Noun Sense

We're back to basics again, remedying the lapses in your basic education. Today we will talk about nouns.

A noun is simply a thing. When the Grammopticon was in school, the common definition was "a person, place, or thing." We added "idea" to the definition after several of us argued that a dream is a noun, history is a noun,  Kant's categorical imperative is a noun. (Perhaps in sixth grade we did not count Kant's categorical imperative among our examples.) We wanted to be explicit about including the kind of things you can't necessarily touch or hold in your hand.

Let us revisit our old friend Axy, the axe-wielding murderer. Axy is a person and therefore a noun. He is a murderer--also a person, therefore also a noun. His axe is a thing--another noun. Murder is more an idea than a thing--but ideas are nouns too.

Remember that a sentence is really a very short story. A story is always about someone or something. For something to happen in our sentence-story, someone has to make it happen. That will most often be a noun.

But do not confuse the noun with the subject of the sentence (if your education was sufficient for you to have the notion of subject and predicate). The subject of the sentence is usually a noun, but there are many other uses for nouns in a sentence:

Axy the axe-wielding murderer stabs the green-eyed man in the chest, then drops the axe to pick up the gun and finish the job.

The scene is littered with nouns. Not to mention blood. Excuse me while I grab a noun, er, mop to clean up.