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In grammar, an appositive, a useful dependent noun or phrase or full clause such as this one, offers clarification in a condensed format. In this Wikipedia entry, the use of appositives and appositive phrases, a grammatical device so handy that its overuse is tempting, are identified by italics.
An appositive, grammatically incomplete, is always set off by commas, a reader-friendly invention, with one exception: LAPIDARY INSCRIPTIONS CHISELLED INTO STONE. If you do not have a chisel in your hand, you must set off an appostive with commas, though at the beginning or end of the sentence only one comma is required.
As for commas, ancient Romans scarcely knew the period at the end of a sentence. :ADDITIONALLYTHEYRANTHEIRWORDSTOGETHERLIKETHISAPRACTISENOTTOBEIMITATED
Not all phrases set off by commas, Gentle Reader, are appositives. Some appositives are so brief— and sometimes so inevitable— that they are epithets: Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror of Persia, comes to mind. But Charlemagne, "Charles the Great", has absorbed his epithet into his very name, much like his 9th-century contemporary Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph at Baghdad. Arabic personal names, daunting to the Anglophone eye,* if such metaphors may be mixed, combine a series of patronymics with an epithet or two, set "in apposition," a phrase not to confuse with "opposition.".
- a gerund phrase placed in apposition
Your further contributions, keeping strictly to this subject, appositives, are invited.
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