[grasshopper]

W/G,
I think you have to compare like with like, or it gets silly. What you are demonstrating there is not the weakness of a fore-modifier, but the strength of a verb. That's surely not the point at issue.
Regards,Maz

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Roger Slater:

"... first reaction, which I offer respectfully to a poet whose work I admire, is that the razor is just a fanciful and fun bit of thought-inducing hokum..."

Whole lot of modifying going on here, where "hokum" would do the work. However, if it's "thought-inducing hokum," I suppose it's not all bad.

"Among many other things, it occurs to me that one formula covering dimeter lines and heptameter lines alike is unrealistic, since there's a lot more room in longer lines for modifyers than there is in shorter lines."

Roger, this sounds like an excuse for padding. "Room" shouldn't justify flabby writing no matter the line length.

Thomas Lux asks his students to put on their adverb lenses and their adjective lenses as a device for finding weaknesses in language, mainly nouns and verbs that lack precision. I find the "Razor" a useful tool, especially in revising metrical poetry, where padding the meter is an obvious danger.

Bob

[Roger Slater]

Well, I have to acknowledge that most fine poems are relatively light on the modifiers; I resisted the numerical notion only because many of the great moments in poetry also happen to involve modifiers, and I feared a rule that might discourage people from using modifiers to powerful effect.

Of course Frost's line is better with its noun before the adjective, but which do you prefer, "Thou still unravished bride of quietness" or "Thou bride of quietness, still unravished"? Maybe it's more difficult to use modifiers than other parts of speech, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't do it and try to make it come out right. Sonnets are difficult, too, but we don't conclude that poets therefore shouldn't write them. If your modifier is "still unravished" or something equally interesting, it's unfair to compare it with weaker words like "slightly" or "red", for example.

Of course, Wiley is only saying not to use too many of them, not to use none at all. But I wouldn't want this caution to mean anything more than "be careful using modifiers" or to serve as a justification for inversions unnatural.

What I said about the difference between longer and shorter lines did not sanction the padding of longer lines with modifiers, of course. I merely suggested that it's easier to find room for any word, modifier or not, if you have four or five feet rather than two or three. Since nouns and verbs are essential, and modifiers are expendible in terms of being able to create real sentences, it follows, I think, that modifiers could get in the way when writing shorter lines. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" has three modifiers that take three of the four metrical beats. These modifiers could not have found room in a dimeter line, and it would take some doing to clear a whole line of trimeter for them. Given the difference between longer and shorter lines in this regard, it stands to reason that "acceptable" ratios should differ as well.

But I know I'll be more alert to modifiers in my own work as a result of this conversation, so the Golias Razor has succeeded in raising my consciousness on the issue whatever the merits of its specific arithmatic.

[Golias]

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Wiley / Golias

Thank you taking up my invitation to explain "Golias’ Razor". Having initiated the thread, I feel I ought to throw in my own three ha’p’orth.

The injunction that modifiers (in this context, single-word adjectives and adverbs) should pull their weight is sound advice for all of us. Golias’ Razor offers a way of quantifying this advice and thereby helping us, as readers and writers, to focus more sharply on the issue. As you make clear, setting the value at 3:1 expresses a critical choice. Though other choices and other values are possible, this does not, in my view, make the Razor less instructive. Rather, it encourages to think, always a good thing.

Maz’s question about French verse is interesting and opens up a wider topic. Roger put it like this: "Words have to come one at a time, of course, and my perception isn't ‘delayed’ but ordered by the poet". I take it that the process of reading (and of listening to) an utterance is one in which the reader (the listener) is constantly guessing from verbal and other clues what will come next and of revising his guess in the light of what actually follows. This process of expectation modified by continuously deferred fulfilment (it is tempting to eroticize the process) is powerfully influenced by word-function and by the dynamics of syntax. Languages vary in the degree to which they require us to postpone what I have just called fulfilment. Of the languages I am familiar with, Latin and German make the greatest demands of this kind - that is, on someone for whom these are not first languages and for whom, therefore, by comparison with English, there is always a residual strangeness involved. I suspect, however, that it would be unwise to assume that a Roman or a German experienced things in the same way. To attribute critical value to the fact that adjectives tend to follow nouns in French seems, therefore, to merit closer thought.

To return to Roger’s remark, I suppose I differ from you in this, that I am not convinced that the writer’s task is simply to move the reader forward without anything which might be "obstructive" or which might create "delaying effects". It is, rather, the task of managing the reader’s attention while at the same time allowing "space" for the intelligent imagination to expand into. Of course, since readers come in all shapes and sizes, this is not easy; but then if it were, it would not be fun either.

Thank you once again for describing for us how your most useful Razor works.

Best wishes!

Clive Watkins

[Anthony Lombardy]

Thanks, Clive and Wiley, for this interesting thread. Stylometrics is a very old part of classics, used to argue authorship, date, and so on. An interesting thing about the field is that early results are often wrong!

I have always told my students that great writers, like Shakespeare, generally write in a ratio of at least 2 to 1, noun to adjective or verb to adverb. Perhaps I was understating the ratio. I don't remember offhand where I first read about this, but I do know that my own informal counting seemed to be consistent with this result for Shakespeare.

I don't totally agree with you, Wiley, on the importance of the placement of a modifier, since I don't think that we process individual words, typically. With highly inflected languages, like Latin and Greek, there is no doubt that language gets processed in bigger chunks than in languages with fairly rigid word order, but even in English there is "chunking".
In conversations like this I think we are missing a subject of great importance if we neglect the way in which adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses figure in the economy of an utterance. A poem can muffle its essential statement in vast folds of adjectival and adverbial clauses without exceeding a desirable ratio of adjectives to nouns. Unless purposive, this can undermine a statement, and is often invisible to writers who don't think in these terms.

Tony

[grasshopper]

Thank you for a most interesting discussion. May I as, a postnote, throw in a thought which you may or may not feel is relevant to issues of 'expectation' etc in reading.
I apologise for not quoting exactly, but I recall in one of Thomas Love Peacock's novels, the hero is escorted round a garden by a rather pretentious architect, to a certain prospect.
'Here' says the architect 'I have added an element to the view, which I call Surprise,'
'Really?' the hero replies drily 'and what do you call it the second time round?'

Regards,Maz

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Roger Slater:

"... many of the great moments in poetry also happen to involve modifiers, and I feared a rule that might discourage people from using modifiers to powerful effect."

Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang...

Yes, Roger, MANY of the great moments, so your fear is justified. However, better to think of the RAZOR as a tool than as a rule. It's utilitarian, especially for novices and writers too dependent on modifiers. But we ought to know, if we use it, that it can't add grace. For that we need Golias's Bay Rhum.

Utterly Shameless O'Clawson

[hector]

Snowy
Flowy
Blowy
Showery
Flowery
Bowery
Hoppy
Choppy
Droppy
Breezy
Sneezy
Freezy

An exception to Golias' razor, perhaps?

[Golias]

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[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 21, 2003).]