AS I HOPE WILL BY NOW be clear, this book is intended as an aid to the practical writer rather than as a cavalry-charge across the battlefield of the language wars. I’m not primarily interested in exploding the prejudices of pedants, nor at ridiculing the ‘relativism’ of descriptive linguists.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of rules for grammar, rules for spelling and rules for writing in general – and rightly or wrongly many people take those rules very seriously. If some of those people are among your readers – and they will be – it is worth for purely practical reasons knowing what they’re likely to baulk at.
Forewarned is forearmed. Below I outline some of the fiercest areas of dispute – not as a plan of attack, so much as a map of the minefield. If it makes you feel better to put ‘correct’ in sceptical inverted commas, feel free.
The notion that it’s wrong to interpose – to blithely interpose, you could say – a word (usually an adverb) between the word ‘to’ and its verb in the infinitive form is the king of zombie grammar rules. Not only is it wrong: it’s actually famous for being wrong. There’s a whole set of folklore about its wrongness (including the idea that the rule came about by analogy with Latin, where infinitives are one word and therefore unsplittable), and a lively mini-industry in tracking down the origins of the ‘rule’ in long-forgotten nineteenth-century style guides. That said, some people still think it a bad habit.
I tend not to split them, all other things being equal. In the first place they occasion a microscopic upping of the cognitive load: the interruption of one or more adverbs means the reader has ‘to’ in a mental holding pattern pending the arrival of the verb; it produces, to my ear, a tiny hiccup in the sentence. Then again, the prissily unsplit infinitive can sound stiff and pompous. The most famous instance in history – Star Trek’s ‘To boldly go …’ – is perfectly idiomatic. The cadence places the stress on the key word – boldly. ‘Boldly to go’ sounds stiff. ‘To go boldly’ shifts the emphasis, to my ear, from the boldness to the going.
And sometimes – especially when your infinitive is near another verb that might want to steal its adverb – you need to split to avoid ambiguity. Recently I found myself writing: ‘Margaret Thatcher claimed only to need four hours’ sleep a night.’ Did she only claim to need four hours’ sleep? Did she claim to only need four hours’ sleep? Or did she claim to need only four hours’ sleep? Each has a subtly different shade of meaning, and by ruling out splitting the infinitive on principle you deprive yourself of the availability of one of them.
There’s a special place at the end of the devil’s toasting fork, if you ask me, for the perpetrator of the comma splice, or run-on sentence. Here’s an example from the menu at a well-known British chain restaurant:
At Little Chef we care about food, all of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
No, no, no and thrice again no. That – at least in standard written English – is just wrong. Not wrong because of the eccentric capitalisation of ‘beef’. Not wrong because of the very questionable truth of the first clause, and the expansive vagueness of the second. It’s wrong because what you have there is two sentences, not one. The two subjects (‘we’ and ‘burgers) and two main verbs (‘care’ and ‘are made’) are the giveaway.
So:
At Little Chef we care about food. All of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
If you want to link two main clauses to emphasise their connection you can use a colon, a dash or a semicolon.
So:
At Little Chef we care about food: all of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
Or, more informal:
At Little Chef we care about food – all of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
Or, if you’re going for a classier look:
At Little Chef we care about food; all of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
You can also use a coordinating conjunction of some sort, as, in fact, Little Chef has done in the back end of that sentence, where ‘and’ helpfully and correctly links the matter of their being certified to the matter of their being made from British beef.
It would be ugly but just about grammatical to write:
At Little Chef we care about food and all of our burgers are made from British Beef and they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
Conversely, if you replaced the second ‘and’ with a comma, you’d have a double comma splice of considerable horribleness:
At Little Chef we care about food, all of our burgers are made from British Beef, they are all fully certified and prepared by our own butcher.
But, aha! Do you notice something going on there? Why yes: the version with the double comma splice is starting to look like something else. It’s starting to look like a list. And here is where it gets a little complicated. As much as the comma splice is a crime that cries to heaven for vengeance, it’s also a crime that – like so much else in language – isn’t always an open-and-shut case. A list is another way of linking independent main clauses, and lists use commas. So you could write, and just about get away with:
Little Chef cares about food, all its burgers are made from British Beef, and its own butcher certifies and prepares them.
But that only works because I’ve recast the clauses to put them into a similar form. And it only just about works: cast as a list the grammar is signalling that these three clauses – caring about food, the burgers being made of beef and the butcher’s shenanigans – carry roughly equal weight; in fact, the second two are offered as corroborative evidence for the first. If you were to write a grammatically identical sentence with the terms in a different order it would sound very odd indeed.
All Little Chef’s burgers are made from British beef, its own butcher certifies and prepares them and it cares about food.
The point I’m making is that this sentence, because of its meaning, doesn’t really want to be a list.
To complicate matters further, the comma splice is widely accepted in very short sentences, particularly if the different clauses share a subject or they’re placed in opposition. ‘It’s not beef, it’s horsemeat.’ ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ And you’re allowed to use it if you’re Charles Dickens, Samuel Beckett or Virginia Woolf: in literary style, all bets are off.
