Plain Words

by Rebecca Gowers

  So far as the heating of buildings in Government occupation are concerned … (So far as the heating … is concerned …)

  Sometimes the weight of a plural pushes the verb into the wrong number, even though they are not next to one another:

  Thousands of pounds’ worth of damage have been done to the apple crop.

  Here have is a blunder. And so (as we have just seen) is the common attraction of the verb into the plural when the subject is either or neither in such sentences as ‘neither of the questions have been answered’ or ‘either of the questions were embarrassing’.

  However, in one or two exceptional instances the force of this attraction has conquered all. With the phrase more than one the pull of one is so strong that the singular is always used (e.g. ‘more than one question was asked’); and owing to the pull of the plural in a sentence such as, ‘none of the questions were answered’, none has come to be used indifferently with a singular or a plural verb. Conversely, owing to the pull of the singular a in the expression many a, it always takes the singular verb. ‘There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip’ is idiomatic English, as ‘there are many a slip’ is not.

  (7) There are or were

  It is a common mistake to write there is or there was where a plural subject requires there are or there were. The following is wrong:

  There was available one large room and three small ones.

  This should be

  There were available …

  It is true that Ophelia said ‘there is Pansies; that’s for thoughts’, but she was not herself at the time.

  (8) Certain nouns are sometimes puzzling

  (a) Agenda, though in form plural, has been admitted from Latin into English as a singular word. Nobody would say ‘the agenda for Monday’s meeting have not yet reached me’. If a word is needed for one of the components of the agenda, say ‘item No. so-and-so of the agenda’, not ‘agendum No. so-and-so’, which would be the extreme of pedantry. If a plural is wanted for agenda itself, it must be agendas or agenda papers.

  Note. When he wrote this, Gowers contrasted the singular agenda with what he considered the definitely plural data. These days, however, many authorities use data as a singular word too (‘the data was inconclusive’). Media is similarly treated as both plural and singular. In the singular, an agenda is being thought of as a (singular) list of things to be done, the data as a (singular) set of items of information, and the media as a (singular) range of different forms of communication. But where criteria and phenomena are used as though singular (‘it was an amazing phenomena’; ‘they judged it on one criteria alone’), this is simply incorrect.

  There are other words, not all Latin in origin, that are treated as both singular and plural in English, e.g. politics, headquarters, whereabouts, livestock and variety. Sticklers tend to use them in the singular (‘The whereabouts of our bull is unknown. Our livestock was already in decline. A variety of them is sick’). ~

  (b) Means in the sense of ‘means to an end’ is a curious word. It may be treated either as singular or plural. Suppose, for instance, that you want to write about means having been sought to do something. You may if you choose treat the word as singular and say ‘a means was sought’ or ‘every means was sought’. Or you may treat it as plural and say ‘all means were sought’. Or again, if you use just the word means without any word such as a or every or all to show its number, you may give it a singular or a plural verb as you wish: you may say either ‘means was sought’ or ‘means were sought’; both are idiomatic. Perhaps on the whole it is best to say ‘a method (or way) was sought’ if there was only one, and ‘means were sought’ if there was more than one.

  Means in the sense of monetary resources is always plural.

  (c) Number, like other collective nouns, may take either a singular or a plural verb. Unlike most of them, it admits of a simple and logical rule. When all that it is doing is forming part of a composite plural subject, it should have a plural verb, as in:

  A large number of people are coming today.

  But when it is standing on its own legs as the subject it should have a singular verb, as in:

  The number of people coming today is large.

  The following are accordingly unidiomatic:

  There is a number of applications, some of which were made before yours.

  There is a large number of outstanding orders.

  The true subjects are not a number and a large number but a-number-of-applications and a-large-number-of-outstanding-orders.

  Of the following examples, the first has a singular verb that should be plural, and the second a plural verb that should be singular:

  There was also a number of conferences calling themselves peace conferences which had no real interest in peace.

  The number of casualties in HMS Amethyst are thought to be about fifteen.

  (d) Those kind of things is a phrase commonly heard in conversation, and instances of the use of the plural these or those with the singular kind or sort can be found in good authors. As I mentioned in Chapter IV, the phrase those kind of things (like different to, very pleased, drive slow and the split infinitive) used to be among the shibboleths by which it was supposed to be possible to distinguish those who were instructed in their mother tongue from those who were not. In 1910, Punch published a poem containing these lines:

  Did you say those sort of things

  Never seemed to you to matter?

  Gloomily your poet sings,

  Did you say ‘those sort of things’?

  Frightened love would soon take wings,

  All his fondest hopes you’d shatter,

  Did you say those sort of things

  Never seemed to you to matter.

  We have a better sense of values today. But even now it is as well to humour the purist by writing things of that kind.

