After loading The Littles into the car last week, I had to run back in the house to look up an address. When I re-entered the garage, I heard Baby Tad wailing. He sometimes whines but rarely wails … unless he’s been hurt, and he’s a tough kid, so it takes a lot to hurt him.
A mother’s kiss quieted the poor little guy’s sobs, so I hopped in the front seat and began chauffeuring to our destination. As I drove, I questioned Vivi about why Tad was crying.
She coolly explained, “His arm got hurt.”
Two things struck me about her answer.
First, he was strapped securely in his car seat. Were there back-seat hidden dangers lurking within arms reach that I had heretofore neglected to mitigate?
Second, she answered in the “passive voice.”
I’m a bit of a grammar nerd. That’s not to say that I have perfect punctuation or grammar… far from it. In fact, my trademark use (and some might accurately say “over-use”) of the ellipse (…) is, at best, unorthodox, and, at worst, flat out wrong. If my Business Writing professor from BYU (Professor Bell) were to read my blog, it would bleed red ink. In fact, I credit (blame) him for my heightened sensitivity to the “passive voice.” In the days before word processors and auto-grammar checking (yes, I’m THAT old), I got dinged on my papers time and time again for mis-using the passive voice. I also got marked down for being verbose. Hard to believe, I know.
Anyway, a passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence.
Example: His arm got hurt.
The primary reason why grammarians (and mothers) frown on the passive voice is that we are left guessing at the true meaning of the sentence.
Who hurt Tad’s arm?
How did his arm get hurt?
At times, use of the passive voice is accidental (as in case of my poorly written college papers), but it can also be employed as a sneaky tactic to hide blame or obscure responsibility.
When we arrived at our destination and I unbuckled Tad from his car seat, my suspicions were confirmed.
Needless to say, Vivi passed the afternoon in the quiet solitude of her room to avoid more aggressive consequences.
