A grammatical contemplation

Illustration by Google Gemini

“Being alone has this negative connotation, like it’s a punishment, but you’re learning to be friends with yourself,” says a Time article quoting a young college graduate who had just migrated to a new city where she had no friends or relatives. She became her own best friend, she says, instead of going in search of other friends. She went on solo hikes, to concerts, museums, movies, and dinners.

Solitude is very useful, the article goes on to argue. It can be a means of self-care and self-exploration. The article also suggests some solo activities like low-skates outing and cultivating a hobby.

I’m leaving my teaching profession at the end of this month. Maggie asked me what I’d do with all the free time. Wouldn’t I feel lonely sitting at home? She knows very well that I love to read a lot, write occasionally, and travel whenever I feel like. So I’m not going to have any problem with how to spend all the time that would lie at my disposal from March 1.

Initially, I was thinking of doing some online teaching from March. However, now I’m not so sure about that. Forty years of teaching is enough, I hear my inner voice whispering. I have begun to feel that I may not enjoy teaching anymore.

As I was walking around in an exam hall this morning doing an invigilation duty at school, I was planning my next week’s lessons for a special group of students. I’ve been asked to take a few hours of intensive teaching of certain topics starting with simple, compound, and complex sentences. As sentences began to unfold in my silent exploration, I was struck by the enormity of that one topic alone. I don’t have to teach grammar at school because I teach senior students who know all the essential grammar already. My job is to teach them literature. So I never gave a thought to grammatical topics.

Today, when I began to plan my class on simple and compound sentences, I realised the potential of that one topic alone for a whole book. We know that a subject and a verb will make a simple sentence. The simplest and shortest sentence in English is: I go. Subject and verb. We can add a lot of things to make it long, but the sentence will still remain simple as long as we don’t add more verbs, and that too finite verbs, to it. Example: I go to school at 7 am every day these days. It’s still a simple sentence.

Now look at this one: I go to school at 7 am every day these days and study hard for the imminent exams. It looks like a compound sentence with two verbs and the conjunction ‘and,’ but it is a simple sentence with a compound predicate because the sentence has only one subject.

Then the famous line from Julius Caesar came to my mind: I came, I saw, I conquered. It is often attributed to Shakespeare though the Bard didn’t use it in his play. My concern was not Shakespeare, of course. Is that a simple sentence since the subject remains the same for all the three verbs? It isn’t. It is a compound sentence because it consists of three independent clauses joined by commas instead of conjunctions. What we have here is a figure of speech known as asyndeton: the omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence.

As I played with more and more sentences while walking around silently in the exam room, I realised how very interesting this one topic alone can be for a book that I may write during my solitary confinement of a retired life.

Here are some of the sentences that presented themselves to me this morning:

1.     I will either read or write today.

2.     Either you can join us now, or you can meet us later.

3.     Either he will call before we leave, or we will have to go without him.

All three sentences make use of the ‘correlative conjunction’: either – or. But sentence one is simple, 2 is compound, and 3 is complex.

My mind played with other correlative conjunctions such as ‘so that’ and ‘neither – nor.’ Until the bell rang for the end of my duty. I realised that I could spend hours and hours on this one topic of grammar alone.

Let’s end this for now, however. On a light note.

Teacher: Can you give me an example of a simple sentence?
Student: I love grammar.

Teacher: Great! Now, a compound sentence?
Student: I love grammar, and I enjoy making sentences.

Teacher: Excellent! Now, a complex sentence?
Student: Although I love grammar, I still make mistakes when my brain takes a coffee break!