Now and then, I peregrinate past something well worth keeping. Starting today, I’ll keep some of those somethings right here.

The GalaxyToday’s keeper: Is Being Done, an essay by Richard Grant White from the March, 1869, issue of The Galaxy¹. (Publishing² from 1866 to 1878, The Galaxy was subsumed into The Atlantic Monthly; Cornell University Library’s Making of America project contains a complete digital archive of The Galaxy.)

Little did I know that the so-called “progressive passive” tense (as in “Your Amazon order is being fulfilled.”) was a relative grammatical newcomer (i.e., it appeared centuries after Shakespeare) to the English language. White did not welcome it. This is an excerpt from his incisive essay.

In Goldsmith’s ‘Citizen of the World,’ (Letter XXL) is the following passage, descriptive of a play.

‘The fifth act began, and a busy piece it was; scenes shifting, trumpets sounding, drums beating, mobs hallooing, carpets spreading, guards bustling from one door to the other; gods, demons, daggers, rags, and ratsbane.’

Read the second clause of the sentence according to the formula is being done. ‘Scenes being shifted, trumpets being sounded, drums being beaten, mobs hallooing, carpets being spread,’ and so forth. The very life is taken out of it. No longer a busy piece, it drags its wounded and halting body along, and dies before it gets to rags and ratsbane.

Related information: Mr. White’s son, Stanford, the celebrated architect, designed the Washington Square Arch and was murdered in 1906.

[Source: Mark Liberman at Language Log]

¹ In which issue find also Julia Ward Howe’s Women as Voters, among other treasures.

² White’s essay will explain this choice of word.