Forbidding Sky

What’s wrong with this sentence:

 “They struggled on beneath a foreboding sky.”

Answer:

Well, nothing. It’s a perfectly valid sentence … in theory. But it’s not what the writer meant. It should have read:

“They struggled on beneath a FORBIDDING sky.”

Hang on! How do I know what the author meant?

OK, I don’t; but I can make a pretty good guess. I’m willing to bet that on nine occasions out of ten, the author meant “forbid” in one form or another. He or she substituted “foreboding” for “forbidding” because it sounded somehow more dramatic, more poetic.

So is “to forebode” a valid verb at all?

Actually yes. It means to “portend” or “augur”, or to sense impending problems. You’ll find it in all the dictionaries, along with examples of its use. But let’s get real; its occurrence as a verb in modern times is extremely rare. Admittedly, you might sometimes encounter it in a sentence like this:

“The ripple of unease in the crowd seemed to forebode evil.”

This is theoretically valid, but in my book it’s archaic and awkward. Safer alternatives would be “portend” or “foretell” or “presage”. Ironically, to some extent “forebode” feels awkward here precisely because it sounds too much like “forbid”, which can make any sentence containing it potentially confusing.

What about “foreboding” as an adjective?

Yes, OK, “foreboding” is a valid participial adjective derived from “forebode”. But if you apply it to an inanimate object, you have to think carefully about what you actually mean. Can a sky really be foreboding? The simple answer is not in itself. The sky doesn’t have any knowledge or feelings, and its appearance can’t be taken as a portent of much more than upcoming weather conditions.

This is pathetic (not)

It’s the observer commenting on the sky who actually feels a sense of foreboding (noun); but that sense is attributed to the sky (adjective). You could argue that this is a case of what linguists call pathetic fallacy. (That’s pathetic as in “pathos”, not as in “contemptible”.) The foreboding is being transferred from the observer to an external object, atmosphere or feeling. And as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to the word “foreboding”, this kind of attribution is so subtle, and its use is so often likely to be questionable, that it’s best avoided altogether.

“Foreboding” as a noun: the only safe bet

For all practical purposes, you’re safest if you limit the use of “foreboding” to the noun. (Technically it’s a verbal noun, or a gerund.) Quite honestly, you’re playing with fire if you use it in any other way.

Foreboding, n. A feeling of uneasy anticipation; a sense of impending doom.

“Glancing up at the forbidding sky, he was suffused with a sense of foreboding.”

If you talk about “a foreboding sky”, you’re likely to upset pedants like me, and confuse people who don’t know the difference into thinking that “foreboding” and “forbidding” mean more or less the same thing. They don’t, and misleading people simply devalues the language.

Author’s note

As you can see, I’m an unrepentant lifelong pedant, but insistence on correctness has helped me immeasurably with my writing, and I can’t be so different from everyone else. So I’ve decided to share a few insights here in a vainglorious attempt to make the world a more comprehensible place.

If you’d like to suggest any other grammatical howlers that I could expose, please leave a comment or drop me a note here. I’d love to hear from you.

And you can decide for yourself whether I live up to my own tenets by checking out my novels. See peterrowlands.com.