Still Untitled

Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.

Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.

Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.

"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"

I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.

Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.

"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."

"Nothing at all?" I asked.

"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."

This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.

"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."

Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."

(It was good potato. I am a hero.)

So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.

"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.

"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"

"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."

And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.

And Tumblrs

Tumblrs

Let me FUCKING tell you

They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -

They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.

You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"

I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.

"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."

They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.

But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?

Enter: the Beatles. On Chords.

Now pop was aggressively on the other side of this debate. Pop LOVED chords. Pop, in particular, loved about four chords, and by god was it faithful to those four chords. This, in fact, is still largely true even to this day, and this is a gift to those of us who like mash-ups.

And the Beatles were initially no exception!

They crashed into public consciousness in 1963 with the album Please Please Me. Let's take a look at the best song on the album, I Saw Her Standing There.

(Shout out to the artist who colourised that video, damn good job).

This song is such a good example of the trendiest of trendy music at that time. Absolute classic 1960s rock and roll banger. Catchy, perfect rock and roll beat, excellent hook. And, it contains the tidy four chords of everyone else! Nicely done, no issue. (Though, in the interests of fairness, some of the songs on Please Please Me were already showing signs of what was to come. From Me To You is another very solid rock and roll song, but its middle section was already showing more interesting chording than most contempories).

It is not, however, a particularly revolutionary song. But, as mentioned, the Beatles were incredibly experimental musicians. I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy four chords and rock and roll beat and concept, was created in 1963.

Four years later, in 1967, they released I Am the Walrus. So! Let's play this as a game!

How many chords do you think I Am the Walrus contains?

If you want to play on hard mode, guess now; if you want a hint, here's the song:

...

...

...

Have you guessed?

The answer is 16. The intro before John Lennon's vocals begin contain eight alone. That's four times the number of most pop songs even now, sixty years on.

And it suits the song! Those chords are not just stuffed in like a weird aural piñata. It's a typical piece of Lennon songwriting at this time, actually - the melody is quite simple, but the chording is complex as fuck to create this shifting, unstable sort of landscape for a song that was deliberately written to be confusing and weird. It's an Alice in Wonderland type of song, and while the melody is fairly solid, the chords under your feet are a mudslide, never quite letting you get your bearings. They drive the song on, and they produce the psychedelic effect that the Beatles were heavily experimenting with at this time.

And, this is very much the defining trait of later Beatles stuff; even mid-era stuff, actually. Once they got their feet under them and realised what they could do with chord complexity, they did not look back.

But! That's just Lots Of Chords. Lennon liked putting lots in. He was a big fan of the Lots of Chords approach. But there are other things you can do with chords; the more advanced settings, as it were, and this is where Paul McCartney specialised.

Chords: Advanced Settings

Modulation

So, I talked about how chords are basically pretty colour palettes of notes to choose from. But, chords themselves can also form palettes, and also have a relationship to one another.

The fun thing with chords is that they sort of self-group into patterns, and we're all very familiar with this even if we've had zero training in musical theory. I mentioned above, we can all recognise happy, sad, angry etc music. Sometimes! Sometimes you hear a chord! And you just KNOW it's kind of incomplete in the song. It inherently feels like the penultimate chord. If the song finished on it, you'd be like "What the fuck is that, where's the ending. Illegal. Resolve that right now." It's the closest non-synaesthetes come to experiencing synaesthesia I think.

So LET'S TALK MODULATION

Take a chord like F major. Its available colour palette contains seven possible notes: F, G, A, B flat, C, D and E. You can pick any number of these, and they'll sound good together, but chords in pop music are normally three notes, so here you can pick F and two others. Let's say, F, A and C. (Try this on a virtual online piano for maximum effect)

It's a nice chord! Sounds pretty.

Now, add in an E flat.

OOOOOOH! Instant unsettling weirdness, right?!?? It's wobbly! It's unfinished!! This, my friends, is modulation - the chord has been modulated! This is the chord known as F7 and it is Weird!! It feels like it's begging to have another chord come along and resolve it to make it feel like it's finished!! And that's because it is.

Next, play a B flat chord. F major as a palette shares a B flat, so they "speak" to each other. You can choose between B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G, and A; pick B♭, plus any other two.

