The first sentence is longer. Well may it be—it is long because it delivers a great deal. It tells us quite a lot. It tells us who did the deciding, and that the decision was close. It tells us who was to do the informing. It tells us who had done what with whom. The second sentence obscures all that. Who decided? Who informed? We don’t know. We aren’t meant to know.
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Lent is a most unusual word. Germans call the forty day period between Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday by the perfectly reasonable name Fastenzeit: the time for fasting. The French, mishearing the Latin quadrigesima, fortieth, call it Careme;whether they “hear” it as having anything to do with quarant, forty, well, je ne sais pas.  The Italian quaresima (Italians do indeed pronounce qu just as we do) is closer to their quarante, forty, so maybe they get the connection.

But the English Lent has nothing to do with forty. It is our old word for springtime: when the days lengthen. Thus it is related to words from both the Germanic and the Romance stock: English long, German lang, Latin
longus. Well then—why isn’t it Longth or Lont? How did that e get in there?
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The Passive Voice is used badly when the writer tucks the real item of interest into a prepositional phrase, obscuring the agent of the verb and deflecting the emphasis. Consider these sentences:

The slider was hammered by Colavito into the left field bleachers.
Colavito hammered the slider into the left field bleachers.

The second places the emphasis on Colavito, the subject of the sentence and the agent of the verb hammered. The first places the emphasis on the slider, with Colavito relegated to a phrase following the verb, as if he and his home run were not really what the sentence is about.

Both sentences are grammatically correct. It’s just that the first, for most purposes, is less effective. Consider these:
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It’s a good old Anglo Saxon word, but it did not mean to grow angry, scowling, waiting the chance to strike. It meant, simply, to boil. Why didn’t the Anglo Saxons say boil if they meant boil? Or bo’ll, if they were from Southwark? Or berl, if they were from Brooklyn-on-the-Thames? They hadn’t been invaded by the French, that’s why. I suppose that English stewards cooking (a French word) soup (a French word) for their dukes (a French word) would boil it—seething with resentment. Boil comes from a stock of Latin / Romance words having to do with bubbling over: an ebullient man is the life of the party.

The old meaning of the word is preserved in the King James account of the manna from heaven: “Bake that which ye will bake today, and seethe that which ye will seethe” (Ex. 16:23). The past tense form wasn’t seethed, but sod (!): “And Jacobsod pottage; and Esau came from the field, and he was faint” (Gen. 25:29). That didn’t mean that Jacob sprinkled dirt into the stew. He sod the stew in a pot: he boiled it.

Strangely enough, we don’t have the old past form, but we do still have the past participle: sodden. But we don’t use it to mean boiled. Something is sodden when it is wet all through, usually miserably so: “I couldn’t wait to take off those sodden clothes.” Not boiled clothes, but sodden, and so almost as bad.

The passive voice is like any tool. You can use it well, you can use it badly, and you can abuse it right out. If I use a garden hose with a nozzle to spray water on my flowers, that’s nice. If I turn the nozzle on jet-stream and churn up the dirt underneath them, that’s bad. And if I take the hose and run over it with my car back and forth, in a fit of pique—angered by the local Gardening Society—that would be abuse.

The Passive Voice is used well when the agent of the verb is general or of no significance. See the previous sentence!  It would be silly to write, “People use the passive voice well when the subject is general or of no significance,” because the subject, people, is general and of no significance. So why include it? Instead, use the Passive Voice, which in this case is more concise and more emphatic.
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Why do we say, “John goes to the pawn shop today,” but “John went to the pawn shop yesterday?”  Where does that come from?

German doesn’t have it. In the Krautic tongue, people say ich gehe, I go, and ich ginge, I went. The past ginge is in the same corral with the present gehe. So what happened to us?

