At Easter, the White House posted “Presidential Message on Holy Week, 2025.” Without addressing the content, that message contained the following words:
Let’s parse this “sentence.”
Most people learned about nouns in elementary school, primarily the basic explanation that nouns are persons, places, things, animals, or ideas. You also should have learned about common and proper nouns in elementary school. Common nouns are generic nouns like a boy, a dog, or a street; proper nouns are specific nouns like Chad, Spot, or Nixon Road. Common nouns should start with lower case letters while proper nouns should start with capital letters. Here, the proper nouns are perhaps the easiest words to identify: Jerusalem, Palm Sunday, Paschal Triduum, Holy Thursday, Mass, Lord’s Supper, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, and Holy Saturday (I would include night with Holy Saturday). But there are two other common nouns here: entry and pinnacle, both abstract (intangible) nouns.
If you’ve memorized the list of prepositions (a good English teacher should have encouraged you to memorize them as a student, but I do recognize that you may have forgotten them), you should be able to identify all of those nouns as objects of prepositions: with, into, on, in, of, and by. The words that separate those objects with their prepositions are adjectives: Christ’s (a possessive acting as an adjective), triumphal, and multiple instances of the definite article the.
Even if you haven’t memorized all of your conjunctions, if you know your coordinating conjunctions–popularly known as the FANBOYS–you recognize the word and.
The word which here is a subordinating conjunction acting as the subject of a dependent clause that cannot stand on its own as a sentence. The word begins is the verb of that subordinate clause.
What do you have left? A bunch of words that look like verbs. But [b]eginning, culminating, followed, and reaching aren’t verbs. They are verbals, words that derive from verbs but that don’t actually function as verbs in a sentence.
I make this point: In kindergarten, you should have learned that a sentence is a group of words that starts with a capital letter and ends with punctuation such as a period, exclamation point, or question mark. By first grade, you should have learned that a sentence has to have a subject (with a noun) and a predicate (with a verb) and express a complete thought. The White House’s “sentence” lacks any subject or verb outside a dependent clause; moreover, it does not express a complete thought
TL;DR: This portion of the White House statement is a sentence fragment.
If I were still teaching in the classroom, this tiny piece of history would show up on the semester exam as an essay question.
Never stop learning,
Erin
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