In total rhetorical effect the sentence seems to be peculiarly “the thing said,” whereas all other elements are “the things named.” And accordingly the right to utter a sentence is one of the very greatest liberties; and we are entitled to little wonder that freedom of utterance should be, in every society, one of the most contentious and ill-defined rights. The liberty to impose this formal unity is a liberty to handle the world, to remake it, if only a little, and to hand it to others in a shape which may influence their actions. It is interesting to speculate whether the Greeks did not, for this very reason, describe the man clever at speech as δεινός, an epithet meaning, in addition to “clever,” “fearful” and “terrible.” The sentence through its office of assertion is a force adding itself to the forces of the world, and therefore the man clever with his sentences—which is to say with his combinations—was regarded with that uneasiness which we feel in the presence of power. The changes wrought by sentences are changes in the world rather than in the physical earth, but it is to be remembered that changes in the world bring about changes in the earth. Thus this practice of yoking together classes of the world, of saying “Charles is King” or “My country is God’s country” is a unique rhetorical fact which we have to take into account, although it stands somewhat prior to our main discussion. As we turn now to the different formal types of sentences, we shall follow the traditional grammatical classification and discuss the rhetorical inclination of each in turn. Through its form, the simple sentence tends to emphasize the discreteness of phenomena within the structural unity. To be more specific, its pattern of subject-verb-object or complement, without major competing elements, leaves our attention fixed upon the classes involved: “Charles is King.” The effect remains when the simple sentence compounds its subject and predicate: “Peaches and cantaloupes grew in abundance”; “Men and boys hunted and fished.” The single subject-predicate frame has the broad sense of listing or itemizing, and the list becomes what the sentence is about semantically. Sentences of this kind are often the unconscious style of one who sees the world as a conglomerate of things, like the child; sometimes they are the conscious style of one who seeks to present certain things as eminent against a background of matter uniform or flat. One can imagine, for example, the simple sentence “He never worked” coming after a long and tedious recital which it is supposed to highlight. Or one can imagine the sentence “The world is round” leaping out of a context with which it contrasts in meaning, in brevity, or in sententiousness.