It does, on the face of it, seem arbitrary and a little eccentric that semicolons, colons, dashes and full stops are all acceptable ways of joining two main clauses, and that the comma isn’t. Likewise, that FANBOYS – the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so – can join them (usually but not always in a double-act with a comma) but that conjunctive adverbs such as nevertheless or however can’t. ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible, but he ate it.’; ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible but he ate it.’ – both grammatically okay; slight difference in emphasis and pace. ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible, nevertheless he ate it.’ – wrong. ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible nevertheless he ate it.’ – even wronger (conjunctive adverbs tend to like a bit of punctuation). ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible, however he ate it.’ – wrong. ‘The Little Chef burger was horrible however he ate it.’ – correct, but because ‘however’ without a comma isn’t acting as a coordinator but as a qualifier: it was horrible regardless of whether he slathered it in ketchup, held his nose or washed it down with Um Bongo. Language: slippery thing.*
So comma splices are horribly wrong, except on the few occasions that they aren’t. Got it? If in doubt, avoid them. Even the acceptable ones can be unspliced without much trouble – ‘It’s not beef; it’s horsemeat’; ‘I came. I saw. I conquered.’ – and you’re more likely to come a cropper by splicing than not.
‘A fierce ironist, his mischief worked in curious ways …’ Here’s the excellent writer Frances Wilson in her 2016 biography of Thomas De Quincey. Had she, grammatical sticklers would wonder, been at the opium? Curious as its workings might have been, De Quincey’s mischief wasn’t a fierce ironist.
Or try this one, from the introduction to a recent edition of Radio 4’s The Life Scientific: ‘Spluttering molten rock, extraordinary heat and intense pressure, my guest today has journeyed closer to the centre of the earth than anyone I know …’ This makes an in-person interview with the vulcanologist Hazel Rymer sound like a dangerous proposition.
A dangler is the name given to a modifying clause – often a participle – whose implied subject is different from that of the main clause. A slightly careless travel writer might announce, for instance: ‘Walking round the corner, the Taj Mahal showed itself resplendent in the bright Agra sunlight.’ The Taj Mahal wasn’t walking round the corner, obviously.
These are worth trying to avoid, not because they are a crime against the language – Oliver Kamm points out a humdinger from Old Hamlet (‘’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard/ A serpent stung me’) – but because they are a small stylistic clumsiness. The number of instances in which they can lead to actual confusion of meaning are small: only an eejit (technical term) will have the slightest trouble making sense of either Frances Wilson or my imaginary travel writer. But, particularly in longer sentences, they can cause the reader to stumble.
‘Can we action that report? I’d like you to cascade it to your team. We brainstormed it yesterday and there are some key learnings in it.’ These may seem to you, as they do to me, grotesque – but they are no sort of error. What linguists call ‘function shift’ – a word taking on a new syntactic role – is one of the great engines of linguistic innovation. Verbs incessantly become nouns and nouns incessantly become verbs and verbs and nouns incessantly become adjectives.
Function shift is built into the language, in fact. We have the linguistic equivalent of a keyboard shortcut for making most regular verbs into nouns by adding ‘-ing’ for the gerund form: ‘There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.’; ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’ Nouns can become adjectives with the addition of ‘-y’: ‘There’s a farty smell in here. Is that you or is it the dog?’ Adjectives can become adverbs with the suffix -ly: ‘Frankly, Mister Shankly, since you ask/ You are a flatulent pain in the arse.’
Nevertheless, people often feel very strongly on the subject so it’s worth pausing before you make a particularly bold and innovative sally in this department. Is it apt to the register you’re trying to strike? How established a usage is it? Does it draw attention to itself; and, if so, is that an effect you’re trying to achieve?
Sometimes, even an established usage can strike certain readers as awkward. Not long ago I was editing a review, by the poet A E Stallings, of a new translation of the Iliad. Stallings noted that the translator was ‘the first woman to have Englished the poem’. I liked the usage – feeling it had a slightly quaint old-fashioned vibe. A couple of my colleagues red-pencilled it furiously, thinking it an ‘ugly Americanism’. Stallings pointed me to the 1628 volume Virgil’s Georgicks Englished.
Curious, I tried my first Twitter poll.
‘English’ (vb, transitive): To translate into English.
Was this, I asked:
a) An abomination of a usage
b) Quaint and elegant?
Long history or not, most people – or at least most of my Twitter followers – were against it: 82 per cent voted a) and only 18 per cent voted b). But along the way a Medievalist friend directed me to a generous handful of well-attested usages from the 15th and early 16th centuries, while a scholar of the Renaissance noted that Milton ‘English’t’ Martin Bucer in 1644 and called it ‘One of [the] commonest verbs to describe translation to/between vernacular(s) in m’period.’ Another mentioned ‘Wycliffe, Caxton, Shakespeare, Browning, Wells, Graves, Vidal, Rushdie’. And the novelist Philip Hensher went off on a tangent wondering whether ‘French’ (vb, trs) only means to snog someone. (Answer: historically it could mean to translate into French; nowadays the snogging is primary.) It was an interesting rabbit-hole to go down. We digested all that scholarship, basked in the richness of the language – and amended the review to read ‘translated the poem into English’.
Business people, as in my example above, seem to be addicted to function shift. I assume they feel it makes them seem dynamic and – in Sarah Palin’s function-shifting phrase – ‘hopey-changey’. Purely as a stylistic preference, business-jargon function shift makes me hatey-vomity.
There’s an elderly superstition against both these usages. It says that you can’t write a sentence such as
Frank had a lot to be annoyed about.
Or
And then we came to the end.
Like the idea that splitting infinitives is wrong, these have become almost joke examples of rules not to take seriously. Hence the hoary witticism, usually attributed to Churchill, that ending a sentence with a preposition ‘is something up with which I will not put’. Lots of phrasal verbs, passives, infinitive constructions and other forms positively demand a stranded preposition.
