Thanksgiving remains an exciting holiday for me because it is the one and only time of year that I get four consecutive days off work without having to dip into my vacation time. Other than that, I find Thanksgiving decidedly meh.
Thanksgiving remains an exciting holiday for me because it is the one and only time of year that I get four consecutive days off work without having to dip into my vacation time. Other than that, I find Thanksgiving decidedly meh.
Last weekend, my father responded to my email to him by reminding me not to use sentence fragments. 🤭
How embarrassing! It was almost as if I had used a swear word. (Dad uses a lot of those himself, but would be shocked to see me let one fly from my keyboard. Actually, I’d be shocked, too.)
My 85 year old father has a master’s degree in English, recites Victorian poetry from memory, and expects me to uphold some standards of decency when I put words to paper (or screen). Fortunately for me, he does not read this blog. Well, at least I think he doesn’t. Umm, hi, Dad?
I write for a living (if you consider drafting policy documents and training programs to be writing, and I will surely excuse you if you do not), so there are no excuses. I have coached my staff over and over again about the importance of avoiding sentence fragments. Hey, man, I wanna see a subject and a verb, you dig?
Some say that sentence fragments are just plain laziness, but the real reason that they are so enticing is that they mimic the way we speak. And suffice it to say that most of us don’t exactly speak the Queen’s English. When we have a conversation, we interrupt, we speak over and under one another, and we use coded references that my fellow lawyers refer to as a “course of dealing.” In other words, you and I understand what we mean based on our ongoing relationship (or at least based on earlier parts of the conversation), whereas others not privy to our relationship (or our conversation) might think a particular word or phrase means something altogether different or might not have any idea of its meaning at all.
For example, I might drop the subject from a sentence because we already know what/whom we’re talking about. This allows me to skip the formalities and go directly to the depth and color of adjectives, prepositional phrases and even (what the heck, let’s go all the way) interjections.
In this respect, formal English takes on a decided egalitarian cast. Faithful use of subject and verb ensures that a stranger walking in on the middle of a conversation can understand what is going on despite the lack of a course of dealing or other contextual clues.
The other reason we like to use sentence fragments is because, well, they’re sexy. They spice up the narrative. You tell me which of the following snippets of dialogue is bound to be more appealing to the average reader:
He went yesterday?! What do you mean?
or
Yesterday?! What?!
While both of the above convey a degree of shock and incredulity, the former contains boring old subjects (he and you) and verbs (went and mean), while the latter contains neither. The first consists of two fully formed sentences, while the latter is composed of two sentence fragments. It isn’t necessary to provide the linguistic guideposts of subject and verb because context has already been provided earlier in the conversation. Arguably, the second choice more accurately conveys the speaker’s emotions and makes for more interesting reading.
This phenomenon is not limited to dialogue and fiction. In fact, among the most prevalent and influential uses of sentence fragments is modern advertising. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at two of today’s most recognizable product tag lines:
Tastes great, less filling.
Lowest prices. Always.
The first example contains a verb (tastes), but nary a subject is to be found. After all, it isn’t needed (because the reader or listener already knows what is being discussed). If brevity is the soul of wit, why muck it up with surplus verbiage? A sentence fragment will serve the purpose nicely.
The second example contains two sentence fragments, the first with a subject (prices) but no verb, the second with neither subject nor verb (just a lonely old adverb). And yet, as a result of context, the reader understands the intended meaning perfectly. Indeed, even a reader with few or no contextual clues can arguably discern the promise of regular discounts. Do we really need to say “this establishment features the lowest prices available in the area?”
Thus, I submit to you, dear reader, that despite the protestations of the grammatical purists out there, sentence fragments do have their place in the English language. Even in the emails of a lifelong word wrangler.
Sorry, Dad.
My grandnephew is exactly one month old today. He has resided in an incubator in the hospital since he was born. Weight at birth: About 1.7 pounds. He has his own dedicated nurse attending to him, 24 hours a day.
Three weeks have come and gone since my parents left our home and returned to the Central Valley following Mom’s surgery. Just when it all started to feel like a bad dream, Mom let me know that she may need to have a second surgery.
When I met my parents for lunch in Sacramento on Monday, Mom was irritated and in a foul mood. They had made the three and a half hour drive for a doctor appointment at Kaiser, a supposedly necessary connection to set a surgery date at UC Davis.
Except that Kaiser refused to do any such thing. UC Davis? They simply claimed not to know what Mom was talking about. Despite what my parents may have been told at Kaiser in Fresno, Kaiser in Sacramento insisted that they don’t schedule surgery at UC Davis. Any surgery would have to be done at Kaiser’s own hospital in Sacramento. And anyway, there were no available surgery dates for months.
Understandably, Mom wondered which Kaiser facility was lying to her. I voted for Sacramento on that score. Why would Kaiser in Fresno tell her that the surgery could be done at the respected teaching hospital at UC Davis if that were not true?
Answer: To shut my sister up. Sis had driven down to support Mom at her gynecology appointment at Kaiser in Fresno a few weeks ago. Mom related that Sis and the doctor got along famously, Sis rambling on about her work as a sonographer. But Mom’s medical record betrayed a different story. Mom only found out because the doctor in Sacramento inexplicably read aloud the part of the record characterizing Sis as a meddler unhappy with her mother’s care. I can only conclude that the nonexistent Davis option was the Fresno doctor’s way of mollifying Sis. When Mom reported this to my sister, the latter got on the phone to Kaiser in Fresno to complain, only to be told that she must have misunderstood.
So Davis is out. I suggested to Mom that if she was going to have the surgery at Kaiser, she might as well have it done at their Fresno hospital, where she’d be close to home. No, she told me, apparently the surgery that she needs to remove her teratomas is sufficiently specialized that Kaiser does not do it in Fresno.
