Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
If you have studied Latin, you might have unhappy memories of a grammatical construction called “the ablative absolute.” The ablative is one of the six Latin cases into which nouns or noun phrases can fall, and one of its uses is to indicate an “absolute” clause, that is, a clause that is loosened from the main clause that contains it. It is still connected, but only loosely, something like a dangling participle, which we are taught to avoid in English, but it has the prestige of Latin behind it (and Greek, for that matter), as well as Shakespeare and many other good writers. We don’t have an ablative case in English, and we don’t add any case suffix to absolute clauses. What we usually do is add a participle.
“All else being equal, I would choose the minority candidate.” Here the opening absolute clause has a participle (“being”) and a different subject (“all else”) from that of the primary clause (“I”). It could be rewritten as a clause more tightly tied to the main grammar: “If all else is equal” or “Since all else is equal.” These two possibilities have slightly different meanings, whereas the absolute version is ambiguous; it could be taken either way. It is a translation of ceteris paribus in Latin, which is still in use in law, philosophy, and economics. In order to show the effect of one variable on another, such as supply and demand, economists usually posit that all the other variables remain constant.
“All things considered” is another common example, so common that since 1971 it has been the name of a news program on National Public Radio. Here the participle is “considered.” Another example is “That said,” which usually leads to a complication or conflict with what was just said. Many speakers make use of standard expressions like these, but very few, I think, invent new absolute clauses. It’s a shame they don’t, as such clauses can be expressive, efficient, and elegant.
The poet William Butler Yeats, who was a virtuoso at complicated syntax in verse, liked absolute clauses. “How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix / On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics,” he asks in a poem called “Politics.” The little clause “that girl standing there” is wonderful: its disconnection from the clause that enfolds it signals the speaker’s disconnection from what he is supposed to fix his attention on.
The final lines of his most famous poem, “The Second Coming,” has a succinct but ominous absolute clause: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The opening lines of another famous poem, “Leda and the Swan,” has a set of three parallel absolute clauses: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, / He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.” Here the main clause is “he holds her helpless breast upon his breast,” while loosely attached to it are three clauses with “beating,” “caressed,” and “caught” as the participles.
It’s not necessary, however, to include a participle in an absolute clause. You can say, “His clothes wet, he spent a miserable day in the woods.” Or “He made it home at last, his dog at his heels.” You could insert a participle (“being wet” or “trotting at his heels”) but they are not essential. You can usually put a “with” before the clause, and turn it into a prepositional phrase: “with his clothes wet” or “with his dog at his heels.” We also have the peculiar phrase “what with,” whose origin can be traced to the fifteenth century. “What with one thing and another, I missed my flight.” But this is not quite an absolute construction.
Shakespeare has many such expressions without a participle, such as this from Macbeth: “For the poor wren, / The most diminutive of birds, will fight, / Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.” Here the absolute clause interrupts the verb phrase “fight against” to remind us why a little wren will fight an owl. In Julius Caesar, Brutus tells Cassius how Portia died: “with this she fell distract, / And, her attendants absent, swallowed fire.” A character in Richard II says, “Joy absent, grief is present for that time.”
“Absent” appears fairly often in absolute clauses without a participle, in part perhaps because in Latin it is a participle itself, derived from abesse, “to be away.” In any event, in twentieth-century legal documents you may find it first in a clause, such as “Absent such an appeal, the constitutional issues were conclusively determined.” To me this usage seems absolute, as it would be if the clause were re-arranged to “such an appeal absent,” but you could argue that “absent” is no longer an adjective (or participle) but a preposition, more or less equivalent to “without.”
There is one ill-judged absolute clause that has caused long and bitter debates in America. The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The first thirteen words are an absolute clause, somewhat odd-looking because of the comma in the middle of it, which today we would leave out (along with the later comma). Because absolute clauses have an ambiguous connection to their main clause, some defenders of unconstrained gun ownership more or less ignore it and claim that the right to bear arms is, well, absolute. But there is no getting around the clause about a Militia: it is clear that maintaining a Militia was the reason for granting the right, but the text does not say, for instance, that only those who are in a Militia have the right. It remains vague, and maddening. (The word “Arms” is also contentious, because none of the Founding Fathers could have imagined that “Arms” includes semi-automatic and automatic guns—but that’s a subject for another column.)
Other than this unhappy example, absolute clauses are often useful and sometimes just the right thing to say. Try to use them. Impress your friends. They will think that, all things considered, you are an eloquent speaker, even a poet.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at
UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at
Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the
staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in
Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin
Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a
deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San
Francisco.
