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Original Post - 18 Mar 2025 - Michael H. Scott

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You know the active voice, where the subject performs an action.

The graduate student analyzed the model.

Here the subject is the graduate student.

And you also know the passive voice, where the subject is affected by an action.

The model was analyzed by the graduate student.

Now the subject is the model.

But do you know the mediopassive voice?

The model analyzed efficiently.

In this case, the subject (the model) receives the action (analyzed). The one performing the action (the graduate student) is absent from the sentence; however, it is obvious that the model did not perform the analysis.

You will often find the mediopassive voice in advertising. A well known example is “the soup that eats like a meal” from Chunky Soup. You have undoubtedly seen or heard other slogans such as “our mattress sleeps like a dream”. The soup does not eat and the mattress does not sleep.

In OpenSees, and in finite element analysis in general, you will hear mediopassives like “triangle elements mesh well” and “sparse matrices solve quickly”. The elements do not mesh and the matrices do not solve.

But you will be hard-pressed to find any mediopassive voice in the latest issue of your favorite earthquake engineering journal. No one says “The steel frame loaded strongly, exceeding the predicted 100 kip capacity by 25%”. Instead one would say “The steel frame resisted a lateral load of 125 kip, exceeding the predicted capacity by 25%”.

OpenSees blogs well. Grammar does not.