More "Bad Things"…

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[Following up on the previous post…] David Owen wrote the following as empirical support for his claim that sentence-initial appositives ("Bad Things") are a recent innovation:

I reread most of Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” and skimmed as much as a modern reader can stand of “The Rambler,” and penetrated as far as it’s humanly possible to penetrate into “Rasselas,” and found no examples.

So I downloaded Volume 1 of Lives of the Poets, sentencized it, ran the simple search for sentence-initial participles, removed the non-appositives, and found 36 remaining examples of this "Bad Things" subset:

Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany, in the mind of Cowley, turned into poetry.
Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable.
Having produced one passage taken by Cowley from Donne, I will recompense him by another which Milton seems to have borrowed from him.
Being severely reproved for this folly, he professed, and, perhaps, believed, himself reclaimed; and, to testify the sincerity of his repentance, wrote and published an Essay upon Gaming.
Finding his rooms too little, he took a house and garden in Aldersgate street[31], which was not then so much out of the world as it is now; and chose his dwelling at the upper end of a passage, that he might avoid the noise of the street.
Having exposed the unskilfulness or selfishness of the former government, "We were left," says Milton, "to ourselves: the whole national interest fell into your hands, and subsists only in your abilities.
Being now forty-seven years old, and seeing himself disencumbered from external interruptions, he seems to have recollected his former purposes, and to have resumed three great works, which he had planned for his future employment; an epick poem, the history of his country, and a dictionary of the Latin tongue.
Being driven from all publick stations, he is yet too great not to be traced by curiosity to his retirement; where he has been found, by Mr. Richardson, the fondest of his admirers, sitting "before his door in a grey coat of coarse cloth, in warm sultry weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his own room, receiving the visits of the people of distinguished parts, as well as quality."
Having an active and inquisitive mind, he never, except in his paroxysms of intemperance, was wholly negligent of study: he read what is considered as polite learning so much, that he is mentioned by Wood as the greatest scholar of all the nobility.
Having disentangled himself from the difficulties of rhyme, he may justly be expected to give the sense of Horace with great exactness, and to suppress no subtilty of sentiment, for the difficulty of expressing it.
Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the terriers of the law, he retired to a publick house on Tower hill, where he is said to have died of want; or, as it is related by one of his biographers, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied.
Having brought him a son, who died young, and a daughter, who was afterwards married to Mr. Dormer, of Oxfordshire, she died in childbed, and left him a widower of about five-and-twenty, gay and wealthy, to please himself with another marriage.
Being too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think himself resistible, he fixed his heart, perhaps half fondly and half ambitiously, upon the lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of the earl of Leicester, whom he courted by all the poetry in which Sacharissa is celebrated; the name is derived from the Latin appellation of sugar, and implies, if it means any thing, a spiritless mildness, and dull good-nature, such as excites rather tenderness than esteem, and such as, though always treated with kindness, is never honoured or admired.
Having now attained an age beyond which the laws of nature seldom suffer life to be extended, otherwise than by a future state, he seems to have turned his mind upon preparation for the decisive hour, and, therefore, consecrated his poetry to devotion.
Entised on with hope of future gaine, I suffred long what did my soule displease; But when my youth was spent, my hope was vaine, I felt my native strength at last decrease; I gan my losse of lustie yeeres complaine, And wisht I had enjoy'd the countries peace; I bod the court farewell, and with content My later age here have I quiet spent.
Having been educated under a private tutor, he travelled into Italy, and returned a little before the restoration.
Having received the first part of his education at Westminster, where he passed six years in the college, he went, at nineteen, to Cambridge[p], where he continued a friendship begun at school with Mr. Montague, afterwards earl of Halifax.
Having gone through the first act, he says: "To conclude this act with the most rumbling piece of nonsense spoken yet:
Being asked whether he had seen the Hind and Panther, Crites answers: "Seen it!
Supposing the story true, we may remark, that the gradual change of manners, though imperceptible in the process, appears great, when different times, and those not very distant, are compared.
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest rang'd: Without unspotted, innocent within, She fear'd no danger, for she knew no sin.
Compared with the ode on Killigrew, it may be pronounced, perhaps, superiour in the whole; but without any single part equal to the first stanza of the other.
Considering the metrical art simply as a science, and, consequently, excluding all casualty, we must allow that triplets and alexandrines, inserted by caprice, are interruptions of that constancy to which science aspires.
Being out of town, I have forgotten the ship's name, which your mother will inquire, and put it into her letter, which is joined with mine.
Being thus prepared, he could not but taste every little delicacy that was set before him; though it was impossible for him, at the same time, to be fed and nourished with any thing but what was substantial and lasting.
Having formed his plan, and collected materials, he declared, that a few months would complete his design; and, that he might pursue his work with less frequent avocations, he was, in June 1710, invited, by Mr. George Ducket to his house, at Gartham, in Wiltshire.
Being now no longer in favour, he contrived to obtain a writ for summoning the electoral prince to parliament, as duke of Cambridge.
Thinking the whole design pernicious to their interest, they endeavoured to raise a faction against it in the college, and found some physicians mean enough to solicit their patronage, by betraying to them the counsels of the college.
Having already translated some parts of Lucan's Pharsalia, which had been published in the Miscellanies, and doubtless received many praises, he undertook a version of the whole work, which he lived to finish, but not to publish.
Having yet no publick employment, he obtained, in 1699, a pension of three hundred pounds a year, that he might be enabled to travel.
Having given directions to Mr. Tickell for the publication of his works, and dedicated them on his deathbed to his friend Mr. Craggs, he died June 17, 1719, at Holland-house, leaving no child but a daughter[192].
Having left his apprehension behind him, he, at first, applies what Marcia says to Sempronius.
Flushed with consciousness of these detections of absurdity in the conduct, he afterwards attacked the sentiments of Cato; but he then amused himself with petty cavils, and minute objections.
Being now received as a wit among the wits, he paid his contributions to literary undertakings, and assisted both the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian.
Having few religious scruples, he attended the king to mass, and kneeled with the rest, but had no disposition to receive the Romish faith, or to force it upon others; for when the priests, encouraged by his appearances of compliance, attempted to convert him, he told them, as Burnet has recorded, that he was willing to receive instruction, and that he had taken much pains to believe in God, who made the world and all men in it; but that he should not be easily persuaded "that man was quits, and made God again."
Finding king James irremediably excluded, he voted for the conjunctive sovereignty, upon this principle, that he thought the titles of the prince and his consort equal, and it would please the prince, their protector, to have a share in the sovereignty.