The surgeon in Sacramento, whom Mom characterized as a young kid “who I wouldn’t hire as a waitress,” never shut up for a minute and never let Mom get a word in edgewise. To add further ambience to our lunch, Mom was fighting with Dad (what else is new ::eye roll::), who she insisted had consistently sided with the young floozie against her.
The next day, Mom was informed that a cancellation had resulted in an available surgery appointment on October 1 at Kaiser’s Sacramento hospital. Since it falls on a Tuesday, Mom agreed. Any day but Friday. “People die when they have surgery on Friday,” she explained.
The only problem is that Mom’s scheduled surgery falls on Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year (one of our High Holy Days). Mom was clearly conflicted about this, but I assured her that she had made the right decision. She’s been feeling pretty lousy lately and, well, that’s when a surgery date was available. Waiting months for the surgery just to avoid the holiday made no sense to me.
The young surgeon opined that she could do the surgery laparoscopically, getting Mom sprung from the hospital after just an overnight stay. I am not sure why I am a bit skeptical. Regardless, my parents will be arriving next weekend, sleeping on the blow-up mattress in our living room. Pre-op is Monday, then surgery on Tuesday. I have arranged for some time off work and will be chauffeuring them the 45 minutes each way to Sacramento for the duration, however long that may turn out to be.
There are entirely too many things that can go wrong, both at my house and at the hospital. I remind myself to calm down and put it all in perspective.
After all, it could be me going under the knife.
My parents are 85 years old. My mother needs to have surgery to remove her ovaries that have developed three huge teratomas, one of which, a CAT scan revealed, is filled with blood. She feels bloated and uncomfortable and wants to get the surgery over with so she can get on with her life.
Kaiser down in Fresno, near my parents’ home, has decided to send Mom up here to have her surgery in Sacramento. My parents are making the three and a half hour trip today to complete paperwork at a local Kaiser facility. They are bringing a suitcase packed with clothes. Mom does not intend to go home until after the surgery. She wants to be admitted to UC Davis Hospital. Now.
Well, I tell her, the sooner she has the surgery, the sooner she’ll feel better. She’s tired of not being able to walk around, not being able to do housework, not being able to garden, not being able to cook, not being able to go up and down the aisles at Winco.
My guess is that the surgery will be scheduled a few weeks off and they will have to go home after all. But Mom is hoping that there will just happen to be an immediate opening.
Mom says the surgeons will try to get everything done laparoscopically, in which case she’ll only have to spend one day in the hospital post-surgery. If they have to open her up, she’ll be stuck there for three or four days.
My parents plan to stay in a hotel for exactly one night after Mom is released from the hospital, just in case things go awry and she has to be readmitted. Then they’re heading straight home, despite the potential discomfort of her stitches being jostled about for such a long car ride. You don’t want to be moaning in bed in some little motel room, she tells me. Au contraire. She wants to have everything she needs conveniently at hand. “Sometimes you want something strange to eat,” she explained to me over the phone. “Like a piece of bread and butter.”
The visit to Kaiser today is likely just a formality, Mom tells me. “Paperwork,” she explains. Like the one foreswearing lawsuits against Kaiser if it all goes sideways. And the one where she declines to be an organ donor. And the one where she declines a DNR order. “If they want to put me on life support, let them,” she tells me. “It’s not as if I feel so bad that I’m ready to give up and die. Maybe if I were 90 years old or something.”
I haven’t the heart to mention that the milestone to which she refers is only four and a half years away. And anyway, what’s so magic about the age of ninety? Plenty of people live to 100 these days, particularly women. I’m putting my money on Mom joining the Century Club.
Now all she has to do is get through this surgery. And the uncomfortable recovery therefrom.
Mono Lake, eastern Sierras. Taken from U.S. 395, north of Lee Vining CA.
I have tried to run away, only to learn that there is no escape. It took some life experience to learn that you will always be outrun by whatever is chasing you, even if the pursuer is none other than your own shadow. (See Proverbs 28:1). It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself.
In my lifetime, I have thrice made the run from sea to shining sea. I couldn’t have done it without the support of my family, and I sometimes wonder where I’d be today without their help.
First time: I was living paycheck to paycheck and, had I not suddenly decamped from Connecticut to the Bay Area, would have eventually run out of money, if not from an automotive crisis, then certainly when my employer closed up shop. That is, unless the abusive relationship I was in killed me first.
Second time: It’s true what they say about not being able to go home again. My eight months in California were disastrous, leaving me to choose between moving in with my parents or homelessness. I saw running away as a viable third option, but high-tailing it back to New England got me nowhere fast. I couldn’t land a stable job in Hartford, went broke and moved in with family in Boston. My first day there, my car disappeared from in front of the laundromat where I was washing clothes. Turned out the cops hauled it away because I couldn’t afford to update my registration and insurance. Back to California I go.
Third time: I was fortunate to have parents who took me in, as I had run out of emotional capital with everyone else. I figured it was better than homelessness. After four and a half months of emotional misery, much of it brought on by myself, a stroke of good fortune led me to a stable paycheck that was just enough to secure a rented apartment six months later.
Twenty years have gone by since then. I have visited the east coast twice without incident. While the sight of New England continues to engender incipient longings, I have come to the understanding that California is my home, now and forever. I was one of those hardheaded dumbells who had to learn the hard way that running away gets you nowhere.
That isn’t to minimize the setbacks that I have experienced here in the Golden State. It took me decades to learn the life lesson that resolve, perseverance, and plain old staying the course can get you far.
Come October, I’ll probably still gawk at the online photos of the amazing Crayola leaf show, coming to you live from Vermont and New Hampshire.
And then I’ll log off, step out into the California sunshine, and laugh.