1035. This week, we look at famous and amazing first sentences in novels to understand what makes them so compelling, and then we look at the interesting origin of "gladiator" and other words from Roman times.
1035. This week, we look at famous and amazing first sentences in novels to understand what makes them so compelling, and then we look at the interesting origin of "gladiator" and other words from Roman times.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, since some of you are probably wrapping up work from National Novel Writing Month, so we're going to talk about good first sentences, and then with the recent release of the movie "Gladiator II," we're going to talk about the interesting origin of the word "gladiator" and other Roman words.
This first segment is by Camilla Nelson.
by Camilla Nelson
In Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), an epidemic spreads across Oran, a town on Africa’s north coast, as Joseph Grand attempts to write a novel. Grand dreams of writing a book that will cause his publisher to leap up from his desk (the publishers in this world are men) and gasp in wonder.
But he can’t get the first sentence right. He worries at every detail, frets over meaning and rhythm. He arranges and rearranges it. There is no possibility of a second sentence. Without the first line, the novel is obstructed.
Camus had a blackly comic sense of humour. And so he causes Grand to go on scribbling through the night, parsing his phrases as the town around him is laid waste. Grand continues to write even as he succumbs to the disease himself. And after he is miraculously cured (the local doctor having burnt the offending manuscript), Grand returns to his sentence once again. He has, he tells the doctor, got the sentence by heart.
Like Hemingway in search of the “one true sentence” he needed for a story to begin – or Flaubert in his excruciating search for “Le Mot Juste” – Grand is convinced that a novel begins with its opening line, and by following that line the writer – no less than the reader – travels along a path to the novel’s final destination.
Camus is keenly alive to the absurdity of Grand’s conviction – the strange futility of his endeavours – but there is perhaps a subtler irony in the fact that he was equally alive to the formal requirements of a good opening sentence. Of course, he also knew that opening sentences are seldom written first, but somewhere in the muddle of the middle, or more often, as an afterthought.
First sentences do a special kind of work. They have, as critic Stanley Fish once said, an “angle of lean.” They establish a contract with the reader about what is to come; they may sketch in a character, establish a mood, foreshadow a plot, or set out an argument. They seem to set the direction for every other sentence. The first words are also, in this sense, the last words.
Take, for example, Tolstoy’s famous opening from Anna Karenina (1873-77),
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The sentence not only sets up one of Tolstoy’s key themes – the struggle between happiness and freedom, or more broadly, between living for oneself and living for others. But it also throws up a series of questions or contradictions that will rule the lives of his characters until the very last page.
It is, of course, far from true that all happy families are alike. The idea is no more plausible than Jane Austen’s equally famous assertion in the opening of Pride and Prejudice (1813) that, “a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” But the sentence is true for the world of the novel.
Most opening lines are a little less tyrannical, in the sense of being less overarching or all encompassing.
George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), for example, starts out with the oddly disturbing sentence,
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
Here it is less the idea as such, and more the odd proximity of ideas and false teeth that the reader finds intriguing.
Oddity is also the principle characteristic of that other famous Orwellian first line of his dystopian novel 1984 (1949),
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.
Here, the 13th strike indicates that things in Orwell’s world are deeply and desperately wrong, but nobody questions them – and, indeed, the reader at this stage is prepared to go along with it too.
It is the task of an opening sentence to pull the reader over the threshold into the world of a book. But the way they do this is often unexpected. They can start with an action, or better still, the dramatic foreshadowing of action.
Graham Greene’s “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him,” which begins Brighton Rock (1938), is difficult to beat.
Or they can start with a minor action that reveals something about a character. “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” tells us much about the dissolute protagonist of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Why, we ask, was he thrown off the hay truck? Was it something he did?
Modern writers have become very adept at throwing out these kinds of narrative hooks – often in multiples.
Elmore Leonard begins The Big Bounce (1969) like this,
They were watching Ryan beat up the Mexican crew leader on 16mm Commercial Ektachrome.
Who is Ryan, we ask. Why is he beating up the Mexican crew leader? Why are they watching him? Who are they? And how on earth did all this make it onto 16mm Commercial Ektachrome?
These sentences are successful in luring the reader because they are plucked from the midst of events. Margaret Atwood starts her dystopic The Handmaiden’s Tale (1985) in much the same way:
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Why, we ask, are they sleeping in the gymnasium? Why is the gymnasium no longer a gymnasium? And, indeed, who are we?
Modern writers have become particularly adept at composing first sentences. They are – admittedly – the first line of defence against rejection by a publisher, or indeed, by an increasingly impatient and time poor reader.
But, in the history of the novel form, first sentences weren’t always so showy.
Jane Austen might be known for the words “It was a truth generally acknowledged …” but among the many first sentences that she wrote is the comparatively prosaic “The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex”, which opens Sense and Sensibility (1811).
And, of course, early novels like those of Defoe or Richardson, for example, were so hemmed in by short and long titles, prefaces, prologues, and epigraphs that it often becomes difficult to decide – in a purely formal sense – where the novel begins.
One of the opening lines I regularly set my students on is the simple ten-word sentence that opens a novel that was sent unsolicited and under a pseudonym to a London publisher late in August, 1847. It reads,
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
The simplicity of the sentence is deceptive. Why do they walk, we ask, and where do they walk? Why was there “no possibility”? In just a few words the reader knows a lot. We know that the characters have a routine; that the routine occurs daily. It is therefore perhaps more than a routine but a custom or indeed an obligation tied to a set of social norms or a way of life.
We know this – innocuously enough – from the use of the relative pronoun “that,” which restricts the meaning or application of the action to “that day,” as opposed to all the other days. (There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.) But it is perhaps the words “no possibility” that stay with us.
These words tell us that had there been the remotest chance then the characters would certainly have gone. In searching among the possible reasons – the inference of windy weather or wild woodlands – the reader might even presume that there is something a little harsh in it. In which case they would be right. It is the opening sentence of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).
Camus’ The Plague (1947) describes a pestilence that is both literal and allegorical. It is a story about fascism, which might well be read as parable about hyper-capitalism in our own time. Of all Camus’ novels, none describes humanity’s coexistence with death on such an epic scale. Yet Camus opens The Plague with a sentence that is deliberately plain and detached:
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran.
In an article about first sentences the better example would be Camus’ The Stranger (1942), which begins,
Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
The Stranger possesses the more alluring opening. But a reader would be hard pressed to tell which is the better book.
Which just goes to show that a first sentence – however dazzling – only gets you so far.
Camilla Nelson is a Senior Lecturer in Writing at the University of Notre Dame in Australia. This piece originally appeared on The Conversation and is included here through a Creative Commons license.
by Samantha Enslen
"Gladiator II" just marched into theaters. Featuring stars like Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal, and directed by returning filmmaker Ridley Scott, it’s a must-see for folks who loved the original "Gladiator."
Today we’re looking at the word “gladiator” itself and some other words used in this Roman-era epic.
We'll start with “gladiator.” As you probably know, among the ancient Romans, a gladiator was a guy who fought at public exhibitions using a sword or other weapon. And logically enough, “gladiator” comes from the Latin word “gladius,” meaning sword.
That root word has also given us “gladiolus”: a perennial plant with long, sword-shaped petals and spikes of bright flowers. You might have heard gladiolus referred to as a “sword lilies” — their common name.
Most gladiators in Rome weren't free men; they were slaves or captives trained to fight for the pleasure of the aristocracy. They were placed in a special social category, considered “infames,” dishonorable citizens with no legal status in Rome.
Over time, “infames,” the word, brought us the English words “famous” and “infamous.” Even today, someone who’s “infamous” may have legal standing, but is still considered notoriously bad.
Gladiators often fought in huge arenas called colosseums. That word comes from the Latin “colosseus,” meaning “gigantic.” That led to our modern-day “colossal” and the now-defunct “colossic,” both meaning “humongous.”
And note: older versions of Roman coliseums were semicircular. When they started to build round or oval ones, like we see in the "Gladiator" movies, they were called “amphitheaters.” That’s a merging of the word “theater” with the Greek prefix “amphi-,” meaning “both” or “on both sides” — a theater on both sides. These buildings were also known as “spectācula,” which evolved into our present-day words "spectacular" and “spectacle."
Finally, let’s take a look at the bad guy in these movies: the emperor. “Emperor” comes from the classical Latin word “imperator.” This originally referred to a chief military commander. But during the Roman Republic, it became a title of honor, ultimately conferred by the Roman senate on Julius Caesar.
The title was adopted by nearly all the subsequent rulers of the empire, eventually coming to be the chief official designation of the Roman leader and taking on the sense of “absolute ruler.”
This title went on to be used for several centuries. It disappeared only in 1806 when the Holy Roman Empire, created by the Catholic papacy in 800 AD to unite Europe under one rule, was dissolved.
But … the legacy of absolute rule didn’t end there.
Rome’s first emperor, Julius Caesar, had such a decisive effect on history that his family name became synonymous with the idea of supreme rule. Caesar became “Kaiser” in German, “tsar” in the Slavonic languages, and “qayṣar” in the languages of the Islamic world.
Maybe centuries from now, my last name, Fogarty, will mean “one who shares knowledge about our language with the wide world.” Who knows? A Grammar Girl can dream, right?.
Postscript
And here's a postscript for true word nerds: “Caesar” was the emperor’s cognomen, or third name. His full name was “Gaius Julius Caesar.” Gaius was his “praenomen” or forename; Julius his “nomen” or surname; and Caesar his “cognomen.” The third name denoted which part of the Julius family he belonged to.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
And finally, I have a familect story from Pam:
"Hi, Grammar Girl, my name is Pam. My family fun phrase is Bear Barber. That's B-E-A-R/ The story is when I was a girl and by girl, I mean, and I was about 30, my mom's chihuahua had minor surgery, and they shaved a patch of fur, and eventually the fur grew back. But only so long, and then it stopped growing. Now, I do not know where my head was, but one day I mused out loud. 'Why didn't Chuy's fur just keep growing here where she was shaved?’ And the rest of the family just stopped dead, and my mother who lives for these little brain lapses in her children said, 'Do you ever wonder why a bear's fur is always short?' And my brother helpfully piped up with 'Maybe bears go to a bear barber.' Thus was born a gentle joke at my expense. And from then on, when anyone leaves for Supercuts, they announce they are going to the bear barber. Thanks."
Thanks Pam. I love that.
If you want to share your familect, you can do it in a voice chat on WhatsApp or you can still call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and both of those are in the show notes, which you can find in your podcast listening app.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin in marketing; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Dan Feierabend in audio; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; Morgan Christianson in advertising; and Nat Hoopes in marketing who makes indie folk music under the name “The Bedroomer” and is working on his third album.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily," which makes a great gift. That's all. Thanks for listening.
***
The following references for the "Gladiator" segment did not appear in the podcast but are included here for completeness.
American Horticultural Society Great Plant Guide: Revised and Updated. DK Publishing, January 2021.
Oxford English Dictionary online. Caesar, gladiator, colosseum. Oed.com.
Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. Julius Caesar, in Encyclopedia Britannica online. https://www.britannica.com/