Conclusion: Either David Owen's "most of Lives of the Poets" was not actually very much of it, or he didn't read it very carefully.

 



21 Comments

  1. Y said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 3:41 pm

    I searched the text version of The Lives of the Poets (with lines unwrapped) for the string ". A ". There are 36 instances, none of which are preposed appositives.

  2. David L said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 4:46 pm

    I agree with the comment from Brian on the previous thread. The numerous examples you have found are not examples of the Bad Thing that David Owen is complaining about.

    "Having consumed a hearty breakfast, he went for a walk" is fine.

    "A sixty six year old man of uncertain health, he went for a walk" is what Owen dislikes.

  3. Richard Hershberger said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 6:37 pm

    Whether the factual assertion is true is not all that important. Even if we stipulate to it, so what? How does this construction being recent support the conclusion that it is bad?

  4. Jerry Packard said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 7:45 pm

    I think it is worth pointing out that in terms of old/new information processing, most of the cited sentence-initial appositives reverse the usual ‘new follows old’ information order that occurs in language. Probably the best evidence of this in the cited examples is the fact that, as Mark pointed out in the last post, many of the appositive modifiers contain a pronoun that refers to the earlier (old) context.

  5. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 8:20 pm

    I am more reticent about purporting to speak for Owen than David L. is, but I definitely agree that disliking "PREPOSED NOUN PHRASE, SUBJECT VERBED" should not necessarily or obviously generalize to a dislike for "PREPOSED PARTICIPIAL PHRASE, SUBJECT VERBED." (Admittedly, Owen's "known as the girls" example doesn't quite fit with his others.) I do appreciate that it may be harder to automate a search for the preposed-noun-phrase sort of construction in an 18th-century text.

    The preposed-noun-phrase usages denounced by Owen seem to me to bear (at least as a matter of aesthetics) a certain parallel to the construction famously denounced by Geoff Pullum in this vintage post: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html

    GKP's point that "The construction sounds to me like the opening of an obituary rather than an action sequence. It's not ungrammatical; it just has the wrong feel and style for a novel" gets us back to the point made in the prior thread that the usage Owen deprecates is rarely used outside a journalistic register but is common within that register.