And now play them one after the other. F7, then B♭. And relax. Crisis over. The chord is no longer wobbling. It is resolved. That is your glimpse on the world of synaesthesia. Imagine feeling like that with fucking book titles. Welcome to my world.

Anyway let's see an example of exactly these chords being used by the Beatles in the iconic Hey Jude (song starts at 55 seconds; at 1:40 is the bit we're focusing on):

We're going to examine the transition of the first verse to the chorus. On the line "Then you begin/ to make it better", on the word "better" they use F major.

They then take it to F7 just as they move into the chorus, on the last beat before the line "But any time you feel the". WOBBLY. UNCERTAIN. DO NOT LIKE.

And then it resolves to B flat on "pain".

This is a song for a young boy whose parents were divorcing so his adulterous father could marry someone else, who was struggling with the emotions of it all; McCartney was a vital influence on young Julian Lennon at that time. But that chord modulation really supports the meaning of the lyrics there. F7 is a lost child's pain; but B flat is its resolution, a soothing lullaby that everything will be alright in the end. Absolutely beautiful use of the tactic.

Now, famous composers do this all the time - think Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, and that famous swell of the violins slamming up into their triumphant, cresting wave (in the linked video, it's at 13 minutes - listen to that 20 seconds and you'll see what I mean). It almost feels cheesy by now, actually, and that's because culturally it now sort of is - it's been heavily used in romance films at the moment of the leads finally kissing or whatever for decades, so it feels old-fashioned to us.

It's therefore rarer in pop, including in the 60s. So, the most skilled composers hide their modulations, so you don't notice them. McCartney became a master of this, and here is his best example of the work:

Penny Lane is a song about a man nostalgically going on a journey through a place he left long ago, but is still home. It's a wistful, optimistic sort of song.

Let's play again! How many modulated key changes do you think this song contains?

...

...

...

THAT'S RIGHT KIDS it's seven. SEVEN.

Every transition from verse to chorus has his voice go up - so far so normal. But in counterpoint, the key modulates down. That gives the chorus a wistful feel, rather than a relaxed, chill feel; but the key change is hidden! We do not notice! Back into each verse it then modulates back up, so the verse feels like an optimistic new day after the chorus. And then, the final chorus modulates up with the vocal instead of down, giving it that joyful, triumphant feel. And I bet for most of you the only one you noticed was that last chorus.

(It also features a baroque piccolo solo, inspired by Bach. The Beatles actually did do a lot to influence contemporary classical music into returning to using chords and that, and this is part of why/how.)

Keys vs Modes

Anyway we've put it off long enough. Let's talk about Eleanor Rigby.

I actually mentioned this briefly on that other post, but the beautiful, sinister, haunting feel of Eleanor Rigby is down to the fact that, rather than using major or minor key, it's not actually in a key at all. Instead, McCartney used a much older tradition from Western music, going all the way back to Ancient Greece, called a mode.

Modes are super old - keys were introduced around the Renaissance, but before that, we used modes. They're similar, and if you want to look into them and their technical differences more you can; but here, I'll just say that the important thing is that the 6th note in the palette is raised by a semitone.

You actually might be familiar with another famous song in the Dorian mode. The most common mode used in Anglo-Celtic folk music was the Dorian mode, and this is what gives us the song Scarborough Fair, and its haunting feel. Eleanor Rigby uses a combination of Dorian and Aeolian modes, and that's what creates its atmosphere.

But, there's another trick Eleanor Rigby uses - its final chords.

Cadences

Also known poetically as a "dying fall", a cadence is essentially how you finish and close off a song. The final two chords played to signal to the hind brain that the song is finished. As with everything else, there are commonly used methods; the most common, even today and across many genres, is the "perfect cadence", where the chord goes from fifth to first, first being the "tonic" - the root note in a chord's colour palette (e.g. the F in the F major options listed above. That's what we call the tonic). It gives a clear sense of finality to the song.

Eleanor Rigby, however, uses something that was at the time - and largely still is - unheard of in pop, classical, or pretty much any other contemporary genre. It drops from second to first. This was last popular among composers in the 14th century. The effect is that mournful, almost unfinished feeling - perfect for a song about loneliness, and a man whose life's work failed.