Our Old English verb gan, to go, to walk, had two past tenses, depending on where you were and what century it was. One was based on a completely different verb: ic ga, I go; but ic eode, I went. That eode seems to be a kissin’ cousin of the Latinire, to go: cf. exit: he goes out. There was also a very old “reduplicative” past, common in Latin and Greek, rare in German, and almost entirely vanished from English: ic gengde, I g-go-ed, I went. Somewhere along the line people stopped understanding eode, because there wasn’t a present for it. It had been a bad boy that year—sorry. So they borrowed a past form from another verb. The verb wend was sauntering along, minding its own business, when the Linguistic Authorities whistled, “Hey kid, come over here. You got a past tense on you?”  He did: went. Compare with send, sent; lend, lent; bend, bent.

My students have been taught that a verb is in the passive voice whenever a form of the verb to be appears. They have also been taught that it is never to be used. They are wrong on both counts.

I’ll speak about the use of the passive voice later. For now, let’s define what we mean by voice. Consider these three sentences:

Superman was stopped by Lex Luthor and a very large dose of kryptonite.
Superman stopped the train with one hand tied behind his back.
“I wish you wouldn’t fly away so fast!” said Lois. Superman stopped.
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I’ve seen the adverbs firstly, secondly, thirdly, and so forth, used in texts that are pretty old, but there’s no reason for them. The forms aren’t logical, since first, second, third, last are already adverbs. They don’t need to have the –ly appended to them. They’re a little like the phony word irregardless, with the double negative supplied by a prefix and a suffix. That word is supposed to mean “without regard,” but its form suggests instead “not without regard.” At least firstly doesn’t do that. It means, “in a first kind of way,” “in a before-everything-else manner,” but what does that say that first doesn’t already say? Rule of style: just use the real old adverbs, and forget the redundant suffix.

Yet, to cut firstliers a little slack: speakers use redundancies all the time when the basic form is no longer “heard” in full. A case in point: foremost. That’s a double superlative. Think of the m in Latin superlatives: miserrimus, most miserable, facillimus, easiest. That m shows up in our old word meaning before everything else: our modern word former. But after a while people no longer “heard” the m as a superlative. So they had to tack on another superlative suffix, the common –st: foremost, before everything else that is before everything else.

Have you ever noticed that there aren’t any words in French or Spanish that begin with sl-? There weren’t any in Latin, either. Every language rules out certain combinations of consonants, as being too hard to pronounce. Hawaiian rules them all out! You never get two consonants together in Hawaiian, but you sure get a lot of vowels to make up for them.

Now then, we know that the English language is a cousin of French and Spanish—and Latin. Either Latin lost all the wordsthat survive in English beginning with sl- (and in German, beginning with schl-), or the words are there, but they’re hidden. It’s the latter.  Latin speakers didn’t like the sl, just as in Middle English we stopped liking kn- and wr-, ending up pronouncing only n and r. The Latins dropped the s.

The root idea underlying the sl- words is that of fluidity or softness or weakness: slow, slug, slink, slick. The Latin relatives of our sl- words begin with l-. So slack is related to Latin languere, to languish, to lie about, to be lax (from the past participle,laxus). So a slacker is lax, by definition! We see a similar doublet in this sentence: I saw the liquid cat slink into the basket.

Some years ago I began to notice that my college freshmen had all gotten a very strange idea. They had been taught that one must never begin a sentence with the word “because.” I have no idea where high school teachers came up with this one. It is like alligators in the Manhattan sewers, or aliens landing in Roswell. Some kook huddled in a condemned building says it, and all at once everybody “knows” it, though it is not in the slightest bit true.

There’s nothing special about the word “because.” It’s a subordinating conjunction, like a hundred others. Any of them may begin a sentence—so long as it’s a sentence they are beginning. A sentence, whether it begins with “because” or “if” or “since” or “although” or “whenever” or “while” or “whatever” or whatever, requires a main clause. This is not a sentence:
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You’d expect that somebody named Waters used to live beside some waters, just as somebody named Rivers used to live beside a river. It ain’t so. Just pronounce the name Walters as if you were from Phiwadewphia: Waowters. The dark English “l” was swawwowed up in the fowwowing consonant: cf. “walk,” “calm.” So the name Waters is a variant of Walters, as Wat was the old diminutive for Walter. That gives us Wat’s Son = Watson, Watts, and Little Wat’s Son = Watkins, Watkinson, and Little Walter = Watt. The unit of electrical power was named after the scientist James Watt. So, if your surname is Waters, that’s related to the word “wattage,” but it is not related to “water.” The name originally denoted the ruler of an army: cf. English “wield,” German “Gewalt,” German “Heer,” army. The underlying idea is the same as in the Greek name Polemarchus: war-ruler, army-ruler. Romance language speakers couldn’t pronounce that initial w: they “heard” it with a g coming before it (round your lips, pronounce a hard w, and you’ll understand why). So we have Italian Gualtieri, French Gautier. English, that most unusual language, has “doublets” beginning with g or w, depending on the road the word took to get here: guard, ward; guerrilla, warrior.