There are a couple of points worth thinking about when it comes to the question of beginning a sentence with a conjunction. One is the imperfect overlap between the spoken and the written language. In speech, the neat division of one sentence from the next with a full stop isn’t so clear. Sentences are often run together with ‘and’ and ‘but’ or ‘so’; and neither speaker nor listener will be making a fine distinction between a compound sentence linked with a coordinating conjunction, and two separate sentences.
That means, to some extent, the usage becomes a marker of informality. So when you’re aiming to write formally – i.e. taking your written language some distance from casual speech – it might make your prose sound too talky if you start a large number of sentences with conjunctions. And, like any tic, it can start to irritate. But there is no good reason to avoid it on principle.
It’s funny that militant grammarians don’t bother to have a prohibition against ending a sentence with a conjunction, i.e. ‘We were heading to the seaside and.’ The ‘rules’ wouldn’t be any fun if they were directed against things that are clearly wrong because nobody actually does them.
In its pronominal use, ‘that’ is pretty straightforward. ‘That’s the badger!’ ‘Is that really what you intended to achieve?’ ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question.’ (Also, more idiomatically, ‘It’s brilliant, that.’) Likewise, it presents no great trouble in its role as a demonstrative adjective – a specially emphatic and finger-pointing alternative to ‘the’: ‘That man stole my budgie.’ ‘I got that scar fighting the Nazis.’ Philip Larkin’s short poem ‘Home is so Sad’ ends with the desolating two-word sentence: ‘That vase.’*
As a conjunction, too, it presents no special problem. It introduces indirect statements: ‘He told me that his wife had once played keyboards in ELO. I’m not sure that he was telling the truth.’ And it’s often optional – ‘He told me his wife had once played keyboards in ELO. I’m not sure he was telling the truth.’
Sometimes, though, it helps minimise ambiguity. The riddling phrase ‘dogs dogs dog dog dogs’ works partly because of an elided ‘that’: to unpack it you could say ‘dogs [that] dogs dog [, in turn] dog [other] dogs’, i.e. dogs pestered by some dogs go on to pester others. Dog hands on incaninity to dog …
Where it gets frisky is when ‘that’ is used to introduce a relative clause. There are all sorts of bear-traps here, primarily because ‘that’ all of a sudden finds itself in competition with ‘which’ and ‘who’.
The first question is whether the subject being modified is animate (i.e. human, unless you’re particularly tender towards animals). It’s as close to an iron rule as you get that you never use ‘who’ with an inanimate antecedent: ‘The brush that she used to sweep the floor’, not ‘the brush who she used to sweep the floor’.† In most cases, the opposite also applies. You use ‘who’ rather than ‘that’ or ‘which’ with a human antecedent: ‘The man who answered the door.’
The rule’s not absolute, there, however. There are shades of meaning as to whether you’re representing the human in question as an individual or a type, and, indeed, whether you’re talking about an aggregate. ‘The sort of child that thinks peanut butter is a form of hair product’ seems to me perfectly acceptable. ‘The crowd that gathered at the Trump rally’ likewise passes muster.
Once you’re in a that/which situation – i.e. the subject’s inanimate – you run up against another sticking point. A large body of received opinion has it that, though many of us use ‘that’ and ‘which’ interchangeably in relative clauses, we shouldn’t.
This school of thought says ‘that’ should be used for restrictive relative clauses,* and ‘which’ for the non-restrictive kind.
So:
The hand that signed the paper felled a city.
But:
The hand, which signed the paper, felled a city.
In the first instance the clause is restrictive or defining: signing the paper is the defining characteristic of the hand in question. In the second (note, too, the commas), the fact of its signing is presented as a bonus piece of information: the main thing we know about the hand is that it felled a city.
This is, again, a guideline rather than an absolute rule, though. In an odd asymmetry you can get away with using ‘which’ instead of ‘that’ in a restrictive clause but you can’t get away with using ‘that’ instead of ‘which’ in a non-restrictive clause.
The hand which signed the paper felled a city.
The hand, that signed the paper, felled a city.
The first of these two is fine. The second sounds wretch-edly odd. Also, ‘which’ can take a pronoun but ‘that’ can’t. ‘The principle for which I would gladly lay down my life’ is English; ‘the principle for that I would gladly lay down my life’ is not.
An old colleague of mine said that his understanding of the rule was that you should always use ‘which’, unless you can’t – in which case try using ‘that’. Probably about as coherent a statement of principle as we’re likely to get. And it points to something that I don’t get tired of repeating: having a formal knowledge of the ‘rules’ is very useful, but developing an ear for what sounds right, which means giving yourself access to the grammatical knowledge that you have internalised through years of speaking and reading, is even better. You know more than you know you know – and paying attention, trying out alternatives, testing constructions on the ear, is at least as likely to steer you through areas of contested usage as clinging to one authority or another.
‘Whom’, a rare survival of our inflectional system, is the accusative case of the relative pronoun ‘who’; that is, you use it when ‘who’ is the direct or indirect object of a verb.
That’s the pedant whom I dislike, and at whom I flipped the bird.
It’s a distinction that is going the way of the rest of the inflectional system – in many cases, ‘who’ does service perfectly well – but it has not gone the whole way yet. There’s a continuum. In the sentence above, for instance, ‘the pedant who I dislike’ sounds more natural than ‘at who I flipped the bird’.
To be absolutely sure you’re getting it right, you can try recasting the sentence with ‘he/him’ or ‘she/her’ (that pedant: I dislike him … I flipped the bird at him). But though that’s a good way of establishing whether the word is in the accusative case, it doesn’t solve the stylistic choice between ‘who’ and ‘whom’. Since they are in variation, ‘whom’ has become a marker of formality and, sometimes, of a certain stiffness.