  TROUBLES WITH PREPOSITIONS

  (1) Ending sentences with prepositions

  Do not hesitate to end a sentence with a preposition if your ear tells you that that is where the preposition goes best. There used to be a rather half-hearted grammarians’ rule against doing this, but no good writer ever heeded it, except Dryden, who seems to have invented it. The translators of the Authorized Version did not know it (‘But I have a baptism to be baptized with’). The very rule itself, if phrased ‘do not use a preposition to end a sentence with’, has a smoother flow and a more idiomatic ring than ‘do not use a preposition with which to end a sentence’.

  Dean Alford, in The Queen’s English of 1864, protested at this so-called rule. ‘I know’, he said, ‘that I am at variance with the rules taught at very respectable institutions for enabling young ladies to talk unlike their elders; but this I cannot help.’ The story is often repeated of the nurse who performed the remarkable feat of ending a sentence with two prepositions (to and for) and a compound preposition (out of) by asking her charge, ‘What did you choose that book to be read to out of for?’ She may have broken Dryden’s rule several times over, but she said what she wanted to say perfectly clearly in words of one syllable, and what more can one ask? Morris Bishop, in the New Yorker, outdid even the nurse in his comic response to a preposition supposedly hidden under a chair: ‘What should he come up from out of in under for?’

  Sometimes, when the final word is really a verbal particle, and the verb’s meaning depends on it, they form a phrasal verb*—put up with for instance—and to separate them makes a nonsense. It is said that Sir Winston Churchill once made this comment against a sentence that clumsily avoided a prepositional ending: ‘This is the sort of English up with which I will not put’.† The ear is a pretty safe guide.

  Note. The comic examples Gowers gives here are not completely helpful. (No one forced to reject an invitation to dance would do so in the grammar of the Authorized Version: ‘But I have a partner to be partnered with; and how am I straitened till this partnership be accomplished!’) Gowers does, however, provide his own, utilitarian examples of sentences t
hat end with prepositions, for instance: ‘The peculiarities of legal English are often used as a stick to beat the official with’. Though the rule he flouted by this arrangement of words may have struck him as half-hearted, there are readers who, coming upon this sentence earlier in the book, will have had an instinct to rearrange it (‘a stick with which to beat the official’). But why?

  The answer is that the ear is a pretty safe guide not only to grammar but also to rhetoric. A writer may sometimes seek the effect of a dying fall (it could be for comic or bathetic reasons), but a strong sentence will usually reserve its main burden of sense to the end, and this burden is not usually carried by a loose preposition. When Gowers took the sentence ‘do not use a preposition to end a sentence with’ and corrected it to conform to the rule it expresses, he did so in a deliberately awkward manner: ‘do not use a preposition with which to end a sentence’. It is perfectly possible to recast this in a simple and direct manner that avoids violating the advice itself, yet finishes on the main point: ‘Do not end a sentence with a preposition’. The following quotation, about Harold Shipman, the doctor and serial murderer, will leave many an ear with the impression that its final word, the preposition for, has been left swinging in the wind:

  This concern with the right medication was often echoed in his advice to inmates, whom he would tell which drugs to ask the prison doctors for. (Darian Leader, What is Madness?, 2011)

  This sentence would be stronger if it ended on another verb, e.g. ‘whom he would tell which drugs to ask the prison doctors to prescribe’. Better yet, it could be rewritten to end with what the author seems to wish to emphasise most: ‘This concern with prescribing the right medication continued in prison, where he would advise sick inmates to ask for drugs he himself had recommended’. ~

  (2) Cannibalism by prepositions

  ‘Cannibalism’ is the name given by Fowler to a vice that prepositions are especially prone to, though it may infect any part of speech. One of a pair of words swallows the second:

  any articles for which export licences are held or for which licences have been applied.

  The writer meant ‘or for which export licences have been applied for’, but the first for has swallowed the second.

  (3) Some particular prepositions

  (a) Between and among. The OED tells us not to heed those who tell us that between must only be used of two things, and that when there are more, the preposition must be among. Between, it says,

  is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely: we should not say ‘the space lying among the three points,’ or ‘a treaty among three powers,’ or ‘the choice lies among the three candidates in the select list,’ or ‘to insert a needle among the closed petals of a flower’.

  (b) Between … or and between … and between. If between is followed by a conjunction, this must always be a simple and. It is wrong to say ‘the choice lies between Smith or Jones’, or to say ‘we had to choose between taking these offices and making the best of them and between perhaps finding ourselves with no offices at all’. If a sentence has become so involved that and is not felt to be enough, it should be recast. This mistake is not unknown in high places:

  It is thought that the choice lies between Mr Trygve Lie continuing for another year or the election of Mr Lester Pearson.

  (c) For between you and I, see ‘I and me’, p. 207.

  (d) Due to. Owing to long ago established itself as a prepositional phrase, and it must be admitted that the prepositional use of due to is also now very common and may have come to stay. But the orthodox still keep up the fight against it: they maintain that due is an adjective and should not be used otherwise. That means that it must always have a noun to agree with. You may say: ‘Floods due to a breach in the river bank covered a thousand acres of land’. But you must not say: ‘Due to a breach in the river bank a thousand acres of land were flooded’. In the first, due to agrees properly with floods, and these were in fact due to the breach. In the second, it can only agree with a thousand acres of land. These were not due to the breach, or to anything else except the Creation.

