Why you need to understand the grammar of voice: how to attribute or obscure responsibility

#languagematters

Grammar is all around us - all day everyday. I teach grammar to undergrads, who, if I’m lucky, come to me remembering a few standard (and mostly useless) grammar ‘rules’ from primary school. They don’t understand grammar’s beauty. They don’t understand its power. It’s my job to help them get to know the guts of language.

Beautiful language is like a grand symphony to my grammar-trained ears. I hear it being used to bring or hold people together, to explore big or important ideas, to create poetic beauty or therapeutic ways of seeing ourselves in the world.

When you can really hear the intricate grammatical patterns of language, the good stuff is awesome. Sure, I’m thinking of great works of literary art, like the novels Dickens or the sonnets of Edna St Vincent Millay. But there is amazing beauty in ordinary conversation. I loved listening to my late mum being a grandmother to her 17 grandkids. In her talk, each grandkid was recognised for their uniqueness, while at the same time, her conversation showed them her own personality behind the grandma label.

Often the way grammar is used makes me weep, like when I hear the wealthy and powerful use language to divide communities and keep themselves on top. Or when I see people whose activist sentiments I share doing a hash job on their words because they don’t know how to get themselves into the driver’s seat of language.

Grammar you shouldn’t leave home without

Sometimes I wish I could switch my grammar brain off. I wish I could stop hearing and analysing the patterns that are flowing around me in my work, my home and my recreation. Other times I wonder how people get through the day not knowing the grammatical systems that have powered them along from sunrise to bedtime.

So here and now, let me introduce you to one of the most powerful grammatical systems that gets you through each and every day. My starting point is a meme travelling around the internet, attributed to Utah Phillips, an American folk singer and labour organizer, who died in 2008. As well as this great meme, he penned a song about the plane that bombed Hiroshima, called Enola Gay. The pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, named this plane after his mother.

I’m excited to tell you Wikipedia reports one of Utah Phillips’ hobbies to be linguistics :). So, did he know the grammatical chord he was striking with this now famous quote?

The earth isn’t dying, it’s being killed and those who are killing it have names and addresses

When Phillips put die and kill side by side, he was dramatizing two very different ways to see something. Die is a process we do all on our own, while kill is something that someone does to someone else. If you are thinking this is a difference between the passive voice (the earth is dying) and the active voice (it’s being killed), you’d be wrong.

But you’d be in good company. Here’s an example I like to use in class with students, with thanks to Ken Roth, former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch:

Roth was commenting on a speech given at the UN to the Security Council back in 2016. He was endorsing this statement by then UN Relief Chief, Stephen O’Brien:

Civilians are being bombed by Syria and Russian forces …

It was a really powerful speech, so powerful, that Roth assumed it didn’t use the passive voice. But, just like the earth is being killed, the UN Relief Chief’s statement that Civilians are being bombed by Syria and Russian forces is in the passive voice. Both of these sentences start with the people/thing being impacted by the action¹.

It’s not surprising that this kind of grammar is a significant touchstone for making sense of war and violence. Language gives you lots of options when you are putting some terrible act of violence into words: options to state who is responsible, options to obscure responsibility, and options to leave agency completely out of the picture. I’ve written here about why journalists reporting on war and violence need to understand the grammar of voice.

It’s really important to know that the meanings we make through grammar are not optional. Sure, grammar gives you choices - but you have to choose, and you have to choose from the options that language gives you. English grammar covertly makes you take a position on agency.

The active and passive voice have something very important in common: they both depict an action where someone or something is responsible for what is going on. The passive voice may not tell you who or what is responsible - that’s one of its funky features. But even if it doesn’t tell you who or what did the action, there is still someone or something responsible for the action.

But the words that Utah Phillips rejected - the earth isn’t dying - do something altogether different. It is a form called middle voice. It is potent and powerful because it allows us to make an action seem like it happens all by itself. If the earth is dying, it is doing this all on its own - no-one and nothing is responsible. This is why Utah Phillips rejected these words in favour of saying the earth is being killed. Sure, he’s replacing middle voice with the passive voice: but he is reminding us that this process has perpetrators, and that we can and should hold them accountable. And within a hot second he is back in the active voice: those who are killing it …

The planet isn’t heating itself

Once you know this distinction, you won’t be able to get away from it. It’s everywhere. Your brain is deciding on the grammatical choice hundreds and hundreds of times everyday. To raise public awareness of climate crisis, we need to be clear that this heating planet is not heating on its own. Our ice caps aren’t quietly melting themselves. Our cities and towns aren’t flooding themselves. Our bushfires aren’t burning themselves. Our ocean isn’t raising its own temperature and sea levels aren’t just ‘rising’.

But check out this ad produced by the Climate Ad project and called ‘A Task of Cosmic Importance’.

After a little intro, the narrator states ‘humanity is heating the planet’ - it’s a nice bit of active voice, albeit that we are all made equally responsible for global warming.

As the scale of the climate crisis is being narrated over graphic images of what burning fossil fuels has done to our planet, the grammar all switches to middle voice:

The ice is melting

The land is burning

The ocean is dying

And the living planet is unravelling on our watch

All middle voice. Ice melting, land burning, ocean dying, the planet unravelling, as if all these processes happen by themselves, without being caused by anyone or anything. Maybe there’s some method here, but I can’t see it.

If we are trying to raise public consciousness that burning fossil fuels is killing the planet, don’t we need everyone to see that global warming has a very clear cause? Don’t we need to constantly make visible, and stigmatize, who is killing our planet, and how they are doing it? In my last post, I wrote about the insults used by climate predators to denigrate climate activists and scientists, while the labels we have for those killing the planet are pretty tame. We really need to lift our linguistic game.

The planet isn’t dying, it’s being killed, and there are real, identifiable people behind the companies profiting from climate-wrecking. Emily Atkin at Heated has just outed some of these climate predators, after a few of them sat down to chopped steak with Trump to help get him back into the White House so he can undo the climate progress made by Biden. Don’t help these climate-wreckers cause by obscuring them in the grammatical shadows.

The chopped steak eaters

1. If you want a more technical explanation of the passive voice: it is configured when we put the ‘Goal’ of an action in the role of the Subject of the clause - here’s the reference book I go to on these matters.