  6. Scott P. said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 8:49 pm

    "Having consumed a hearty breakfast, he went for a walk" is fine.

    "A sixty six year old man of uncertain health, he went for a walk" is what Owen dislikes.

    Is this informed (like several supposed English grammar rules) from Latin? The former would be rendered by an ablative absolute, the second not. Is that why the former is okay?

  7. cameron said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 9:43 pm

    I agree with Scott P., above. none of those examples, nor any of the ones in the previous post, are examples of what Owens calls Bad Things.

    I also agree that those kind of absolute constructions were likely inspired by emulating Latin prose

  8. David L said,

    January 13, 2023 @ 11:14 pm

    I'm not saying that I agree with Owen. I'm just trying to convey what I believe to be the issue he is peeving about. It has nothing to do with grammar rules but is a matter of stylistic preference entirely.

  9. JPL said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 12:11 am

    @JW Brewer:
    Taking off from the GKP post you linked to:

    Self-hating layabout Sam Smith, although his name is not important here, plopped down to a lonely breakfast of Heinz baked beans. Still in the tin, the beans were unaccompanied by even a sausage. His name is not important, because he had been living under an assumed one for the past thirty years. No woman in the home, he hadn't the felt need to make himself even minimally presentable to the expected visitor who was to give him his next assignment. By nightfall the papers would be reporting his murder on page 23, although not including any name, whether assumed or real. Unknown to the world, he was, however, revered by an elite group of intelligence operatives.

    I thought I would try my hand at writing a Dan Brown novel, whoever he is. (Graham Greene probably wouldn't use that pattern of expression.) Mannered maybe; but is it "objectively objectionable"? I might have meant it as an example of parallelism.

  10. Nat Jacobs said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 1:21 am

    Latin is also very fond of appositives. And if the problem is purely stylistic, an issue of a sentence beginning with a certain focus and then making a sudden swing in content, classical Latin has plenty of those. The “golden line” swings back and forth like a pendulum.

  11. languagehat said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 9:21 am

    I agree with Brian and David L — you have wasted a lot of time and effort disproving something Owen never said. He is not talking about this construction, and I'm surprised that after Brian's comment you didn't take that on board and refine your search. Yes, Owen's complaint is idiotic peevery, but you haven't disproved his historical claims (not that I give a damn whether they're correct or not — who cares?).

  12. Bloix said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 12:11 pm

    A peever myself [joke], I read Owen in the NYer in the original and I think he has half a point, poorly expressed. It seems to me that the looser the relationship between the information expressed in the appositive and the information expressed in the rest of the sentence, the more confusing and annoying it becomes.

    Compare his first two examples:
    Here's the first:
    "A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs. Jones is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren."
    Note that the appositive here does not modify, explain, or add anything relevant to the rest of the sentence. The fact that while alive she lived in Brooklyn is not related to the number of surviving descendants she has. Worse yet, the use of the phrase "former resident" for a dead person is moronic. The obit writer is saying, in effect, Mrs Jones is a former resident of Brooklyn, but now resides in Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Queens. It's just stupid.

    Imagine the sentence, "A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs Jones moved to Fort Lauderdale four years ago to be close to her eldest daughter." That wouldn't be a problem, would it?

    Here's Owen's second example:
    "Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants."
    Here, the affectionate nickname is linked to (and perhaps explained by) by the elephants' fun-loving behavior. I see nothing wrong with it. To me, "Ruth and Emily, who are affectionately known as "the girls," have a lot of fun … " would have been fine, but no better.

    If you run through Owen's examples, you can judge each one by the degree to which it modifies or explains the content of the rest of the sentence. The further away it is, the more jarring it becomes.

  13. Bloix said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 12:11 pm

    A peever myself [joke], I read Owen in the NYer in the original and I think he has half a point, poorly expressed. It seems to me that the looser the relationship between the information expressed in the appositive and the information expressed in the rest of the sentence, the more confusing and annoying it becomes.

    Compare his first two examples:
    Here's the first:
    "A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs. Jones is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren."
    Note that the appositive here does not modify, explain, or add anything relevant to the rest of the sentence. The fact that while alive she lived in Brooklyn is not related to the number of surviving descendants she has. Worse yet, the use of the phrase "former resident" for a dead person is moronic. The obit writer is saying, in effect, Mrs Jones is a former resident of Brooklyn, but now resides in Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Queens. It's just stupid.