‘The bloke whom I met in the pub’ sounds wrong because the precision of ‘whom’ jars against the slanginess of ‘bloke’. It’s worth getting it ‘wrong’ sometimes for stylistic reasons, in other words, and your ear will be the best guide.
Just don’t get it actually wrong. You occasionally hear people so frightened of using ‘who’ wrongly, or so convinced that ‘whom’ is simply a posher version, that they use ‘whom’ in the nominative as a hypercorrection. ‘The man whom laid our patio’ is, if you ask me, even worse than ‘the pedant at who I flipped the bird’. The ‘he/him’ test, applied properly, would smartly dispatch that temptation.
Lenin’s famous phrase ‘Who whom?’*, incidentally, absolutely relies in that form on the inflection. If Lenin had said ‘Who who?’ he would have sounded like an owl.
The question of whether a personal pronoun should be in the subject case or the object case is one that causes considerable vexation. We’re good at getting it right when there’s only one involved: nobody except for Tarzan says things like ‘Me love Jane.’* But the vapours rise when we find them yoked together in a more complicated way.
‘Between you and I’ is widely considered wrong because ‘between’ is a preposition and pronouns tend to take the accusative or object case with prepositions – as in ‘behind us’ or ‘after him’.
Those who have been brought up to understand that ‘My wife and me love Game of Thrones’ is an unpardonable vulgarism will always say, rightly, ‘My wife and I love Game of Thrones.’ The problem is that the first version is widespread in idiomatic use; and if you reverse the order it becomes practically compulsory. ‘Me and my wife love Game of Thrones’ will sound to most ears more like an English sentence than ‘I and my wife love Game of Thrones’. There seems to be a rule – though it’s not one of logic – that if you’re going to use a noun-phrase like ‘my wife and I’ in the subject case, you have to put the speaker last in sequence.
‘Between you and I’ is most likely an extension of this muddle: you think you know it’s not ‘proper English’ to say ‘my wife and me’, because those are the subject of the sentence; and by (mistaken) analogy you assume that the phrase ‘between you and I’ has the same grammar.
An awkward hypercorrection is also sometimes applied to pronouns with comparatives and linking verbs. Do you say ‘taller than me’ or ‘taller than I’ (or, indeed, ‘taller than myself’)? ‘It’s me’ or ‘It is I’? The first, in each case, sounds more natural, though some sticklers, in thrall either to sketchy Latin analogies or eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians, will insist on the second. Neither is wrong. And, as so often, the showily ‘correct’ version will affect your register. In the sitcom Allo Allo, there was one character who always introduced himself: ‘It is I, Leclerc!’ His usage was intended to sound ridiculous.
A cousin of this anxiety is the misuse of reflexive pronouns. You’ll sometimes hear this pompous/anxious usage: ‘My wife and myself love Game of Thrones.’ Sometimes you’ll even find it in isolation: ‘Please don’t hesitate to contact myself …’ In both cases the reflexive pronoun seems to have been mistaken for a more formal version of the accusative ‘me’. It isn’t. There are arguments that it’s an established usage, but I’d counsel establishing it no further by steering clear. It still grates on many ears.
‘Trailer for sale or rent: rooms to let, fifty cents./ No phone, no pool, no pets. I ain’t got no cigarettes.’ Here’s one of the battlegrounds on which the logical brigade fight their defence of correct English. If you ain’t got no cigarettes you must have some cigarettes, right?
Double negatives may be illogical, but they are also idiomatic. And in an English governed purely by the laws of logic, ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ would be antonyms rather than synonyms. Double negatives are frequently used, as above, for emphasis. They can also introduce a subtlety of meaning. To say somebody is ‘not unattractive’ is to say something slightly more complimentary than that they are unattractive, but slightly more qualified than that they are attractive. The rhetorical name for this is litotes.
To the extent that double and, especially, triple negatives can cause the reader to stumble, and because they annoy pedants, be cautious with them. ‘Ain’t got no’ isn’t a standard written construction. And the ‘not unattractive’ formula needs to be used precisely, rather than because it lends an impression of judiciousness to a phrase. The former Prime Minister John Major was much mocked for his use of the phrase ‘not inconsiderable’:* a litotes that relies on negating a word nobody uses anyway.
These two phrases are very often used interchangeably. There does exist a traditional distinction, though, and it’s worth knowing. ‘Due to’ is used adjectivally – i.e. it modifies a noun or pronoun. ‘Because of’ modifies a verb.
The lateness of the train was due to the leaves on the line.
The train was delayed because of the leaves on the line.
In the first case ‘due to’ refers to a noun: ‘the lateness’. In the second, ‘because of’ refers to a verb: ‘was delayed’.
That distinction seems to be breaking down due to – sorry, because of – the pressure of usage. But understanding it will at least help you get a sense, if a sentence you’ve formed with either phrase sounds odd, of why that might be and of how to fix it.
Some users get very ventilated indeed when they read ‘different to’ rather than ‘different from’. They argue (correctly) that the verb to differ always takes the preposition from; they go on to argue (wrongly) that by analogy so must its cognate different. Though ‘different from’ remains more common, and is usually the safe bet, ‘different to’ is a long-established usage. The verb to accord always takes with, for example, but we say ‘according to’.
‘Different than’ is well established in American English, but not a standard usage in the UK.
