(I know I’m supposed to do seasonally appropriate posts, etc., but I’m bad at that, oh well.)
Derek Guy writes about menswear. I follow him on Twitter not because I want tips about how to dress (I reckon I’ll never really break out of the cargo-shorts-and-ball-cap habit) but because it’s fascinating to me to read about the aesthetics of and the engineering that goes into men’s clothing design.
However, today a language thing. In a recent thread he was talking about improvements in the wool that’s used for men’s suits. At one point he makes an observation about the benefits of a particular fabric:
The text says this, with the interesting part in bold:
It’s harder to get clothes made from these fabrics nowadays. Among guys obsessed with tailoring, there are “cloth clubs” where members organize special runs of custom fabrics made to Old World specs. Stuff tailors beautifully.
The sentence Stuff tailors beautifully struck me because it shows three interesting language things.
The first is conversational deletion a.k.a. left-edge erosion, in which the beginning of the sentence has been elided. You might expect something like The stuff or This stuff, but here the initial determiner (The or This) has been axed. We do this a lot, especially with pronouns (“Better be going!”, “See ya!”) but we can also elide other elements (“No way!”). In a Slate article, Katy Waldman quotes Randolph Thrasher Jr.’s analysis:
… whatever is exposed (in sentence initial position) can be swept away. If erosion of the first element exposes another vulnerable element, this too may be eroded. The process continues until a hard (non-vulnerable) element is encountered.
Here, of course, stuff is the first “non-vulnerable” element, so that’s what starts the sentence. This phenomenon is called conversational deletion because it’s something we do in informal speech and writing. Yet another name for this is diary drop, because it was noted as a feature of diary entries.
The second thing that struck me was ambiguity. Stuff tailors beautifully isn’t ambiguous in context. But if you try hard enough, you can read stuff as an imperative verb and tailors as a noun, the object of stuff. Sure, we don’t usually stuff tailors, but we do stuff turkeys. And if we do stuff a tailor, perhaps we can do so in a beautiful way. (Trying hard to make sentences ambiguous is a specialty of editors, right?)
Finally (and most fun) is that Stuff tailors beautifully is a great example of what’s called mediopassive. The intent here is something like “This stuff can be tailored [by someone] in a beautiful way”.[1]
Although that’s the meaning, the grammar of Stuff tailors is a little different than normal passive. As in normal passive, the “patient”—the thing being acted on, as they say—is the subject of the sentence: stuff. But we don’t have a form of to be + the participle ([can] be tailored). Instead, the verb tailors is active-looking even though it has passive semantics—someone is doing something (namely, tailoring) to the stuff.
Conceptually, mediopassive is a slightly strange construction (cloth tailors, wut?), but it’s pretty common. Here are some more examples, conveniently supplied by the good folks at Merriam-Webster in their note on mediopassive:
- This window opens easily.
- The landscape photographs nicely.
- The car drove smoothly.
- The house sold in four days.
- The book reads like first-person reportage.
Anyway, I thought it was cool to find so much language fun in a three-word sentence.
It would be remiss of me if I failed to include the obligatory commercial for my book, in which I discuss conversational deletion and many other fun terms about language. (Not mediopassive, though! I’ll have to fix that.)
Happy holidays!
[1] A possible fourth language thing in this sentence is that the meaning of beautifully is (to me) a bit hard to pin down. Does it mean that it’s easy to tailor? That the end result is beautiful? Something else?