Other songs also get some unusual cadences. Yesterday, She's Leaving Home and And I Love Her all finish on a plagal cadence - a drop from fourth to first. You may recognise this cadence from Christian hymns - it's the cadence used to sing "amen" at the end of a hymn. It is otherwise basically absent from pop music.

(I don't think any of these were the result, btw, of McCartney going "today I am going to write a song in the Dorian mode with a plagal cadence to end." As I say: he's an intuitive musician, and he drew from a LOT of influences. Apparently that included hymns.)

India and the Culture Shift

So, the band, like most young people in the 60s, had dabbled a lot with drugs - LSD in particular. I'll come back to that at the end, but the long and short of it is: Lennon and Harrison were big into the stuff and had a hardcore psychedelia phase, Ringo had a go, but McCartney was very against it. It was one point of tension among many, the others being ego, child abandonment, and Yoko Ono getting cameos.

But a big driver of it was that they were, ultimately, four kids when they were suddenly catapulted into a kind of mega-stardom that the world had never seen before. None of them handled it well, if we're all being very honest with ourselves and each other. The obvious impact was to John Lennon's relationship with his first wife and son (though, side note: he'd started mellowing and making a lot of amends in the 70s, before he was tragically murdered); but none of them exactly behaved very well.

And so, like a lot of people in that sort of situation, initially they turned to drugs (particularly in the 60s). But when it wasn't giving them the meaning they craved, they turned elsewhere, and this brings us nicely to the big contribution made by George Harrison: the replacement of LSD with Hindu spirituality and Indian music.

George's interest began in 1965, and that was when he started learning sitar from Ravi Shankar - he played it on Norwegian Wood, in fact. But in 1967, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the inventor of transcendental meditation, held a seminar in Bangor, Wales, and the Beatles, led by George, attended. It had such a profound effect on them that they went to Rishikesh to do a training course in it in 1968. When asked why, Harrison was quoted as saying  "We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, it isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside, is it?"

(George also became a Western spokesperson for transcendental meditation, and would often appear on TV with the Maharishi to tell people about its benefits. This made a lot of white Christian English men Big Mad and they would also go on television and yell at him a lot.)

BUT THE POINT IS this was a big turning point in the Beatles music. They were all fascinated by the spiritual teachings. They started using more Indian instruments in their music - Within You Without You was inspired by classical Hindustani music, and Harrison got Indian musicians to play the rest of the instruments on it (sitar, tabla, dilruba and tambura); in fact, he was the only Beatle on the track. But, for as much as he was the main devotee, Harrison wasn't the only one.

I mentioned earlier that John Lennon's work, for a long time, was characterised by simple melodies and complex chording. The Indian influence was what changed this. During Rishikesh, he wrote a song called Child of Nature; it was never released as a Beatles song, but years later it resurfaced as the song Jealous Guy on his solo album, and you can really hear the melodic Indian influence on the tune. This is because, as is very commonly characteristic in traditional Asian music, it's pentatonic - put simply, it's the black notes on the piano.

They wrote songs like demons in that retreat, often when they should have been meditating (except George, who was very strict; even so, he wrote about six songs in that time). Most made it onto the White Album. But that fusion of Indian and Western music was ahead of its time - and, it was an early foray that helped smooth the way a little for the development and rise of bhangra in the UK in the 70s.

But all this is basically prelude to the most innovative song they ever created.

Tomorrow Never Knows

Now LISTEN. I am not here to say this is the best song of all time. Personally I do not think this is even the best Beatles song of all time. It's not even the best in its genre.

But Tomorrow Never Knows is a song for which you can make a dazzlingly strong argument that it revolutionised modern music as we know it. Take my hand, I shall explain

So: this song crops up on Revolver, in 1966, and several important elements come together for it:

For the album Rubber Soul, the Beatles had made it big enough that they could do whatever they wanted in their own studio. They could ignore the recording conventions of the day; what they wanted, went. Total creative control.

For Rubber Soul, they also started thinking of the whole album as a unit of art in its own right, rather than a collection of individual songs.