There’s a school of thought that ‘none’ is a contraction of ‘not one’ and therefore can’t take a plural verb. So: ‘None of us is innocent’, not ‘none of us are innocent’. A great pile of usage data shows that people have used ‘none’ with plural verbs for centuries. So it’s not an error – but it’s something that will set sticklers bristling. And, actually, the distinction allows you to introduce a subtlety of meaning. ‘None of us is innocent’, in a theological context, might make the point that no individual is without sin before God; ‘none of us are innocent’, in the context of a mass trial for war crimes, tips the scales towards an implication of collective guilt (in which the individual guilt is subsumed). See what sounds most natural; and, with sticklers in mind, prefer the singular version if both sound fine.
English lacks an impersonal pronoun such as ‘on’ in French. So if you’re speaking about an indefinite human subject you can use ‘one’ – though it will sound rather affectedly aristocratic. ‘One can’t get proper caviar at M&S these days’, i.e. nobody can get proper caviar there, is perfectly grammatical, though most people would say (and write): ‘You can’t get proper caviar at M&S these days.’ It’s wrong, however, to say: ‘One popped to M&S this afternoon and one wasn’t able to find any caviar.’ In this instance you’re talking about a specific rather than a notional caviar-seeker, so you should say ‘I’ or, if you’re the Queen, ‘we’.
One of the great engines of linguistic change is error. If enough people get something wrong often enough, it becomes right. In language as in war, the victors write the history. But in language, as in war, the first people to go over the top get the worst of it from the enemy machine guns.
This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the meanings and spelling of words. Some of them I’m calling ‘red rag’ words after the (apocryphal) effect on an angry bull. It might on the face of it seem odd that so many of the words that really exercise the language police – ‘decimate’, as above, being a good example – are arcane ones.* But to qualify for red-rag status, it seems reasonable to suppose, a word must be used frequently enough to attract the attention of the professionally outraged, yet infrequently enough that its meaning hasn’t yet shifted wholesale.
A lot of the time a Latin or Greek root helps with red-rag status. To return to the social psychology of pedantry, there’s a certain pride in knowing the root meaning of a word – and it’s therefore attractive to think of that knowledge as being of some importance. But it isn’t. Etymology may help tell you part of the story of how a word came to take the form it has today: but it does not tell you what it means now. For a while, for instance, sticklers objected to the word ‘television’ on the grounds that it was a barbaric mishmash of Latin and Greek roots.
The class anxiety underpinning this sort of prescriptivism is made pretty clear in one of Fowler’s* most delightfully absurd outbursts:
Word-making, like other manufactures, should be done by those who know how to do it; others should neither attempt it for themselves, nor assist the deplorable activities of amateurs by giving currency to fresh coinages before there has been time to test them.
If we were to compile an exhaustive list of usages that incense sticklers we could be here some time. And it’s often the case that the ‘wrong’ usage has a longer pedigree than the ‘right’ one – that some supposedly barbaric modern mistake is neither modern nor a mistake.† A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And as ever, the very fact that the sticklers are objecting is a sure indicator that the word’s ‘wrong’ meaning is clear from the context in which it’s used.
However, a few of the most common are as follows. As ever, we can argue the toss about whether such and such a usage is acceptable – most modern dictionaries will acknowledge both variants. In standard written English, though, the following are booby-traps. Here are the pedant-friendly versions as an aid to the cautious.
• Affect/Effect: These are different words. When used as a noun, affect means ‘emotion’ and ‘effect’ means the consequence or result of something. As verbs, to affect something is to have an impact on it (or, in the less common sense of ‘he affected a purple fur coat’, to adopt a mannerism or image pretentiously); to effect something is to cause it to happen. ‘The Brexit vote affects all of us: it will effect the UK’s departure from the European Union.’
• Ageing/Aging: By analogy with ‘rage/raging’ or ‘stage/staging’ you might think that ‘aging’ would be the standard or only way of forming the participle. Actually both are standard usage, with ‘ageing’ preferred (though not mandatory) in British English.
• Alright: A much deplored variant spelling of ‘all right’. I would always spell it as two words, not least because it drives sticklers nuts when they see it spelt as one. But linguistically speaking there’s no reason to accept ‘always’ and ‘altogether’ and reject ‘alright’ as an abomination.
• Annex/Annexe: The former is a verb; the latter a noun. You annex the Sudetenland; then you play ping-pong in the annexe of your mountain retreat.
• Anticipate/Expect: You can expect fusspots to leap on you if you use ‘anticipate’ as a synonym for ‘expect’. Anticipate them by knowing the rule. Though they are widely used as alternatives, to expect something is to be confident it’s going to happen, whereas to anticipate is to act in advance of your expectation. A goalkeeper might anticipate a shot at goal by leaping to his right with his arms outstretched.
• Appraise/Apprise: To appraise is to put a value on something; to apprise [someone of] is to tell someone something. ‘The pawnbroker appraised my mother’s engagement ring and apprised me of how much I could expect to hock it for.’
• Beg the question: This technically describes a sort of circular logic where you assume your conclusion in the premises you set out from. A mocking example would be the epigram: ‘Treason never prospers. What’s the reason? That if it prospers, none dare call it treason.’ Now it’s commonly more loosely used to mean ‘prompt the question’, as in ‘The manager’s abrupt departure begs the question of whether Sunderland’s hopes of promotion are at an end.’
