* A Civil Service correspondent takes me to task for having dealt too leniently with this phrase, which he calls a ‘monstrosity’: it is one, he says, that ‘the cynic regards as being typical of the civil servant, who is (in his eyes) incapable of decisive thought’. Perhaps it is wise to avoid a form of words that can arouse feelings of that sort in anyone. In The Valley of Fear, Sherlock Holmes reacts in the same way: ‘ “I am inclined to think —” said I. “I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently’.
* The debate here may not be wholly clear to all readers. It is possible by being selective to make a powerful argument in favour of English words of Anglo-Saxon origin. John Newton’s famous hymn on the subject of ‘faith’s review and expectation’ opens, ‘Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav’d a wretch like me!’ Both sweet and wretch are ‘Saxon’ words (swoete and wrecca) first recorded in Old English in the ninth century. Later Romance vocabulary (largely courtesy of the Norman invaders under William the Conqueror) gave English the alternatives dulcet and miscreant; and educated seventeenth-century taste spawned the further Latinate options sacchariferous, mellisonant and reprobate. Not a soul could believe that Newton’s hymn would be improved by choosing substitutes from among these Romance barnacles: ‘Amazing grace! (how sacchariferous the sound) That sav’d a miscreant like me!’ Yet grace and save are also Romance words, and some of us have need of saving graces. As for the idea that only our ‘Saxon’ words are earthy: to purge English of its Latin and Old French influences would require that we deny ourselves sex and violence, and how popular would that be? ~
* For more on ‘elegant variation’ see pp. 203–4.
* The phrase in case of can, however, be ambiguous, for example as it is found on the sign that says, ‘In case of fire do not use the lift’. ~
* See also pp. 178–9 for superfluous use of both.
* We seem to have grown used to the idea that ‘extra virgin’ is a legitimate standard of purity, but the popular phrase ‘very real’ is now a source of irritation to many. It is not new. In 1812 an anonymous ‘Society of Gentlemen’, translating the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, felt driven to explain that ‘the divine truth proceeding from the divine good is the very very real’. ~
* For more about appreciate see pp. 153–4.
* The OED cites this sentence as its sole example of a use of the word Micawberite, wrongly implying by its definition that Gowers meant to invoke Micawber, the ‘feckless optimist’. Gowers may have been unusual in wishing instead to pay tribute to Mr Micawber’s translations into plain English (the example above is taken from chapter 11 of David Copperfield), but he was not the first to use ‘Micawberite’ itself. This term, with the OED’s meaning, was in circulation at least as far back as the 1880s. The Michigan Argonaut mentions ‘obsequious Micawberites’ in 1884; the Westminster Review in 1895 compares Micawberites to ostriches; and in a 1906 issue of the Outlook, a weekly review, the vulnerable Micawberite is conjured up in an attack on the hire-purchase system. ~
* The Times columnist who rejected the word personnel out of hand might even so have been provoked into letting off a new jet of steam at the idea that it would one day be being used of single members of the human race, as is demonstrated by these instructions for ‘vehicle extrication’: ‘To properly and safely conduct rescue-lift air bag operation, a minimum of five personnel are required: one personnel tending to the patient, two personnel on each side …, one personnel managing the rescue-lift air bag controls, and one personnel as the officer in control …’. (This list does not even add up to five, unless ‘two personnel on each side’ is taken to mean one on each side.) ~
* It was whimsical of Gowers to mention ‘Upharsin’ in a paragraph on jargon. This word, from the Aramaic, appears in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, as an element in ‘the writing on the wall’. ‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin’ is inscribed by floating fingers on a piece of plaster in the palace of King Belshazzar. The King, seeing unattached fingers at work, is so terrified that the ‘joints of his loins’ are loosed. The words are a message from God. Only Daniel can interpret them. Daniel tells Belshazzar that he has been ‘found wanting’ and that his kingdom will be divided. In the night King Belshazzar is slain. ~
* For more on overall, see pp. 159–161.