For Revolver, which followed Rubber Soul and utilised these same concepts, they took their time. Every song was recorded and re-recorded and played with, and in several cases the final version was not the one they went into the studio with. Rubber Soul took fewer than 80 hours to record. Revolver took 220.

The thing to know about Ringo Starr - he was not the world's greatest drummer. He really wasn't. Lennon once famously said Ringo wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But, he had one talent on the drums, at which he was absolutely unbeatable: his sense of time. Lennon also said of him that he was more accurate than a drum machine; and this was 100% true.

George Harrison had introduced them to Indian music, and the first stirrings of Hindu spirituality. He had learned sitar by this point.

Paul McCartney had started hanging out with avant-garde classical composers, who, as mentioned, were playing with some widely-considered-dogshit techniques at the time. From them, he learned the practice of tape loops - recording a single sound onto a strip of tape, cutting and gluing it into a loop, and then playing it to repeat itself

John Lennon wanted to create, in a song, an art installation - a soundscape that would replicate how it felt to have an acid trip.

And so. The stage is set.

Firstly, this was unknown territory. No one had done this soundscape idea with commercial music before. The technology was partially invented by this song. I mean that sincerely - some of the tricks used did not exist before this song. Most notably, the vocal modulation effect. These days, you'd press a button on a mixing desk; at that point, the tech didn't exist. So, they fed Lennon's vocal through the revolving speakers in a Leslie cabinet, designed for use with a Hammond organ. One of the sound engineers invented automatic double tracking for the song, to layer the vocals.

Secondly, this was therefore a project of unprecedented creation. This is the song they took the longest on, that changed the most from start to finish. And, if you're going to be experimental on this level, with three talented musicians working intuitively to channel pure invention...

Well, you're going to need an extremely accurate drummer to keep them tied together, aren't you? Someone who won't go off-piste no matter what the others do. Someone more accurate than a drum machine.

Thirdly, McCartney's tape loops, brought from the classical world, were key. They discovered that, while the classical guys would just play these as sounds in their own right (remember, this was the era of rubbing sandpaper together and declaring that it, too, was music, before dodging the tomatoes of a booing crowd), they could run these loops and layer them up to create the soundscape they wanted; something never before created. Some of the loops were so long they extended out of the control room and down the corridor. They also realised you got yet another sound playing them backwards, which Harrison made great use of by deliberately playing in such a way that it would produce the desired reversed sound.

Fourth, Harrison and Lennon - they created both the simulation of an acid trip, and the concept of spiritual enlightenment on top. With Harrison's guidance, Lennon wrote lyrics based on the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Guru Timothy Leary.

Fifth - Harrison chose to add, not chords, but a sitar drone. A drone is a single note, played as a backing to a melody - commonly used outside of Western music, such as in India. This was, I believe, the first drone recorded as used in Western music since the Middle Ages.

And the final result was this:

It's hard to overstate the impact this song had on listeners, on the industry... Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Remember the start of this post? Remember I Saw Her Standing There? Compare the two. This is an aural kaleidoscope, a soundscape effect never heard before. We can't imagine it now, because these are now techniques that have become standard in the industry. But imagine going from I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy melody, four chords, three guitars and a drum set, to this. Where's that gif of Rapunzel remembering in Tangled. Where the camera goes in her eye and she staggers. That was the entire nation when Revolver was released, and it finished on a three minute art installation producing sounds no human ears had ever before heard.

Concluding Points

I do want to stress, mind, that most of this was not unique to the Beatles. I do think insufferable fans - in the same vein as insufferable fans in every single fandom ever - have overstated the value of the Beatles as being, like, the One True Band, and claiming they invented from whole cloth every single thing they ever did; and I hope this post made it very clear that that is simply not true. Like all human innovators, their innovations were built on previous inventions and discoveries and innovations from other art forms, including other musical genres. This is just a quick overview, really, to outline what they were specifically doing with their music to make it stand out so much; and it did, of course, have enormous influence. But that's not the same thing as "absolutely no one else was doing any of this."