• Classic/Classical: The distinction in usage is not absolute. But, in general, classic applies to something time-honoured and impressive, such as a ‘classic album’; ‘classical’ applies to periods or styles of art and civilisation (specifically Ancient Greece and Rome). A 1924 Bentley is a classic vehicle; a gladiator’s chariot is a classical vehicle. Or, when it comes to schoolgirl practical jokes, compare: ‘We put a newt in Miss Trunchbull’s jug of water! It was classic!’ with ‘We crucified Miss Trunchbull on the Via Appia! It was classical!’
• Comprised/Composed: Both words, in the sense in which they are usually confused, describe the relation of sum and parts. The first supplies the word ‘of’ implicitly – ‘the search party comprised Shaggy, Scooby and Velma’ – and the second does not: ‘the search party was composed of Shaggy, Scooby and Velma’. ‘Comprised of’ is the common muddle, and is safest avoided. ‘Consisted of’ and ‘made up’ might make your life easier.
• Deny/Refute/Rebut: If you refute or rebut a charge, you disprove it. If you deny a charge, you simply claim it isn’t true. A distinction is sometimes made between rebut and refute – the latter meaning a categorical disproval and the former emphasising the mounting of an argument – but in common usage they are interchangeable. The OED defines rebut with the words ‘disprove’ and ‘refute’.
• Dilemma: Pedants will say that it describes a choice between two things, and not more, on the basis of its etymology (the Greek di-lemma meaning two propositions).
• Discreet/Discrete: The former refers to tactful secrecy; the latter to separate things. ‘My wife and my mistress occupy discrete parts of my life. Fortunately my butler is discreet about it.’
• Disinterested: Often used to mean ‘not interested in’ – as in, ‘he was completely disinterested in what I had to say’. Disinterested means ‘not having skin in the game’ – i.e. ‘a disinterested observer would see the justice of Fred’s complaint’. ‘Uninterested’ is what you say when you want to convey boredom.
• Enormity: This is an old-fashioned word meaning a moral abomination or wickedness – as in Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fayre: ‘The very womb and bed of enormity.’ It is commonly now used to mean ‘enormousness’, and the usage doesn’t seem to have led to any great loss of life.
• Flaunt/Flout: If you flaunt something, you’re showing it off. If you flout something, you’re showing contempt for it. ‘Kim Kardashian flaunts her curves in a daring peekaboo bikini’; ‘The celebrity website’s sidebar of shame flouts the decencies of a civilised society.’
• Fulsome: This adjective, usually applied to apologies or praise, means ‘horribly over the top’ rather than ‘generous and effusive’. It’s used so much in the second sense, now, that the sticklers look to be losing that battle. Oliver Kamm points out that the second sense of it pre-dates the first, and that the OED contains an instance from 1325 meaning ‘plentiful’ or ‘abundant’.
• Hanged/Hung: A criminal is hanged (as in, ‘by the neck until dead’); pictures and porn stars are hung.
• Headbutt: This is, if you’re going to be fussy, a tautology. You can’t butt someone with any part of your body other than your head.* This is not a common stickler obsession, but it has a story attached. I was in an editorial meeting at the newspaper where I used to work when an ashen member of the newsdesk interrupted us. He told the editor that our drunken Scottish political reporter had headbutted an MSP in the Holyrood bar. Our then editor frowned. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think you mean “butted”.’ No more, as far as I know, was said on the subject.
• Hopefully: This is another usage that causes sticklers to weep sweet, sweet tears of anger. They will say that the word ‘hopefully’ is an adverb meaning ‘in a manner filled with hope’ – as in, ‘it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive’. Therefore, they argue, to write, ‘Hopefully, I will finish my book before my deadline’ is at best a dangling modifier and at worst a crime against the language. Where’s the verb it modifies? The answer is that it’s not modifying a verb: it’s modifying a sentence. And as a sentence adverb – a role it’s had since the first half of the twentieth century – it conveys the meaning that something is to be hoped for. It has, in other words, acquired a new meaning.* It seems to irritate people particularly because many sentence adverbs can be rewritten in their verbal forms – ‘It is sad that’ for ‘sadly’; ‘it is amusing that’ for ‘amusingly’ and so on – and ‘it is hopeful that’ doesn’t quite work the same way. Nor do ‘thankfully’, ‘frankly’, ‘regretfully’ and any number of others. Sadly, pedants will keep going on about this. Mostly, they can be ignored.
• Imply/Infer: If you imply something you are attempting to put a meaning across in a slightly oblique way. If you infer something, you are drawing a conclusion about the meaning.
• Invariably: I invariably catch myself using this to mean ‘most of the time’ or ‘very frequently’. Technically it means ‘without variation’, i.e. unfailingly and all the time.
• Irregardless: Not a word, it’s widely thought. In fact this awkward or jocular collision of ‘regardless’ and ‘irrespective’ does appear in the OED – but more than half of the citations there feature the word in the context of doubting whether it’s a proper word at all: ‘She tells the pastor that he should please quit using the word “irregardless” in his sermons as there is no such word.’ Steer clear.
• Just desserts: Since ‘deserts’ in its non-sandy sense is only ever used in the set phrase ‘just deserts’, it frequently gets muddled with its pudding-meaning homophone. It means ‘what you deserved’, and shares the verb’s single s. ‘Just Desserts’ would be a punning name for a restaurant. If you ate there all the time and got fat, that would be your just deserts.
• License/Licence: The first is a verb; the second is a noun. The DVLA (or the DMV) licenses you to drive a car by giving you a licence.
• Lie/Lay: Lie is an intransitive verb with the past tense lay. Lay is a transitive verb with the past tense laid. You lie on a bench. You lay wreaths. You lay on a bench yesterday. You laid wreaths yesterday. Dialect usage sometimes substitutes lay (usually in participle form) for lie: ‘I was laying on the sofa when I remembered I had an appointment.’ That’s not standard written English.
