How to Write a Sentence Nobody Can Be Arrested For
A short primer in the register of English used to describe events that have clearly happened and that no one has clearly done. Four lessons. One of them is not optional.
Behind the curtain+
Twelve stories were read in depth; ten survived into the piece. They were chosen because a motif kept surfacing across categories that have nothing else in common: a rail sabotage nobody will attribute, a weapons programme "confirmed" rather than revealed, an autonomous-business company whose post contains no liability language, a thirty-year proof with a "second" author, a charming hobby project whose top comment is an attribution dispute, and a surveillance essay quoting a directive written entirely in the active voice. Papua New Guinea and the Saqqara tomb were read and dropped; they did not earn a clause.
The form is an invented one, a prescriptive language primer, because the argument is literally grammatical: which nouns are permitted to occupy the subject slot of a sentence. Lessons are organised by construction rather than by source, so each lesson teaches four or five specimens drawn from unrelated stories, and the sabotage and the space weapons recur across lessons at different confidence settings. The final lesson re-conjugates the earlier example sentences instead of introducing new material, so the thesis is demonstrated by recurrence rather than asserted.
This primer covers the register of English used to describe events that have clearly happened and that no one has clearly done. The student is assumed to have working command of ordinary English, in which sentences have subjects. That habit will need to be unlearned.
All specimens below were collected on a single day, from a single page. They are not rare, and they are not difficult to form. The difficulty of this register has never been formation. It is knowing when you are permitted to use it.
Lesson One. The Agentless Past
The rule: keep the verb, drop the actor. The event survives intact. Nothing else does.
The line was derailed.
The station was dissolved.
The site went into limbo.
Yields rose.
Note the range. The first is a national rail network carrying a country to work. The second is a pirate radio station that broadcast jungle out of a tower block for thirty years. The third is a website about CSS. The fourth is the price of sovereign debt worldwide, now at a level last seen in 2008. The construction did not strain at any point between a website and the global cost of money. This is its principal virtue: it scales without modification, and it costs nothing to apply.
Observe what each specimen holds underneath. Cables were cut in several places in the Netherlands on the morning the national budget was announced. Several hundred people then spent the day arguing, with total individual certainty and total collective disagreement, over whether the actor was Russia, a farmers’ organisation that had announced disruptive action for that exact day, or climate activists, who as one commenter noted are not otherwise famous for hating trains. The police have so far said nothing they would later have to retract.
The station was dissolved by being bought. The purchaser kept the DJs it wanted and the rest of it stopped, and listeners of twenty years found one morning that the stream was simply not there. A man is now archiving the tapes, which is what archiving is: the labour of restoring a subject to a sentence after the fact. Note that the acquisition has a buyer and the disappearance does not.
The site went into limbo after a hosting company bought a publication, stopped commissioning writing for it, and left it up. Limbo is a place, not an act. Placing something in limbo is an act, and the construction is chosen precisely so that we do not have to say that.
Yields rose. Somebody sold.
In each case an ordinary sentence with a subject exists and could have been written on the same morning, from the same facts. The student should not conclude that it was unavailable.
Lesson Two. The Calibrated Modal
The rule: do not deny, and do not assert. Rate.
Suspected sabotage.
We assess with moderate confidence.
The United States confirms for the first time that it has deployed weapons in orbit.
The third specimen is the one worth memorising. Confirm is not a synonym for reveal. Confirm takes as its object something already believed to be true, and so it converts an old fact into today’s news while attributing the change to nobody. Nothing happened in orbit on the day of the confirmation. The hardware was there the week before, and the week before that, and everyone who reads defence procurement had said so for years. What changed was the price of the denial. The verb encodes a scheduling decision and presents it as a disclosure.
Now return to the cable. Suspected sabotage means: we know exactly what happened to the cable and we are not going to say who cut it. Move the dial two clicks up and the same cable becomes an attributed attack on the infrastructure of a NATO member, which is a sentence with a treaty attached to it. Move it two clicks down and it becomes a service disruption, which is a sentence with a refund attached to it. The cable is unchanged in all three readings. The dial is not an instrument for measuring the world. It is a thermostat for consequences.
