Plain Words (22 page)

What is the antecedent of
which
? Is it
enquiries
,
requests
or
reasons
? Probably
enquiries
, but if so, it is a long way off. In this sentence
it matters little, but in other sentences similarly constructed it might be important for the antecedent to be unmistakable. The surest way of avoiding ambiguity, when you have started a sentence like this, is to put a full stop after
reasons
, and begin the next sentence
These enquiries
or
These requests
or
These reasons
, whichever is meant.

These are examples of the verb separated from the auxiliary:

The Executive Council should, in cases of approved institutions employing one doctor, get in touch with the committee.

The Council should accordingly, after considering whether they wish to suggest any modifications in the model scheme, consult with the committee …

It is a bad habit to put all sorts of things between the auxiliary and the verb in this way. It leads to unwieldy sentences and irritated readers.

Adverbs sometimes get awkwardly separated from the words they qualify. In his work of 1904,
An Advanced English Syntax
, C. T. Onions, the fourth editor of the
OED
, states that they ‘should be so placed in a sentence as to make it impossible to doubt which word or words they are intended to affect'. If they affect an adjective or past participle or another adverb, their place is immediately in front of it (
helpfully
placed,
perfectly
clear). If they affect another part of the verb or a whole phrase, they may be in front or behind. It is usually a matter of emphasis:
he came soon
emphasises his promptitude;
he soon came
emphasises his coming.

The commonest causes of adverbs going wrong are the fear, real or imaginary, of splitting an infinitive, and the waywardness of the adverbs
only
and
even
.
Only
is a capricious word. It is much given to deserting its post and taking its place next to the verb, regardless of what it qualifies. It is more natural to say ‘he only spoke for ten minutes' than ‘he spoke for only ten minutes'.
Pillorying misplaced
only
s has a great fascination for some people:
only-
snooping seems to have become as popular a sport with some purists as split-infinitive-snooping was a generation ago.
*
A book in this vein, devoted to the exposing of errors of diction in contemporary writers, contained several examples, such as:

He had only been in England for six weeks since the beginning of the war.

This only makes a war lawful: that it is a struggle for law against force.

We can only analyse the facts we all have before us.

These incur the author's censure. By the same reasoning, one would have to condemn Sir Winston Churchill for writing in
The Gathering Storm
:

Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions.

Fowler, in
Modern English Usage
, took a different view. Of a critic who protested against ‘He only died a week ago' instead of ‘He died only a week ago', Fowler wrote:

There speaks one of those friends from whom the English language may well pray to be saved, one of the modern precisians who have more zeal than discretion …

But it cannot be denied that the irresponsible behaviour of
only
does sometimes create real ambiguity. Take this sentence:

His disease can only be alleviated by a surgical operation.

We cannot tell what this means, and must rewrite it in one of two ways:

Only a surgical operation can alleviate his disease (it cannot be alleviated in any other way).

A surgical operation can only alleviate his disease (it cannot cure it).

Again:

In your second paragraph you point out that carpet-yarn only can be obtained from India, and this is quite correct.

The writer must have meant ‘can be obtained only from India', and ought to have written this, or, at the least, ‘can only be obtained from India'. The original sentence, though not actually ambiguous (for it can hardly be supposed that carpet-yarn is India's only product), is unnatural, and sets the reader puzzling for a moment.

So do not take the
only-
snoopers too seriously. But be on the alert. It will generally be safe to put
only
in what a plain person would feel to be its natural place. Sometimes that will be its logical position, sometimes not. When the qualification is more important than the positive statement, it is an aid to being understood to bring the
only
in as soon as possible; it prevents the reader from being put on a wrong scent. In the sentence ‘The temperature will rise above 35 degrees only in the south-west of England',
only
is carefully put in its right, logical place. But the listener would have grasped more quickly the picture of an almost universally cold England if the announcer had said, ‘the temperature will only rise above 35 degrees in the south-west of England'.

A purist might condemn:

I am to express regret that it has only been possible to issue a licence for part of the quantity for which application was made.

But the ordinary reader will think that this conveys the writer's meaning more readily and naturally than:

I am to express regret that it has been possible to issue a licence for only part of the quantity for which application was made.

Even
has a similar habit of getting in the wrong place. The importance of putting it in the right one is aptly illustrated in
An
ABC
of English Usage
by Treble and Vallins, 1936, where it is added to the sentence ‘I am not disturbed by your threats':

Even
I am not disturbed by your threats (let alone anybody else).

I am not
even
disturbed by your threats (let alone
hurt
,
annoyed
,
injured
,
alarmed
).

I am not disturbed
even
by your threats (
even
modifies the phrase, the emphasis being on the
threats
).

As the authors note: ‘It is also possible, though perhaps rather awkward, to put
even
immediately before
your
, and so give
your
the emphasis (
your
threats—let alone anybody else's)'.