* In the decades since Partridge and Gowers wrote disparagingly of the cliché to all intents and purposes, it has given rise to a corrupted version of itself, ‘to all intensive purposes’. This is no improvement on the original. ~
* Gowers confidently gave as examples explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, but decades later both soldier on, yet to hit the buffers. ~
* The Deputy Prime Minister not so long ago roundly declared, ‘We will not balance the books on the backs of the poor’. ~
* It is a particular danger of the truncated language of a newspaper headline that its words will group themselves together to suggest an unintended meaning, as in this example, which introduces a report on an auction of Nazi artefacts: ‘Cards from Himmler to mother as Nazis spread across Europe on sale’. But no such excuse can be made for the following sentence, taken from the Guardian: ‘The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress—the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs’. ~
* See p. 246.
† See p. 251.
* For more on split infinitives, see pp. 232–6.
* For more on ‘I and me’ and on ‘who and whom’ see pp.207–8 and 218–20.
* For more on the awkwardness of that, see p. 216.
* This appears to be a reference to the early jazz song, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of my Jelly Roll’. Gowers writes that his comic singer is ‘not misunderstood’ (even though the song title given here is a shade more euphemistic than the original). But what he fails to mention is that ‘ain’t’ makes the statement a triple negative, which is strictly much more complicated than a mere double. That said, it is presumably true even of this example that no one is likely to misunderstand the not giving. ~
* On phrasal verbs see also pp. 108–110.
† Though Churchill, if indeed he made this joke, would not have been the first to do so, he endorsed Plain Words in Parliament without correcting the story. ~
* Babies remain vulnerable to ambiguity about antecedents, as a story from the Guardian shows: ‘Breastfeeding babies will need their own tickets for 2012 Olympics—even if they weren’t conceived when they went on sale’. The Chairman of the London Games, challenged on this point, described it as an anomaly that some people had bought ‘tickets that have subsequently had babies’. ~
* ‘Elegant variation’ used to be an accepted feature of fine writing, as is shown by this remarkable extract from The Times of 1848, in which readers are alerted to a demonstration of M. Molk’s newly invented ‘electric searchlight’: ‘At this period of the evening the moon will be in its zenith, but M. Molk does not apprehend any sensible diminution of the lustre of his light from the presence of that beautiful luminary’.
* See also pp. 243–5 for punctuating relative clauses.
* See pp. 182–3.
* This quotation is taken from Forster’s essay of 1935 ‘The Menace to Freedom’. When he later republished it in Two Cheers for Democracy, he corrected the line to read ‘a creature who, we pretend, is here already …’. ~
* For this misuse of a comma see also pp. 245–6
* On hyphens see also pp. 255–7.
* See also p. 222.
* See also pp. 214–5 for the dangers of the throwback comma combined with which.
* The Guardian supplies a splendid example of the species of parenthetical, half-submerged ‘sea-serpent’ sentence that Mark Twain attempted to warn against: ‘In a highly political family, daughter Rachel also worked for Brown at No. 10 while her older brother Steph
en—born in 1970, a few months before his father, only child of a mining family from the closely knit Welsh valleys, became an MP—carved out a post-Cambridge career with the British Council’. This sentence may be boggling in many ways, but it is undoubtedly most boggling for its momentary suggestion of a son born some months before his own father. ~
* Gowers’s preferred system of punctuation has largely fallen out of fashion, though it is still used here and there, for instance in the Times Literary Supplement. ~
* George Eliot uses the ‘I say’ device in Middlemarch: ‘Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greater expense)—Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in the world …’. But in modern writing this use of ‘I say’ would be likely to invite what Gowers calls elsewhere ‘the prick of ridicule’. ~
* Since Gowers wrote this, the OED has gone further, describing officialese as ‘formal and typically verbose’ and ‘turgid or pedantic’. ~
* But see pp. 141–2. ~
* If all the commas are left out, as they are in Usage and Abusage, this passage is made to look even harder to understand than it really is.
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