They were also, like many young folks in the 60s, very happy to blur traditional societal lines in pursuit of broadening their musical horizons (and in line with the general hippie movement). They socialised and worked with a LOT of artists from a lot of different genres and even media. There are plentiful records of them doing jam sessions with artists of different genres, races, genders, nationalities, all sorts, many of whom became friends, and had an influence on the band's music (and later solo songs). This means some elements were things that were being done in genres traditionally created/dominated by artists of colour, but a lot of insufferable fans attribute these things directly to the Beatles, and that's not fair. Like every other artist ever, they built on a pre-existing foundation by those who preceded them. The band themselves, at least, acknowledged it, even if the fans won't.

But, on the whole, this was a band defined by its experimentalism, its intuitive grasp of music, and its incredibly diverse genre background that nonetheless was drawn in to create something that sounds like them. Some of it, where cohesion was disintegrating and the experimentalism went A Bit Far, sucks tremendous penis, I'm not going to lie (the White Album has my whole heart but Jesus fucking Christ, John, what the fuck were you thinking with Revolution 9). But without the incredible bombs, you don't get gut-wrenching emotional ballads like While My Guitar Gently Weeps, or the Fool on the Hill. You don't get tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalist songs like Piggies. You don't get the spiritual psychedelia of Within You Without You or Strawberry Fields Forever, or the fun children's songs like Octopus' Garden or Yellow Submarine, or the human portraits of working class struggle in Lady Madonna or Eleanor Rigby, or a host of the most covered songs of all time like Yesterday and Get Back and Come Together, or the anthem of Hey Jude.

Anyway. I highly recommend you try Piggies. Very Tumblr-friendly lyrics. Well done, George.

Final Fun Bit

And it wouldn't be worth doing a post like this without adding these:

And my favourite line from the film A Hard Day's Night:

The fundamentals of any language's grammar can be confusing, even if (or especially if!) you're a native speaker of the language. That's because we tend to use these rules without even thinking about them, internalizing them without consciously understanding how they operate. So please don't feel discouraged if any of this information is new to you--that's why this post is starting here, with a rundown of the very basics of how languages in general (and English in specific) work.

Part I: The Fundamentals

When you're trying to communicate a thought, one of the simplest sentence structures out there is subject-verb-object: this is grammar terminology for the case that 'something is doing something to something else'. Take the following English sentence:

I threw the ball.

In this statement, "I" am the subject, the entity performing an action. "Threw" is the verb, the action that is being done. And "the ball" is the object, the entity the action is being performed on. Together, they form a very straightforward and simple thought: I threw the ball. This framework is so common among natural languages that one high-level way linguists sort different languages is by how the categories of that framework are marked in its text.

One such method is order. English is what grammarians call an SVO language--it almost invariably orders these word-types by going subject-verb-object. Other languages may be SOV, OSV, OVS, but most languages do have a default ordering. For example Latin (which I took in school) is SOV (subject-object-verb). If I translated that English sentence into Latin, I could render it as:

Ego pilam ieci.

Here, "ego" is the subject, "pilam" the object, and "ieci" the verb. Now, Latin also does some other things to mark its subjects, objects, and verbs. It has specific endings for nouns depending on whether they're subjects or objects, which means that order can be more of a suggestion than a strict rule. Latin often did adhere to SOV order anyways, but some texts like poetry took a certain artistic license. It was therefore unusual--but not strictly ungrammatical--to order the words something like:

Pilam ieci ego.

A Latin reader would be able to understand that while the ordering is unusual, "ego" is nominative and therefore the subject, while "pilam" uses the accusative ending and is the object. But English, notably, lacks this kind of explicit word-type marking. It means I can't do the same sort of shenanigans in English. If I tell someone:

The ball threw I.

That's an ungrammatical sentence, and not likely to be understood by a native English speaker as a case where *I* am throwing *the ball*. There are very few words in English (pronouns, really) which change based on whether they're the subject or object. This means that, unlike in other language, the order of English does all the heavy lifting when it comes to communicating subject and object assignments to a listen. There are very few exceptions to SVO order in English.

Part II: Those Very Few Exceptions

Before we get into dialogue, I want to discuss a few cases where you can, technically, trick English SVO order. I think it's helpful to understand the context that English does have exceptions, but those exceptions either 1) serve very specific grammatical functions, or 2) are not actually exceptions, just weird edge cases that look like them.