Unnecessary repetition of a word—the right word for its sense put in the wrong place for its sound—is another form of poor arrangement that can be irritating to a reader. If you are able to avoid this in a natural way, you should. For instance, in the comment ‘the Minister has considered this application, and considers that there should be a market in Canada', the repetition of
consider
gives the sentence a clumsy air. The second one might just as well have been
thinks
. Similarly, it would have been easy to avoid the ugly repetition of
essential
in the sentence ‘it is essential that the Minister should be provided with outline programmes of essential works'. But where the same thing or act is repeatedly mentioned, it is better to repeat a word than to avoid it in a laboured or obvious way.

Irritating repetition of a sound is usually mere carelessness:

The controversy as to which agency should perform the actual contractual work …

Reverting to the subject of the letter the latter wrote …

In view of the very serious perturbation about the situation in the motor car industry …

Since a certain amount of uncertainty still appears to exist …

I feel sure that what really existed was an uncertain amount of certainty.

This is an elastic heading. It may for instance be said that neither
both
nor
like
is strictly a conjunction, but their caprices make it convenient to include them in the list below.

(1)
And
. There used to be an idea that it was inelegant to begin a sentence with
and
. The idea is now as good as dead. To use
and
in this position can be a useful way of indicating that what you are about to say will reinforce what you have just said.

(2)
And which
. There is a standard rule that it is wrong to write
and which
(and similar expressions such as
and who
,
and where
,
but which
,
or which
, etc.) except by way of introducing a second relative clause with the same antecedent as the one that has just preceded it. It is an arbitrary and pointless rule (unknown in French) that will probably be destroyed in the end by usage, but for the present its observance is expected from those who would write correctly. According to this rule, Nelson was wrong grammatically, as well as in other more important ways, when he wrote to Lady Nelson in 1793 after his first introduction to Lady Hamilton:

She is a young woman of amiable manners and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.

To justify the
and who
grammatically, a relative is needed in the first part of the sentence, for example:

She is a young woman whose manners are amiable and who does honour to the station to which she is raised.

Conversely, the writer of the following sentence has got into trouble by being shy of
and which
:

Things which we ourselves could not produce and yet are essential to our recovery.

Here
which
cannot double the parts of being the object of
produce
and the subject of
are
. To set the grammar right the relative has to be repeated:

Things which we ourselves could not produce and which are essential to our recovery.

The wisest course is to avoid the inevitable clumsiness of
and which
, even when used in a way that does not offend the purists. Thus these two sentences might be written:

She is a young woman of amiable manners who does honour to the station to which she has been raised.

Things essential to our recovery that we ourselves cannot produce.

(3)
As.
We say ‘as good
as
ever' and ‘better
than
ever'. But should we use
as
or
than
, or both, if we say ‘as good or better'? The natural thing to say is ‘as good or better than ever', ignoring the
as
that
as good
logically needs—and you commit no great crime if that is what you do. But if you want both to run no risk of offending the purists and to avoid the prosy ‘as good as or better than', you can write ‘as good as ever, or better'. Consider this sentence:

Pamphlets have circulated as widely, and been no less influential, than those published in this volume.

This can be changed into:

Pamphlets have circulated as widely as those published in this volume, and have been no less influential.

Note
. Gowers also wrote here: ‘
As
must not be used as a preposition, on the analogy of
but
(see ‘
But
' below). So you may say, “no one knows knows the full truth but me”, but you must not say “no one knows the truth as fully as me”. It must be “… as fully as I”. The first
as
is an adverb, the second, a conjunction'.

Anyone choosing to follow this advice who fears that the formula ‘as fully as I' now sounds stiff, can easily soften it by adding a verb, e.g. ‘as fully as I do'. ~

(4)
Both
. When using
both
…
and
, be careful that these words are in the right position and carry equal weight. Nothing that comes between the
both
and the
and
can be regarded as carried on after the
and
: if words are to be carried on after the
and
, they must precede the
both
; if they do not precede the
both
they must be repeated after the
and
. For instance:

He was both deaf to argument and entreaty.

Because ‘deaf to' comes after
both
it cannot be ‘understood' again after
and
. We must adjust the balance in one of the following ways:

He was deaf both to argument and entreaty.

He was deaf to both argument and entreaty.

He was both deaf to argument and unmoved by entreaty.

An extreme example of the unbalanced
both
is:

The proposed sale must be both sanctioned by the Minister and the price must be approved by the District Valuer.

Do not use
both
where it is not necessary (where the meaning of the sentence is no less plain if you leave it out):

Both of them are equally to blame. (They are equally to blame.)

Please ensure that both documents are fastened together. (Please ensure that the documents are fastened together.)

(5)
But
. Where
but
is used in the sense of
except
, it is sometimes treated as a preposition, sometimes as a conjunction. Mrs Hemans would not have been guilty of ‘bad grammar' in her poem ‘Casabianca' if she had written ‘whence all but him had fled', but in preferring
he
she conformed to formal practice. That is the worst of personal pronouns: by retaining the case-inflections that nouns have so sensibly shed, they pose these tiresome and trivial questions.
*
If the sentence could have been ‘whence all but the boy had fled' no one could have known whether
but
was being used as a conjunction or a preposition, and no one need have cared.