Definition:
The part of a sentence or clause that indicates what it is about. See also:
Etymology:
From the Latin, "to throw."Examples and Observations:
- "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
(Albert Einstein) - "This is not a book that should be tossed lightly aside. It should be hurled with great force.
(Dorothy Parker) - "The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away."
(George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant") - "Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road."
(E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake") - "You can't try to do things; you simply must do them."
(Ray Bradbury) - "Baseball is dull only to dull minds."
(Red Barber) - "But by far the strongest cohesive force in the paragraph is the recurrence of the same grammatical subject, or its equivalent, from sentence to sentence."
(Wilma Ebbitt, et al., Writer's Guide and Index to English, Scott, Foresman, 1978) - "Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason."
(Richard Chenevix Trench) - "To do the thing properly, with any hope of ending up with a genuine duplicate of a single person, you really have no choice. You must clone them all."
(Lewis Thomas, "The Tucson Zoo") - "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it, and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there."
(Don DeLillo) - "Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults."
(Mitch Hedberg) - "I am a sophisticated sex robot, sent back in time to change the future for one lucky lady."
(Chuck Sherman in American Pie, 1999)
Pronunciation: SUB-jekt