The word is commonly but inaccurately spelled “forego,” but those are really two separate and unrelated verbs. The “fore” in “forego” means “first” or “before,” so that a “foregone conclusion” is a conclusion that comes before any argument or declaration, since none is necessary. That prefix “fore” is related to all kinds of words in English that have to do with priority in time or position; the ones beginning with f come from the German stock (first, forward), while those beginning with p typically come from the Latin stock, either borrowed directly or imported through French (prime, primrose = first rose of spring, prior, pristine = in its ancient original condition, not necessarily clean; prince = the first citizen, head of state).

But the prefix “for” in forgo is the same as the much more common “ver” in German, and often implies something done inside out, or something done to its bitter end, as in its Latin cognate per-; something perfect has literally been done to its completion; but someone perfidus has taken his trustiness and twisted it into mendacity. In English the prefix survives in “forswear,” which means “to swear off,” as in “forswear thy foolish ways,” or “to swear falsely,” as in “the villain is forsworn.” It also survives in “forget,” which means that you don’t get it; “forspent,” which means you’ve spent it all, drat it; and “forlorn,” cf. German “verloren,”  Our word was the old past participle of the Old English verb forleosan, to lose, with the medial s turning to r by a process known as rorification, which is the process by which something turns into an r (even philologists have their jests); and in a couple of other words, including “forgo”.

We in English have an odd and useful tool: a possessive that can be appended to an entire phrase, rather than to just one word.  Look at the following:

Il figlio del re d’Inghilterra (Italian)
Le fils du roi d’Angleterre (French)
Der Sohn des Koeniges von England (German)

In each case, the possessive applies to the noun alone.  In the Romance languages, the possessive must be marked by a prepositional phrase: The son of the king.  In German, the possessive is typically marked twice, by the word order, and by our well-known s on masculine or neuter singular nouns.  It’s how we form our possessives: we add an s, but unlike the Germans, we add it to all nouns: It’s women’s night at the Colonnade.  The Germans can say, too, Des Koeniges Sohn, the king’s son, but that’s unusual, and for special emphasis.

What none of those languages can do is what we do all the time:
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The word redundant suggests a wave that keeps splashing over the side of the boat, over and over. We use it to signify something unnecessary because it has already been said or done. It is not the same as repetition, which can be extraordinarily effective.

Redundancies in poor writing occur most often when the meaning of an adverb is already implied by the verb. They can lead to real silliness:

“Successfully foiled again!” snarled Mr. Whiplash, standing beside the empty railroad tracks.

The house was partially damaged by fire. A part of the house was damaged? How can you damage something, if not partially? Something that is completely damaged is not damaged. It is destroyed. Speaking of which:

His reputation was completely destroyed. He had been hoping for a while that it would be incompletely destroyed, but alas, it was not to be.

The barn was completely surrounded by water. That is, it was surrounded on all sides by water. We can even make it redundantly redundant, like so: The barn was completely surrounded on all sides by water.

The Cardinals won twelve consecutive games in a row. The year before, they had won twelve consecutive games, but they weren’t in a row. The year before that, they had won twelve games in a row, but they weren’t consecutive.

Holmes darted quickly to the door, where a lone gunman was standing by himself, his hand tucked secretly in his jacket pocket. “Moriarty, my old enemy,” he said, “nous nous revoyons encore!”