The grammar of the weekly horoscope

“This week something will clear up that has been on your mind for a while.” Sentences built this way turn up in every other weekly horoscope, and they hold true — for you, for your neighbour and for just about anyone who reads them. The reason for that is not in the sky, it is in the sentence structure. It becomes visible as soon as a text like this is taken apart the way a sentence is taken apart in an English lesson.

Nobody does anything

“Something is clearing up.” “A decision is due.” “Movement is coming into it.” None of these sentences has anyone in it who acts. Sometimes the verb is reflexive, sometimes the subject is itself already an event; either way the acting person is missing, and so is the place where anything could fail to happen.

Nouns made out of verbs do the same job: a clarification, an encounter, a change. They name an event without saying who goes through it, with whom, when and where. Compare that with the sentence “On Thursday your landlady calls.” That one names a person, a day and an action — and it can go wrong.

The hedges

Words such as rather, somewhat, possibly, basically, not infrequently or a little are called hedges in linguistics: they stand around a claim like a hedge and take the sharp edges off it. Then there are the modal verbs — may, might, could well be.

The test takes no time at all. Cross out every one of these words in a paragraph of a horoscope and read it again. Two kinds of sentence are left: ones that suddenly claim something, and ones with almost nothing left of them.

Blanks to fill in

“Someone close to you.” “An old matter.” “Something you keep putting off.” Expressions like these point at something without naming it. They work like a field on a form: the text provides the frame, you enter the content.

And you enter it without noticing, in a fraction of a second. Anyone who watches themselves do it notices their own work: at “someone close to you” a face comes to mind, and from then on the text is about that person. You entered that person yourself.

Advice cannot be proved wrong

“Watch your boundaries this week.” “Make time for a conversation that is overdue.” Imperatives make no claim about the world. They can be wise or superfluous; wrong they cannot be, because they say nothing whatsoever about the coming Thursday.

In many columns half the text consists of sentences like these. The passage is read as a prediction all the same: the form promises information about the future, and what is delivered is well-meant advice.

The “you” that points at no one

The last piece lies in the form of address. In grammar, “you” is a pointing word. It has no fixed meaning; it gets that meaning only from the situation in which someone says it: in conversation it points at the person opposite. In a printed column nobody is opposite, and so it points at whoever is reading.

The whole genre lives on this. One and the same sentence addresses hundreds of thousands of people one by one, and every one of them can rightly say it means them. Try replacing the “you” with “people with this star sign”: the content stays the same, the effect is gone.

Two tests to run at home

The first: swap the headings. Read the paragraph for Taurus under the heading Libra. If nothing strikes you, the text is not about a sign but about people in general.

The second is pure sentence work. Go through a paragraph sentence by sentence and note three things next to each one: who does something in it, when, and with what. For most sentences the line stays empty. The few where it fills up are the only ones anyone can talk about on Sunday.

None of this settles anything about astrology. What has been described is a way of writing, and that is interchangeable: the same reading could just as well be written down in sentences that name a person, a date and a matter — only such sentences are printed more rarely, because they can make fools of themselves. You can hear what the genre usually sounds like in the free weekly horoscope; you can see what a reading actually fastens onto in the components of a horoscope.