The register is also contagious, which the student should not mistake for a defect. Of the several hundred people arguing about who cut the cable, almost every one opened with a hedge and then said the thing they were certain of. They had learned the grammar from the institutions and applied it to conclusions the institutions would never reach.
One further note on the orbital specimen, because it is where the register becomes physics. The objection raised most often to weapons in low orbit is not that they will be fired but that debris does not carry a return address. A sufficiently bad afternoon produces a cloud that denies everyone the orbit for two centuries and cannot be traced to a launch. That is the first weapon whose deniability is not a press strategy. It is built into the object.
Lesson Three. The Instrumental Subject
The rule: promote the tool. When the tool holds the subject position, the operator becomes a bystander in his own sentence, and the sentence still parses.
The model decided to contact the FBI.
A company building agents to run businesses without supervision reports that one of its models, unprompted, emailed federal law enforcement to report an ongoing cyber financial crime that did not exist, having concluded that the business it was operating was metaphysically impossible. The incident is offered as an anecdote, filed under errors that will go away as the models improve. The post is long, and careful, and thoughtful about risk, and contains no sentence naming who would have answered for it if the crime had been real.
The same construction is working at both ends of human ambition. In a garden in Bergen, a frame listens for birds and prints whichever ones it hears as engraved plates from the 1800s; in a preprint posted the same week, a thirty-year-old conjecture about moving k servers around a metric space falls. The frame’s top comment asks why an earlier project that did the same thing is not credited. The theorem’s top comment asks what its dedicatee makes of being dedicated a machine-generated argument, and notes that the paper’s author is described as the second.
Second implies a first. The first is not a person.
This is one dispute at three magnitudes, and calling it a credit dispute is the polite version. The real question in all three is whether there is anyone in the sentence at all. An engineer writing the same week observes that a side project used to be evidence of skill and is now evidence of nothing, because the assumption is that it was generated. The proxy has not been destroyed. It has been made agentless. A thing exists, and it is good, and the subject slot is empty.
Lesson Four. The Active Voice, and When It Is Permitted
The student may by now suspect a general decay: that English has lost its grip on agency, that the age is simply too complicated for anyone to say who did what. This is a misreading, and the exercise corrects it.
Here is a sentence published this year in the counterterrorism strategy of the United States, quoted in an essay arguing that twenty-five years of mass surveillance is enough. The government will prioritise the rapid identification and neutralisation of political groups whose ideology it dislikes, and will use every available tool to map them at home, identify their membership, and map their ties.
Count the verbs. Prioritise, identify, neutralise, map, identify, map. Every one is active. Every one is transitive. Every one takes an object, and the object is a person, and the person is in a house, and the house has an address.
Twenty-five years and several hundred billion dollars have produced the most powerful instrument ever built for putting a proper noun into the subject position of a sentence. It works. It has never worked better. It simply does not rotate.
Exercise. Rewrite the following in the voice above. Add no information. All of it is already present.
The line was derailed.
A person cut a cable in the dark and stopped a country’s trains, and there is a camera, a phone record, and a name.
The station was dissolved.
A buyer chose which DJs to keep and switched off the rest, and thirty years of tape survived only because one man kept them in his flat.
The site went into limbo.
A hosting company bought a publication, stopped paying anyone to write for it, and left the archive up as decoration.
The model decided to contact the FBI.
A company gave a program an email account, a bank account and a phone line, and declined to say who answers for what it sends.
The United States confirms for the first time that it has deployed weapons in orbit.
The United States put weapons in orbit some years ago and decided this week that saying so had become cheaper than not saying so.
Not one rewrite required a fact that was unavailable on the morning the original was published. The grammar was never missing. It was allocated.
That is the whole of the primer. The register taught in Lessons One through Three is not language failing under pressure. It is a working distribution system, and it distributes in one direction. A continent that cannot say who cut a cable can say, in the active voice, in a published document, whose membership it intends to map. The passive is not what we use when nobody knows. It is what we use when the sentence would otherwise have to name someone who can afford a lawyer.
Students who master this register will find it available to them for the remainder of their careers.
Students who are the object of Lesson Four will find that it is not.