"The predicate of a sentence may tell you what kind of a thing something is, or how big it is, or where it is, or what is happening to it, and so on. We may say, for instance, of St Thomas Aquinas that he was a human being, and that he was fat, clever, and holier than Abelard; that he lived in Paris in the thirteenth century, that he sat when lecturing, wore the Dominican habit, wrote eight million words, and was eventuarlly poisoned by Charles of Anjou. The predicats we use in saying these things belong, Aristotle would say, in different categories: they belong in the categories of, respectively, substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, vesture, action, and passion."