Once upon a time, the famous singer Barbra Streisand wanted to hide her home from view. Like many celebrities, she had at best an ambivalent to hostile relationship to the sort of prying behavior of cameramen and wanted to keep her home life private and far from the splashy tabloids or vapid entertainment shows about the life of famous people. Unfortunately for her, what she found out was that her efforts to hide herself instead drew attention to herself, as people were interested in getting to know what she wanted deleted from maps. As a result of this experience, a rule was developed, and modestly named after her, to show that the attempt to hide things or delete things often encourages people to know about them all the more. Interestingly enough, it should be noted, the singer Bryan Adams found similar problems when he sued Allmusic, a website that aggregates user and professional reviews about albums, to remove all information they had about him, in large part because the reviewers on the site were highly critical about his musical material, which led many musical journalists to be even more hostile towards him. Thankfully, he has not sued me (yet) to remove my own reviews and commentary on his career and music.

One of the most notable aspects of the English language is the matter of deletion. For a variety of reasons, words, parts of speech, or whole clauses that would normally be expected in a sentence can be deleted from a sentence. While this subject does not appear to be one that is formally taught to many native speakers of English, who delete automatically and often (as is the case with me), the subject is of intense interest to those who are learning English as a second language, especially as those deletions make it more difficult to understand what a writer is saying because they have simply deleted important explanatory words from their sentences. Perhaps the most extreme version of deletion occurs in exclamations like “Fire!” “Stop!” or “Go away!” In such cases, only a noun or verb is given, often with an exclamation mark, because the situation is so urgent and critical that only the barest essential information needs to be given about what is going on or what someone needs to do immediately. To go into a typical Nathanish sentence with three subordinate clauses would allow the fire to consume everything or something equally horrific. In such cases deletions are to be expected, and the context makes things sufficiently clear what is meant.

More commonly, deletions are not used in such urgent contexts, but many of the contexts in which such deletions are used are similarly obvious. Often, in subordinate clauses, for example, so much is deleted from a sentence that could be free-standing that it becomes a fragment that has to be attached by a phrase that indicates its subordination to the rest of the sentence. Instead of having two short or middling-length sentences, we have a longer sentence that could easily come from the pen of the Apostle Paul or this writer or anyone else with a fondness for complicated and nuanced sentence construction. Here again, as long as the writer does not go overboard with such phrases–the typical limit of comprehension for most people is judged to be three such phrases in a single sentence–the sentence can be understood with such deletions because they are included in the main phrase of the sentence. This same sort of deletion can occur, for stylistic purposes, when a writer uses sentence fragments that follow to increase tension. One can give an explanation in one sentence, and then follow that sentence with a fragment beginning with and or but or another conjunction that is not strictly grammatically correct, but also can easily be understood within the larger context of what has been said or written.

So far we have dealt with deletions that are either entirely appropriate or easily understood, whether or not they are strictly grammatically correct. Yet there are other cases where the deletions are not easily understood, although there is a logic behind them. Speaking personally as a writer, there are characteristic classes of deletion that I engage in. For one, I frequently delete the dimension of measurement or comparison in a statement, which can sometimes leave ambiguous the precise nature of a comparison or the precise basis of the measurement. Similarly, in conditional statements I often delete the if, phrasing the sentence so that it may be implied but is not directly stated. Likewise, when providing the steps of thinking or reasoning that lead me to a particular point, I delete those steps that I race through in my own thinking but which for other people may have to be plodded along one at a time in a slow fashion. Where such deletions–or other classes of the same kind–occur, many listeners or readers feel it necessary to ask for clarity. What is being meant here? Why was this word or this dimension or this step removed? What is deleted can draw attention precisely to that which the reader or speaker is seeking, by the deletion, to make implicit rather than explicit. The natural question is, why was this deleted? Often the logic is precisely to, by implication, lead the reader or listener to draw connections that the speaker or writer does not wish to explicitly make but wants the audience to understand, to preserve some sort of plausible deniability as to the intent of drawing the precise connections made, or to avoid specifying something that may be awkward or embarrassing to someone for it to be said outright. And yet there is presence even in absence, and the deletion can draw attention to the logic and motivations for not saying what it would not take very much effort to say, if someone wanted to.