Clauses contain a verb but phrases don’t necessarily. At least I think that’s what they taught me in elementary school. I had trouble remembering then and I have trouble remembering now. Fortunately, I don’t really have to remember now because there are none of those pesky nuns hovering over me as I write. What a relief! (Notice I just wrote an entire sentence without a verb. For that I would have had to stand and recite the entire Lord’s Prayer, several Hail Marys and a sincere Act of Contrition.) It is truly wonderful to be able to take a few liberties with my efforts.

I remember that it was not permitted to split an infinitive in those days. To help me remember this fact as well as what an infinitive really was, I created this little phrase (or clause, whatever):” you are not allowed to ever split “to split” with “ever.”’ It has served me well over the intervening years. That kind of clause (or phrase, whatever) is called a mnemonic, a device that helps you remember something, but it is a word I love because of the way it is spelled. The beauty of mnemonics is that they help you remember things that you are not really interested in remembering anyway. Like so many useless things we carry with us, they help overload and clog my memory, which doesn’t really need any help with that skill since my brain is capable of accomplishing that without help from me or anyone else.

There are a few other mnemonics that I sometimes use although they are not always a big help. For example, the word, “shmoe,” helps me remember the names of the Great Lakes, which contain twenty-one percent of the world’s fresh water (the mnemonic does not help me remember that piece of gratuitous information.) The letters, of course, stand for the names Superior, Michigan, Huron and two others that I can’t remember right now. Some mnemonics work better than others. Another famous mnemonic is “My Dear Aunt Sally”, helping us remember the order in which we are supposed to perform arithmetic operations. Of course, any mathematician would tell you that the mnemonic should read, “Dear My Sally Aunt,” since we would often be better advised to do arithmetic in the order, divide: multiply, subtract, add.

Nobody has a good definition of the word, “phrase”, which really means that I don’t have a good definition of the word. Apparently, you can have a phrase with a single word in it (although I would be loath to call that a phrase,) or it can contain up to many words, including nouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, verbs, exclamations,  subjunctives, adjunctives and interruptions. I am only kidding about the subjunctives, adjunctives and interruptions, I think. A phrase, it seems, can appear anywhere in a sentence. Furthermore, a phrase can contain other sub-phrases and parts of speech in it. It is incredible that anyone has ever had the courage to define the thing in the first place.

A clause, on the other hand, has a fairly definite meaning: it is a group of words that contain at least one verb. It represents a thought, or at least an assistant thought to help its main sentence’s main thought to perform its service. I like clauses more than I like phrases and often make them up and recite to myself for entertainment (I don’t get out much these days.) There are a great many clauses: restrictive and non-restrictive, for example. I once had an English teacher who took pity on me and tried to explain over and over the difference between these two entities, to absolutely no avail. I did not fail that English course but I think it mostly because the teacher would not be able to stand me for another year. There are many other types of clauses: restrictive, undernourished, potbellied, overfed, indeterminate and undefined. Isn’t English a great language?

Clauses and phrases, even if we don’t quite understand which is which, help us to communicate our thoughts. Unfortunately, neither of them helps us to have thoughts in the first place. Sometimes, when my thought reservoir runs dry, I turn to other sources for inspiration, like newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television and the internet. Frankly none of these is much help. So, in desperation, I go into my office and stare at the wall until something happens. Rarely do I get a useful response. Most of the time I simply come up with words that I attempt to put in some logical (to me, at least) order and fashion into a unified work for which I supply a title, credit myself as the author, and hope that somewhere sometime, someone will happen upon it  and read it.

Fortunately, for me, at least, I am a member of a writing class, which provides a captive audience, each of whom is obliged to sit still and listen as I read it to them. On occasion, the sitting still part is not universal.