Sunday, January 17, 2016

All of the words in the English language are divided into nine categories: article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. Of all of these, the noun is the most important, as all others are more or less dependent upon it. A noun signifies the name of any person, place, or thing, in fact, anything of which we can have either thought or idea. There are two kinds of nouns: proper and common. Common nouns are names which belong in common to a race or class, as "man" or "city." Proper nouns distinguish individual members of a race or class, such as "John" or "Philadelphia." In the former case, man is a name which belongs in common to the whole race of mankind, and city is common to all large centers of population, but "John" signifies a particular individual of the race, while "Philadelphia" denotes a particular one from among the cities of the world.

The word "flower" is a common noun.

The word "Rose" is a proper noun.

A poem by Emily Dickinson

"Suspense"

Elysium is as far as to

the very nearest room,

if in a room a friend await

felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,

that it can so endure

the accent of a coming foot,

the opening of a door!

From "Essays in the Art of Writing" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Choice of Words

The art of literature stands apart from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist words is the dialect of life; hence, on the one a hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to receive it. But on the other hand, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeler's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. you have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigor: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import.