• Literally: This word traditionally means ‘not figuratively’. ‘That footballer literally has two left feet’ would denote not clumsiness on the ball, but an unprecedented birth defect or mutilation. Its use as an all-purpose intensifier – ‘I wouldn’t kiss you, Piers, if you were literally the last man on earth’ – has become so common that it has now come to mean ‘figuratively’. It’s a word that literally now means both one thing, and the opposite of that thing. Even the OED now includes among its uses (though as ‘colloq’) the indication ‘that some […] metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense’. Fortunately, the context almost unfailingly tells you which sense it’s being used in. If someone says ‘I literally died’, they didn’t.
• Mischievious: This is a misspelling (or if you insist, variant) of the word ‘mischievous’. An online poll for the Oxford Dictionaries blog in 2014 found that 53 per cent of respondents claimed to use the misspelling rather than the correct version. I suspect they were being, er, waggish.
• Practise/Practice: The first is a verb; the second is a noun. You practise the piano at piano practice.
• Snuck: An unexceptionable variant past participle for the verb to sneak; chiefly (the OED says) an American usage. Gets some people riled. I’ve had grown men take time out of their lives to write me angry letters when I’ve written ‘snuck up on’.
• Such as/Like: These are very often used interchangeably. ‘Elite athletes like Giant Haystacks and Jocky Wilson were mainstays of Saturday afternoon television when I was a child.’ Sticklers will have it that you should say ‘such as’ rather than ‘like’ here, since you’re not emphasising a resemblance between the athletes on television and the people in question, but offering named examples of the people who were on television. ‘Such as’, in those instances, is preferable. Compare: ‘Very fat men like Giant Haystacks and Jocky Wilson are a liability on the trampoline.’ Often, these senses will overlap, though. It’s worth trying both out when you’re not sure. What sounds right? If it’s possible to replace ‘like’ with ‘for example’, you are probably best off going with ‘such as’.
• Supersede: It means to replace something. ‘Super-cede’ is a common misspelling. ‘The spelling “supersede” has superseded the variant “supercede”.’
There are other, subtler missteps to watch out for when it comes to vocabulary. These have to do with style and tone. If your tone is arch, self-regarding, pompous, sneering, cutesy or merely jocular you might score the odd snigger from the peanut-gallery, but you do nothing to reach the more sceptical reader.
It’s worth being particularly careful of boastful self-descriptions; or, worse, boastful self-descriptions that appear to be neutral or even self-deprecating. It’s the equivalent of giving yourself a nickname like ‘Dutch’ or ‘Ace’ and hoping it sticks. You are asking to be bullied. Some are obvious. If you describe yourself as a ‘maverick’, a ‘cynic’, a ‘reprobate’, a ‘provocateur’, a ‘wag’, or similar, you are on a sure course for others to apply less flattering descriptions to you.
But others are subtler: ‘sceptic’, ‘realist’, ‘radical’ or ‘progressive’ are all essentially boasts masquerading as statements of fact. ‘Sceptic’ says: ‘I’m the sort of person who thinks critically about what I read or hear.’ Since everyone presumably aspires to do just that, you’re trying to say you’re cleverer than those around you. ‘Radical’ means nothing at all, in this context, except that the speaker thinks that there’s a particular disruptive bravery to his or her political persona – which is a judgment for others to make. ‘Progressive’ is a compliment that the political left pays to itself: a near-antonym of ‘conservative’ that smuggles in a vague sense that the right direction of travel is self-evidently forward, and that there’s only one sort of forward that works.
At the other end of the political spectrum you should be likewise cautious about appeals to ‘common sense’ or ‘right-thinking’, which arrogantly assume that a position is so obvious it needs no argument. If it did need no argument you probably wouldn’t need to assert it in the first place. These and phrases like them are generally code for an unexamined assumption. If something stands to reason, you should make clear why.
Then there’s the linguistic equivalent of the Christmas jumper or the revolving bow tie. Viz comic is an admittedly unlikely but well-calibrated index of what a friend and I have come to call ‘Wanker Words’. There is instruction to be found in their strip ‘The Real Ale Twats’ – which follows the adventures of a crew of skipping, bearded wallies in a series of country pubs. But they never say ‘pub’: instead they say ‘tavern’ or ‘hostelry’. And they don’t have a drink: they ‘tipple’ or ‘sup’ or, God help us, ‘quaff’.
What that identifies well is a grotesque species of jocularity. Jocularity is not the same thing as humour: it’s the substitute for humour deployed by those incapable of the real thing. It’s being asked what you do for a living and saying: ‘I’m a schoolteacher … for my sins!’ It’s arriving to meet your friends and announcing: ‘Gentlemen!’ or ‘Ladies!’ It’s raising a glass of wine and announcing: ‘Ah, the true, the blushful Hippocrene …’
The showy or joking use of foreign words or phrases is often a hallmark of this style of language. If you’re talking about ‘naivety’, does it add anything to translate it into French? Weltanschauung doesn’t do much that ‘worldview’ doesn’t. And so on. Of course there’s huge latitude for personal preference – some people will think alfresco or esprit de l’escalier pretentious, but the first is common enough (at least to my ear) to pass muster, and the second, like Schadenfreude, has no similarly economical English equivalent. But the more showily and often you drop a loan-word or loan-phrase into a piece of writing, the more likely it is that it will grate on the reader.
