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January 10, 2004

Passive: The Criminal's Voice

I'm not an active-voice absolutist, and editors who are miss something in the subtleties of expression that our language allows. Sometimes the thing being acted upon is, in fact, the subject of the sentence. In the following exchange, my grade-school-age nephew brings into stark focus the utility of the distinction between active voice and passive voice.

My daughter has a toy that is a sort of cross between an ATM and a cash register, including one drawer that pops open at the pressing of a "Withdraw" button and another that requires a plastic key. When I entered the living room a little while ago, my nephew was playing with the toy, and the key was in two pieces on the floor beside him.

"Did you break the key?" I asked.

"It was broken a few minutes ago," he replied.

"So it was just lying there and split into two?"

"I was trying to open the drawer, and the key broke."

Well, at least he attributed an action to himself, even if he and the key continued to occupy separate clauses.

Posted by Justin Katz at January 10, 2004 2:01 PM
Language
Comments

"The key broke" is an interesting expression. Greek has a middle voice, along with the active and passive, but English just has the two. In the middle voice the subject of a sentence is both the doer and the receiver of an action. Usually it is explained to English speakers by use of an intensive, like a relexive pronoun. "I cut myself" would be an example.

But "the key broke" seems to approximate a middle voice too.

At least English speakers don't have to learn a whole bunch of endings for a third voice, hehehehe...

Posted by: George Lee at January 10, 2004 9:43 PM

George,

Yes, I noticed, when writing this out, that there is that vague area between passive and active. But what struck me about my nephew's phrasing was that he didn't use just "the key broke," which leaves the breaker entirely vague. Who broke it? Did it break itself? Or was it just a natural event, akin to "the day began"?

Rather, my nephew's phrasing posited a breaker. It wouldn't have seemed so odd, for example, if there had been a group of children in the room. "The key was broken" would, in that case, leave open the possibility of blamelessness, or at least ignorance of who was to blame. With his being the only person there, the passive seemed particularly, well, intuitively deliberate.

Posted by: Justin Katz at January 10, 2004 9:54 PM