One way you can fudge SVO in English is through a process called topicalization. Topicalization is a rhetorical device where the most semantically-important element of the sentence (the "topic") is moved to the very front of a sentence regardless of its usual word order. This device is actually used a lot unconsciously in English speech, but in text it appears most often in deliberately poetic prose and generally has an archaic feel to it. (It's also how Yoda-speak works. It's intelligible, but used for Yoda Star Wars specifically because it feels *off* compared to normal English.) So An example of topicalization that messes with SVO order might be:

The ball, I threw. The bases, I ran. A home run, I scored.

(Ignore the fact that the pitcher is not the one running the bases in baseball. I locked myself in to 'throwing' as an example and I needed more sentences to emphasize the point.)

These sentences *are* grammatical, even though they use OSV order! But notice how I need specific punctuation now? Topicalization in written English requires this comma as a cue, so that readers can understand that the object has been moved as part of this device.

Another "exception" might look something like this:

The ball I threw had broken through the window.

If you look at the first part of that sentence, it appears as if we've broken SVO--that's the object, subject, and then verb right there! But the thing about this example is, it's not *actually* a rearranging of "I threw the ball". This is a sentence with a main clause and a relative clause, which happen to fit together in such a way as to seem like an OSV version of "I threw the ball". The sentence can better be understood through the following notation:

The ball [that] I threw [theta] had broken through the window.

This better shows the main clause and the relative clause. The main clause is:

The ball had broken through the window.

"The ball" appears first because it's actually the *subject* of this sentence.

While:

[That] I threw [theta]

Is a relative clause which complements (i.e. adds more description to) "the ball". Relative clauses are a case where a complementizer pronoun ("that") can take the place of pretty much any noun in a relative clause--however, it always goes at the beginning. That [theta] notation above is a way that grammarians indicate a standard part of typical sentence order had been dropped (or it might be phi? I don't fully remember at this point). So here, "that" is referring to the object being thrown, and is linked to "the ball" by its position in the sentence. So it creates the illusion of OSV sentence order, when actually this is an SOV sentence with a relative clause inside that is *also* SOV.

And I hope you see how hard it is to explain grammar, and why some people will just skip to stating a rule and say that's just how it is.

Part III: Dialogue

Okay, so what is dialogue, grammatically? There's a decent amount of debate on this. But I personally think it makes the most sense to understand dialogue as the object of the speech verb. I'll be using that framework through the rest of this example to show why dialogue works the way it does in English.

So assume we're dealing with subjects, verbs, and objects. We know what happens when I throw a ball. But what happens, grammatically, here?

He said I threw the ball.

Well, that's actually also SVO order. "He" is the subject, "said" the verb, and "I threw the ball" is the object that he said (it's a type of subordinate clause--I'm skipping the part where we look at "he said that I threw the ball" because it's kind of going the long way around to the point that this clause serves as the object of a *different* clause). And that makes sense, because the entire statement is the thing that he is saying. Now consider:

I threw the ball, he said.

Remember topicalization? We can move something that's considered more important to the front of the sentence. But it is now a little bit confusing, yeah? Because when we use words like "I", it becomes ambiguous whether or not "I" refers to me, the speaker of the narrative, or this new guy. It's technically grammatical, but we're not likely to use this type of topicalization for such an ambiguous sentence. If only there was some way to clearly delineate how the statement being said relates to the rest of the text...

Enter quotation marks.

Now, I want to be clear. I'm not saying this is the Literal Historical Origin of quotation marks, to resolve this type of ambiguity. It probably happened to resolve something like this, but I'm not well-versed enough in ancient grammar to know who invented the quotation mark and why. Do not take my speculation as fact.

However, it is clear what the utility of the quotation marks is. If we force the statement inside quotation marks, we're building a reference space for it relative to the text as a whole. That way, we know that in:

He said, "I threw the ball."

