-
Athelstone posted an update 1 year, 11 months ago
Oddity Corner: accustom, verb, make someone or something accept (something) as normal. The other day, in my writing group, somebody came up with the phrase, “…as my eyes accustomed to the darkness.”
It immediately struck me as an odd phrase, but I was in a minority of one. I suppose my reaction is because I’m used to seeing accustomed as part of a compound, with an earlier part doing the time-passing bit e.g. became accustomed, grew accustomed. “Accustomed” is the achievement. I suppose the issue becomes clearer if we substitute another past-participle such as “informed” although we are informed “by” rather than “to”. We would have the somewhat unusual phrase, “…as my eyes informed by the darkness.” to which we could contrast, “…as my eyes were informed by the darkness.”
My personal feeling is that I would steer clear of an expression that might leave my reader struggling with whether my grammar is good rather than enjoying my story, but other than that does the original phrase have a problem?
Skip to content
I don’t think it has a problem though it perhaps sounds old fashioned, which could be the intention. In a contemporary story I’d be more likely to say, ‘As my eyes adapted to …’.
But I think there could be a grammar question in there, Ath. This is where I show my uncertainties about active v passive but accustomed on its own is active. In a compound with an auxiliary verb it’s more passive I think. ‘My eyes became accustomed.’ The OED says, ‘In passive use sometimes approaching the stative adjective; cf. accustomed adj.’
My eyes opened to darkness.
My eyes were opened to darkness.
In which ‘opened to darkness’ is adjectival. Sometimes you want a straightforward active verb and sometimes you don’t.
I’ll stay sitting on this fence 🙂
And I’ll chuck in a quote. ‘The ear is not accustomed to exercise constantly its functions of hearing, it is accustomed to stillness.’
J. Ruskin, Modern Painters vol. I. 60
Lucky Ruskin.
It’s definitely not intended to be old-fashioned. A twisty modern tale.
The nearest support I have found to my position when searching the internet, is the statement that “accustomed to usually comes after linking verbs such as be, become, get, and grow”.
I suspect that part of the issue is that, as the OED suggests, there is an adjectival function in some contexts. In fact, some definitions of participles suggest that most have both adjectival and verb characteristics.
It does occur to me that accustom is a transitive verb and should, therefore, take an object. The preceding verb in, say, “my eyes became accustomed to the light” is to allow eyes to be the subject, the thing that is doing the becoming activity, which frees the participle accustomed to take eyes as its object. Which may, or course, be a load of nonsense.
I wondered if the transitive quality of accustomed was playing a part but couldn’t get my head round whether it was or not. This is where my thin knowledge of grammar fails me. I’m also easily lost when having to consider how one word can fulfil different grammatical functions which might overlap.
With accustomed, maybe it comes down to how an author wants to portray the passage of time. Eyes adapt fairly quickly to light so I might argue that become, grow, etc. aren’t necessary. If a character was adapting to something that could take longer, like a move to a new area, I’d add a linking verb to emphasise the process.
In the end, voice is probably the most important thing. If the character or narrator would use a linking verb, there should be one included.
I think that’s what bothered me the most. It’s far away from a commonplace way of speaking. I’ve had quite a few conversations over the last three score years and (well not quite) ten, and read a fair bit, and I’m pretty certain that this is the first time I’ve seen “accustomed” used in this way.
Why I’m wasting my time puzzling and researching this, I don’t know. Actually I do. I’m about to start editing and at the same time I’m at a difficult point in the rewrite of a short story that’s insisting on growing towards novella length. In other words, prevarication.
Anyway, I think I have it:
1) Accustom is a transitive verb. It requires an object to act on (the thing that becomes accustomed)
2) In the phrase “my eyes accustomed to the darkness”, the word eyes is the subject and accustomed is left without an object. This is grammatically incorrect. Pedantry aside, it also sounds wrong. It’s wrongness can be drawn out by substiting a synonymous modal verb phrase “used to”. We would not say “my eyes used to the darkness”.
3) If a second verb is added, say became, then the resulting compound verb is intransitive and does not require an object. This is because now the participle accustomed takes on an adjectival role related to the subject eyes. That’s why we say “became accustomed” or “grew used to” and so on.
No good asking me about grammar, so I can’t give a reason for it but while I had no hiccup over “My eyes accustomed to the darkness” I mentally inserted ‘themselves’ after accustomed.
Which is to supply an object to the verb and make it grammatically correct.
Thank you for sorting this out, Ath. It has made me think more carefully about verbs 🙂
I think the importance for writers is that we need to demonstrate that we can follow the generally accepted grammatical conventions so that our work is publishable. There’s an awful lot of correct grammar that simply reflects how the posh mates of C19th lexicographers spoke and wrote and sets out that other ways are wrong.
More often than not , i find if something you write or read stops you from moving forward then it probably could benefit from revision. depending on the surrounding context of the piece i would have probably written something like … As my eyes adjusted I negotiated the dark shadows with growing ease.
Late to this, but maybe I’ll make up for that by the pungency of my comments. Even before your careful explanation six posts back, that phrase just sounded plain wrong to me, like a bum note in music. Just because you were in a minority of one doesn’t mean the others were right. To extend the musical analogy, it’s as if you’d been in a group of musicians, someone played a bum note, and you were the only one who spotted it. Is there a verbal equivalent of ‘cloth ears’?
@purplewitch absolutely. I don’t think it will be an issue because the writer in question is quite sharp. Anyway, if it gets to the point where a 3rd party is giving it a professional read, it isn’t going to last.
@richardb yep, that analogy is about right. In this instance I wouldn’t say the author has cloth ears (although the others might, I suppose) but there’s something about writing a paragraph that’s a little like solving a maths problem, or, to steal your idea, writing a passage of music. Once you’ve done it, it’s sometimes difficult not to be wedded to the solution you’ve come up with. It has a logic and structure that can be hard to break free from.
Accustomed is a tricky beast. It’s possible to use the exact same word structure, but extend the phrase to relieve “accustomed” of its main-verb duties, and emphasise its adjectival duties. With a bit of punctuation, we have excellent grammar. For instance: ‘My eyes, accustomed to the darkness, revealed a tall stranger.’
Adding a bit of nonsense to the conversation –
To write a pithy sentence and not use well-worn phrases
Comes with all the thinking and headache that it raises.
So, me, I play with words and, using inconsistent skill,
I hammer, pull, and twist them and bend them to my will.
I make them mine – reformed, unique, and, sometimes packed with wit
And do you know there’s lots of times I even make up sh**!
So, when something that you read, or write, irks your sense of style
Change things if they seem that bad, or accept things with a smile.
Very nice too.