  Due to is rightly used in:

  The closing of the telephone exchange was due to lack of equipment. (Due to agrees with closing.)

  The delay in replying was due to the fact that it was hoped to call upon you. (Due to agrees with delay.)

  Due to is wrongly used in:

  We must apologise to listeners who missed the introduction to the talk due to a technical fault. (Due to agrees with talk, implying a ‘talk due to a technical fault’.)

  Fowler remarked about due to used as a preposition: ‘perhaps idiom will beat the illiterates, perhaps the illiterates will beat idiom’. The illiterates will probably win.

  Note. When, ten years after making this prediction, Gowers sat down to revise Fowler’s Modern English Usage, he wrote that he now felt the battle to resist Fowler’s ‘illiterates’ was indeed lost. This entry may therefore be thought of as a curiosity, though there are writers who still observe the rule it explains. ~

  (e) Prior to. There is no good reason to use prior to as a preposition instead of before. Before is simpler, better known and more natural, and therefore preferable. It is, moreover, at least questionable whether prior to has established itself as a preposition. By all means use the phrase a prior engagement, where prior is doing its proper job as an adjective. But do not say that you made an engagement prior to receiving the second engagement.

  Mr X has requested that you should submit to him, immediately prior to placing orders, lists of components …

  Sir Adrian Boult is resting prior to the forthcoming tour of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

  In sentences such as these, prior to cannot have any advantage over the straightforward before.

  Note. The same could be said of previous to. Gowers also wrote that following used as a preposition was a ‘pretentious substitute’ for after (‘following heavy rain last night the wicket is very wet’). The OED’s earliest example of this use is dated 1947. It then cites Gowers himself, who in 1948 had written: ‘Perhaps the fight against following as a preposition ought to be regarded as lost’. He still thought it was pretentious. ~

  TROUBLES WITH PRONOUNS

  Of pronouns, Cobbett wrote in his grammar that ‘The use of them is to prevent the repetition of Nouns, and to make speaking and writing more rapid and less encumbered with words’. In more than one respect they are difficult parts of speech to handle.

  (1) It is an easy slip to use a pronoun without a true antecedent

  He offered to resign but it was refused.

  Here it is lacking a true antecedent. It would have had one if the sentence had begun ‘He offered his resignation’. This is a purely grammatical point, but unless care is taken over it a verbal absurdity may result. Cobbett gives this example from Addison:

  There are, indeed, but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a Relish of any Pleasures that are not Criminal; every Diversion they take is at the Expence of some one Virtue or another, and their very first Step out of Business is into Vice or Folly.

  As Cobbett points out, the only possible antecedent to they and their is the ‘very few who know how to be idle and innocent’, and that is the opposite of what Addison means.

  (2) Be sure there is no real ambiguity about the antecedent

  This is more than a grammatical point; it affects the intelligibility of what you write. Special care is needed when, for example, the pronouns are he and him, and more than one male person has been mentioned. Robert Louis Stevenson, in a letter of 1892, wrote: ‘When I invent a language, there shall be a direct and an indirect pronoun differently declined’. He gave an example of what he meant, to show the freedom that this would provide:

  Ex.: HE seized TUM by TUS throat; but TU at the same moment caught HIM by HIS hair. A fellow could write hurricanes w
ith an inflection like that!

  A fellow could, but English affords no such aids. Handicapped as we are by the lack of this useful artifice, we must be careful to leave no doubt about the antecedent of our pronouns, and must not make our readers guess, even though it may not be difficult to guess right. As Jespersen points out in his Essentials of English Grammar, a sentence like ‘John told Robert’s son that he must help him’ is theoretically capable of six different meanings. It is true that Jespersen would not have us trouble overmuch when there can be no real doubt about the antecedent, and he points out that there is little danger of misunderstanding the theoretically ambiguous sentence:

  If the baby does not thrive on raw milk, boil it.

  Nevertheless, he adds, it is well to be very careful about one’s pronouns.*

  Here are one or two examples to show how difficult it can be to avoid ambiguity:

  Mr S. told Mr H. he was prepared to transfer part of his allocation to his purposes provided that he received £10,000.

  The his before purposes refers, it would seem, to Mr H., and the other three pronouns to Mr S.

  Mr F. saw a man throw something from his pockets to the hens on his farm, and then twist the neck of one of them when they ran to him.

  Here the change of antecedent from the man to Mr F. and back again to the man is puzzling at first.

  There are several possible paths to removing ambiguities such as these. Let us take by way of illustration the sentence, ‘Sir Henry Ponsonby informed Mr Gladstone that the Queen had been much upset by what he had told her’, and let us assume that the ambiguous he refers to Mr Gladstone. We can make the antecedent plain by