What Words Do

Yesterday you learned that grammar only cares what job a word does. Today you learn the list of jobs. There are eight, and every word you'll ever meet holds exactly one of them — in any given sentence.

Only eight? That seems too small a number for a language this troublesome.

A noun names something — a person, a place, a thing, or an idea that has no shape at all. Library. Sophia. Wisdom. Each one names, and naming is the whole of its job.

The oldest job of all. Before anyone could say anything about the world, they first had to name the pieces of it.

"Sophia teaches. Sophia argues. Sophia never stops." Must I say her name every time?

Never — that's precisely what a pronoun is for. She stands in the noun's place once the noun has already been introduced, so the sentence doesn't have to keep repeating itself.

I carry the baskets. I catalogue the scrolls. By midday I am exhausted.

A verb names an action, or a state of being — carrying, cataloguing, or simply being exhausted. Nothing happens in a sentence, and nothing merely is, without one.

"Scroll" tells me nothing. "The ancient, brittle scroll" tells me to carry it very carefully.

An adjective describes a noun — narrows it, colours it, warns you about it. You've just proven, by accident, that you were listening.

And how did he carry it, once you'd warned him?

Carefully. An adverb — it describes the verb, the way the adjective described the noun. I did learn something yesterday, apparently.

Is it on the shelf, under the shelf, or behind the shelf? Because those are three very different afternoons for whoever has to find it.

A preposition places one thing in relation to another — where, or when, or how something stands beside something else. Small words, and yet they decide whether you find the scroll at all.

The Roman boy is idle, and Philo is curious, but neither of them has put a single basket back on the shelf.

Ouch. That's a conjunction at work — a word that joins two ideas together, and here it joins them so that the second one can knock down the first.

Oh! Fine — I'll put the baskets away.

And there's the eighth and last, entirely by accident — a small burst of feeling, attached to nothing, standing outside the grammar of the sentence altogether. That's every job there is.