A handful of examples should give you the general idea: all are usages that tell the reader less about what he or she wants to know and more about what the writer thinks of him or herself. They are, effectively, advertisements for a persona: semantic junk-mail.
Academe, especially preceded by ‘groves of’. ‘Academia’ or ‘the academy’ don’t have that awful archness. While we’re at it, dreaming spires in relation to Oxford can do one. See also Big Smoke, Big Apple and Frisco (unless you’re Otis Redding or Sylvia Plath).
The Bard as an epithet for Shakespeare. Just about all right for a headline writer; terrible in speech or continuous prose. Likewise, Wilde is not the divine Oscar unless you’re hoping to look horribly fey.
Bibulous or convivial. ‘I should like to entertain you to a bibulous lunch.’ ‘The gathering promises to be convivial.’ ‘Drunken’ will do just as nicely in both cases.
Call out as a synonym for ‘challenge’ or ‘oppose’. This popular expression marks its own homework – it implies that what you object to is ipso facto wrong, and that in speaking against it you’re not expressing a different view so much as bravely speaking truth to power. The self-flattering High Noon implications are particularly embarrassing.
Deconstruct as a clever-sounding synonym for ‘analyse’. It has a meaning in philosophy. That meaning is not ‘write a short commentary on something I saw on the internet’.
Embonpoint or décolletage are prissy and usually slightly jocular euphemisms for the visible parts of a woman’s breasts. Breasts, tits, boobs, cleavage, puppies or what have you all serve better in their respective contexts. ‘Bosoms’ in the plural is technically a fault, and certainly a vulgarism – but it has passed (see also ‘bazooms’ and, presumably by analogy, ‘bazookas’) into fairly common use. Derriere is a criminally arch way of referring to someone’s backside. The MailOnline website, at the time of writing, contained 5,840 instances of the word ‘derriere’, of which more than 2,000 collocated with the word ‘pert’.
La as a jocular prefix to a woman’s name. For a long time the columnist Julie Burchill was referred to by a certain sort of male writer as ‘La Burchill’. Just horrible.
Luncheon is a perfectly good English word. But ‘lunch’ is a better one.
Tome is a mimsy and arch usage. Try ‘book’. And if you automatically reach for ‘slim volume’ as the standard epithet for a book of poetry, you’re reaching for a cliché.
Wireless is what your smartphone uses to download your porn. Only the over-70s can use the term to describe a radio without sounding like pillocks.
Whenever I’m confronted by vocabulary of this type I’m reminded of an old cartoon. It shows a man in a fancy restaurant saying: ‘Waiter: what’s the plat du jour?’ Waiter: ‘It’s “dish of the day” in French, sir.’
* The writer Jonathan Franzen is particularly exercised by a special case of the comma splice. In his short essay ‘Comma-then’, collected in Farther Away: Essays (2012), he fulminates against people who ‘use the word then as a conjunction without a subject following it’; as in (his example) ‘She lit a Camel Light, then dragged deeply.’ He thinks the ‘comma-then’, here, should be replaced with the word ‘and’ to make a compound sentence. ‘Comma-then’, he says, is an ‘irritating, lazy mannerism, unlike the brave semicolon or the venerable participial phrase’. I can’t see his objection at all. I read Franzen’s short essay, then sat back in my chair quite baffled.
* To put it in context, the last two lines run: ‘Look at the pictures and the cutlery./ The music in the piano stool. That vase.’ There’s a world of nuance in the shift from the run of neutral ‘the’s to ‘that’ – it seems to me to open out to an almost accusatory tone of exhausted familiarity.
† This can trip up foreign language speakers, who don’t always have the distinction in their native languages.
* An explanation of this is to be found in the section on commas in the earlier chapter on punctuation.
* From the Russian kto kovo: it has the force of asking ‘who [holds the whip hand over] whom?’, or as Aretha Franklin put it (uninflectedly), ‘Who’s zoomin’ who?’ It’s a forcefully compressed statement of the basic issue of political power.
* The Incredible Hulk sidesteps the issue cunningly by referring to himself in the third person. ‘Hulk smash puny grammar pedant!’ He’s still shaky on verb morphology and the correct use of determiners, though.
* I can’t find any evidence of him ever using it, but it was a staple of Private Eye’s spoof Secret Diary of John Major.
* The main reason we collectively forgot how to use the word decimate in its ‘proper’ sense – meaning to punish a Roman legion by killing one man in ten – is that we stopped doing that. Good.
* Here I’m referring to Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), author of the original Modern English Usage (1926). Where I talk about Fowler elsewhere in this book, I’m referring to the 1996 third edition of his book, which was substantially revised and updated by Robert Burchfield.
† An instance of the knots in which prescriptivists can tie themselves is offered by the Académie française, which has traditionally waged war on the barbaric English loan-words it sees as polluting the true French language. It prefers, for instance, ‘ordinateur’ to ‘computer’, as a word for the thing on your desk. Computer, mind you, originally comes – as its form makes pretty clear – from a French root (the OED’s etymology says: ‘Compare Middle French computeur person who makes calculations (1578)’). And, in fact, ‘computer’ was what the French called it first. ‘Ordinateur’ didn’t show up until 1956.
* Oddly, you can’t butt someone with your butt.
* The Economist’s style guide has an intriguing theory as to how. It blames the Germans. German immigrants to America, it suggests, ‘found the language of their new country had only one adverb to serve for both hoffnungsvoll, meaning full of hope, and hoffentlich, which can mean let’s hope so’. The Economist offers no evidence for this, but it’s an interesting idea. Do let’s be beastly to the Germans.