Modifier Mike

Modifier Mike is Sentence-Town's verb-decorator.

Mike — whose given name is Michael, though everyone calls him Mike — is cheerful and fussy. He attends, he says, to the small specific details. He believes that the same verb performed differently is a different sentence. He ran tells you only that an action happened. He ran quickly tells you the speed. He ran yesterday tells you the time. He ran home tells you the destination. He ran because he was late tells you the reason. Each adverb adds a layer of specificity without changing the underlying verb-action.

Mike grew up in an interior-decoration family. His parents had run a small furniture-and-soft-furnishings shop in the kingdom's central capital. The shop sold chairs, tables, throws, cushions, curtains, and small ornamental objects. Mike had grown up understanding that furniture by itself was just structure — and that furniture made into a room was structure-plus-decoration. A chair was a chair. A chair with a green cushion in a parlor by the window was a specific chair in a specific situation. Each decoration-layer added character without changing the underlying chair-ness.

When he joined the GrammarForge academy at twenty-one, he was paired immediately with Modifier Madge — the noun-decorator — who had joined the same year. They have, in the seventeen years since, been the academy's joint-decorators. They share an office. They co-teach when adverb-and-adjective patterns intersect. They are good friends and good colleagues. (They are not married — children sometimes ask, with great curiosity. They are not. They are, simply, the decorator pair.)

In his classroom, Mike begins every first-day lesson the same way. He has, on his desk, a small chair — about the size of a doll's chair, made of polished pine. He places it on the desk. He says: "This is a chair. It is a chair. It does what a chair does."