    Imagine the sentence, "A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs Jones moved to Fort Lauderdale four years ago to be close to her eldest daughter." That wouldn't be a problem, would it?

    Here's Owen's second example:
    "Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants."
    Here, the affectionate nickname is linked to (and perhaps explained by) by the elephants' fun-loving behavior. I see nothing wrong with it. To me, "Ruth and Emily, who are affectionately known as "the girls," have a lot of fun … " would have been fine, but no better.

    If you run through Owen's examples, you can judge each one by the degree to which it modifies or explains the content of the rest of the sentence. The further away it is, the more jarring it becomes.

  14. Bloix said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 12:29 pm

    PS- it seems to me that the annoying quality of the "Bad Thing" appositive arises from the way the identity of the subject is withheld for a brief time. In addition to the usual connection between the subject and the predicate, we must make a second connection
    – between the subject and the appositive, and this requires a backward leap just as we are trying to move forward. The more irrelevant the appositive is to the content of the predicate, the more difficult to make the leap, and the more it slows cognition.
    Perhaps this is what Owen means when he says that these appositives turn the sentence inside out. All he wants is for the appositive to be embedded in a pair of commas after the subject, instead of sitting outside and in front. That way, no backward leap is needed.

  15. Ernie in Berkeley said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 2:10 pm

    I giggled at the word "sentencized", but then realized that I don't know what it means. Isn't the book already made up of sentences?

    (neither "sentencize" nor "sentencise" is in the OED)

  16. Matt Juge said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 3:04 pm

    "Having consumed a hearty breakfast, he went for a walk" does not contain a counterpart to a Latin ablative absolute but rather a perfect participle with a direct object. The nominals in AAs are almost never coreferential with nominals in the main clause. Since perfect participles are morphologically passive, you'd need a (semi-) deponent to get an active/transitive reading. No good candidate leaps to mind, though.

  17. Viseguy said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 6:42 pm

    I read the Owen piece with annoyance, until I got to the end and realized that there's an arguably valid stylistic point in there, somewhere, mutatis mutandis and gustibus non disputatum (did I get those declensions right? — probably not. 'Cause I don't parlay Atin-lay). If only his editor had recast it as an internal memo, or as something other than a peeve…. I appreciate that the whole world will not agree with me on this; nevertheless, I command it to do so.

  18. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 7:31 pm

    @Matt Juge: I feel like "A hearty breakfast having been consumed [by him being implied …], he went for a walk" would have more the feel of a Latin ablative absolute but I'm not going to invest the time to work out how to express that in Latin … I expect it would only take me a few minutes with an internet reference to work out the perfect passive participle of manducare, but the verb itself reminds me that I haven't had my supper yet.

  19. Killer said,

    January 14, 2023 @ 10:18 pm

    I agree with the other commenters who said that the examples in these two posts are different from what David Owen is complaining about.

    The Robinson Crusoe examples all follow this structure:
    “One thing having happened (or being the case), a related thing then followed.”

    The Decline and Fall examples all follow this structure:
    “In doing a particular thing, the person was also doing this other thing.” (Except for the two that start with “Having”, which fit the Robinson Crusoe model above.)

    The Lives of the Poets examples all follow one or the other above.

    Whereas Owen’s examples all follow the model that Joe calls the "biographical appositive”: “Identified by this one characteristic, the person is also identified by this other characteristic [which might or might not be related to the first one].”

  20. Montag46 said,

    January 16, 2023 @ 12:13 pm

    The periodic sentence from David Copperfield seems to be a perfectly acceptable "set-up" for a comic climax, but not for a mere description.
    I sense Dickens was aiming for a comic effect.

  21. Michael Watts said,

    January 17, 2023 @ 5:49 pm

    I giggled at the word "sentencized", but then realized that I don't know what it means. Isn't the book already made up of sentences?

    Since this is in the context of software processing, I assume the term refers to adding structure to the data. The book is already made up of sentences in a Platonic sense, but as data input it's just a bunch of individual characters in sequence. If you want to analyze it on the level of sentences, the first thing you need to do is break up what you have – a single sequence containing the entire book – into a set of individual sentences. At that point you can answer questions like, for example, "what is the third sentence in this book?".

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