Simple is beauty

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
1

Hi,

I have three more questions.

  1. “Having been warned, they proceeded carefully.”
    Can I reduce it to “Warned, they proceeded carefully”

  2. “Simple is beauty.” Simple is an adj. How come it can be the subject?

  3. “She is gonna kill herself running.” The meaning is she will run untill she dies. But I am wondering it should be She is gonna kill herself FOR running or some other kinds of preposition. Am I right?

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  1. Hmm, this is a difficult question. In some cases you could use a participle that way, but in this one it sounds just a little bit off. I’m afraid I can’t fully explain when it is OK and when it is not. Perhaps it has something to do with the balance of the sentence. I’d not use it unless my intuition told me it was all right.
    You could say “though warned, they proceeded”: somehow the conjunction makes it OK, probably because then it will be taken as a shortened adverbial clause instead of as a bare participle.

  2. The subject is “beauty”, the subject complement is “simple”: the word order in this sentence is just reversed.

  3. Not really: “running” is a participle here, not a gerund. A participle is like an adjective, while a gerund is like a noun. In fact this type of sentence resembles your “warned” sentence. It is fine here. Note that “gonna” is very informal language. I suppose the present participle can be used more freely than the past participle.
    You could say “by running”, but that isn’t necessary.

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How come the word order in “Simple is beauty” can be reversed?

It’s rhetoric or what?

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4

Yes, I was assuming that this was poetry or something, with rhetoric inversion. Do you know the context? On second thought, there is a chance that it might merely be a badly written sentence, if the author meant “simplicity is beauty”, or “simple is beautiful” (adjective - copula - adjective is a normal construction, by the way).

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I just saw that sentence in an ads. Maybe it tries to get attentions and it did.

Can you tell me more about adjective - copula - adjective structure? I never heard of it.

Thanks

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6

Oh I think you know it:

  • big is beautiful
  • more is not always better
  • less is more
    Etc.

Advertisements are notorious for bad use of language: making things seem better than they are is what brings most ugly things to a language. In addition, people in advertising get to publicise their writing even though they are usually not well educated. So we should always be on our guard not to take over advertising slang.
My apologies if I got too sentimental there.

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Less can definitely be more: