Words&Dirt

“It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two yards from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a yard across.  If you were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible from behind.  You could see it only from the side nearest the road, and you couldn’t see it easily even from there, because all you could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front of it on this side: a patch of grass lit by a streetlight.

But Will knew without the slightest doubt that that patch of grass on the other side was in a different world.

He couldn’t possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and kindness was good.  He was looking at something profoundly alien.”

––The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman, loc. 238-46

“You can’t say Bill killed, meaning he died, or The building razed, meaning it collapsed or burned.  English allows one to talk both about going out of existence and about causing to go out of existence, but not with the same verb.  It’s as if the language took the existential stance––perhaps the moral stance––that when something ceases to be on account of old age, peaceful causes, spontaneous combustion, internal rot, or carrying the seeds of its own destruction, that demise is qualitatively different from the outcome of malice aforethought.  This isn’t a peculiarity of English; many other languages use distinct verbs for dying and killing, even when they allow their other verbs to do double duty for happening and causing to happen.

When I allude to moral sentiments to explain the syntax of causative verbs, I am not trying to enliven a grammar lesson with an eye-catching figure of speech.  Morality and causative verbs tap the same mental model of human action.  Moral judgments apply most clearly to people who act with the intention of bringing about a foreseen effect.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 71