"he" and "I" are referring to the same person. But in:

He said, "Luke threw the ball."

we've now forced the statement to specify in order to remain internally consistent. And that's true regardless of where in the sentence we stick it. Both sentences above are SVO, but this:

"I threw the ball," he said.

is now OSV. The dialogue object represents a unique case in English grammar, where (because of the quotation marks?) the object can float around the sentence in the same way Latin can take poetic license. That's not even the only unique thing about dialogue objects. For certain subjects, you can even use OVS order, something that's very rare with other English verbs.

"I threw the ball," said Luke.

Still grammatical, even with the subject stashed at the end of the clause. You can even form a complete sentence with only the dialogue object.

"I threw the ball."

That is grammatically complete--you are allowed to drop both the subject and verb frequently when it comes to English dialogue. This shows how "said" and similar verbs about communication function as a kind of default action. It's common and expected enough that we can signal the implied presence of the verb through other cues like quotation marks.

But remember above, with the Latin? Latin and languages like it can get away with loose word order only because of the strict markers applied to nouns and verbs. Without marking the grammatical properties of dialogue, we suddenly become unable to use dialogue as this floating object disconnected from the text. Therefore, we developed strict rules for how to signal dialogue and integrate it with a text.

Part IV: Okay, But Why These Rules?

I'm not going to say none of these rules are arbitrary, because some of them are weird. But if you write in US or UK English (I cannot speak to a lot of other dialects, and I know many different regions have *significantly* different dialogue formatting rules) the rules you're probably most familiar with probably come from that post with all the examples in quotation format. I'll do something similar here:

"You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks," she said.

They added, "But dialogue at the end of a sentence ends with a period inside those same quotations."

"Don't forget that you need a comma after the 'said' verb if dialogue directly follows it. But not if the verb is already being used for different dialogue!" he noted. "And aren't there special kinds of sentence stops that work no matter where in the sentence the dialogue is?"

Even with the above, things can get complicated. But the best way I can describe it for authors is: language is recursive. You can fit an entire clause inside of other clauses, and each clause has to be grammatical relative to itself. This means you should think of each line involving dialogue as having two grammatical layers.

In the first, all sentences with transitive verbs need a S, V, and O somewhere (even if that 'where' is imaginary. So you can think of the above passage as functioning, grammatically, as so:

[Object], she said. They added, [object]. [object], he noted. (He said,) [object].

There's one funny rule, which is that a comma should separate the object from the subject/verb when the verb is a dialogue tag and the object is in quotation marks. When the verb is dropped, so is the extra comma.

Then you think of the clauses that act as the objects (dialogue, specifically, consists of clauses). They have to be grammatical, relative to themselves. Note that here, 'grammatical' doesn't mean all of your characters speak with perfect English--it means that you need to have sentence breaks and some reasonable standard of punctuation, even in dialogue. Remember that a single dialogue "object" can be multiple sentences. You need them to exhibit consistent grammar on their own terms. The following:

You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks

is not grammatical, because it lacks punctuation to serve as a sentence stop.

You end dialogue that's in the middle of a sentence with a comma inside the quotation marks.

is now grammatical. Once again, I'm not a grammar history buff so this is purely speculation, but I think somewhere down the line we realized that our one funny rule was making things really awkward. "This is a random quote.", they said. looks ridiculous. A lot of language refinement is about simplification, and that mess is certainly not simple. So the comma migrated *inside* the quotation marks to replace the period that was previously there.

Note that this replacement only works on periods--which serve as the "default" sentence stop. When the sentence stop is instead an exclamation mark, a question mark, or a hyphen, that information is worth preserving, so it overrides the comma. Likewise, we drop the period that should be on the outside of the quotation marks at the end because the sentence inside the quotes already has a sentence stop.

Conclusion?

There are a lot more dialogue punctuation rules, of course, and a lot more quotation mark rules (not the same thing), so if anyone has follow-up questions on my take of Best Quotation Mark Formatting, feel free to hit me up. What I hoped to make clear with this post was not just "what are the rules", but "why are the rules". Because that way you can start approaching weirder formatting questions with a critical understanding of how the underlying grammar of the sentence is meant to operate. Which punctuation standard more clearly serves the needs of a reader? Which better reflects the underlying conceptual structure behind the grammar? And which do you prioritize in a given moment?