And another thing

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I know that you all have lives and jobs and dogs and children and husbands and wives. I know that you have houses to clean, thoughts to think, food to cook, gardens to garden, books to read, and miles and miles to go before you sleep, but do take five minutes to look at this.

I think it must be a spoof. It is a website set up to guard and preserve the great English language. (How could I resist that, when I am the scourge of the dangling modifier?) Here, however, is the title emblazoned on one page:

QES ENGLISH ACADAMY: Rogues' Gallery

I'm certain it must be a typographical error. They surely must know how to spell academy. I might have had a cheap laugh at that and walked away, but I clicked on Julian Fellowes, who is their number two rogue, below George W. Bush and above the European Union. Here the ironies were piled so deep I had to struggle my way through them. The furious article denouncing Fellowes for being a pretentious snob who cannot write English and does not know how to use the subjunctive is possibly the clunkiest piece of prose I have read this week. Or last week, for that matter. It's flat and ugly on the page, confusingly punctuated, and often mildly unclear.

It favours a shockingly clumsy use of dashes. It is far too free with inverted commas, often for no apparent reason. It uses gratuitous exclamation marks. It does not know that Gosford Park was a film, not a television play.

There is also a weird class warrior aspect to it. It accuses Fellowes of being posh, and a snob, but then uses the word 'fraightfully' to describe his speech. Anyone interested in language and the strange, mazy class system of the British knows that 'fraightfully' indicates the refined speech of the aspirant lower-middle-class, the Hyacinth Buckets of the world. It means that people who are not posh are trying to sound posh. Fellowes is upper middle class, and speaks with the clipped accent of the old landed gentry, overlaid with the slight camp of the theatrical community. None of this matters a whit in any sensible discussion, but if you are going to make an ad hominem attack, you should at least make your insults accurate.

Then there is a most peculiar problem with commas. I became quite fascinated with this site, and roamed all over it. On every page, I found at least two glaring mistakes in punctuation. I was going to list all the missing commas for you, but I know you have jobs and lives and dogs.

I keep feeling that I should get cross about all this. Who will guard the guardians? Then I think: oh, really, it's just silly.

 

Found via Johnson, the Economist's excellent new blog, which is funny and well-written and knows what to do with a comma.

PS. I'm sorry, but I have to give you one of the QES comma howlers:

'At a Board of Trustees meeting in early March, it was agreed with much pleasure, that RHEA WILLIAMS would be appointed as acting Chairman of the Society, with immediate effect.'

The only way that sentence works is if you put in a comma after agreed, or take the comma out after pleasure. If I were getting really sniffy, I might also point out that board of trustees is not a proper name and therefore does not require capital letters. And, since I appear unable to stop, is it slightly odd to refer to a woman as a chairman? I know that chair and chairperson are ugly and unwieldy, but what is wrong with using chairwoman? We quite happily say businesswoman. Imagine how curious it would be if you read: 'Miss A was a highly distinguished businessman'.

Oh, perhaps I am crosser about this than I thought.

Pedant's corner

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Yesterday, I was happily watching The Daily Politics.  I love and revere The Daily Politics. I think it is my favourite programme on British television. I get quite twitchy when Parliament is in recess and the show goes off the air. And as for Andrew Neil: I used to think him embarrassing and vulgar, all that running off to Tramp with glamorous Indian ladies, and now he has turned into a brilliant, forensic political interviewer. Which just goes to show. (Not sure quite what; something about books and covers perhaps.)

Anyway, there I was, plugged into the BBC iplayer, in hog heaven, when Tessa Jowell, who used to work in the Department of Education, said that young people were 'disinterested in politics'. At which point, my pedant alarm went off. She meant, of course, uninterested.
That's it, I thought; it's official. It's like the day the music died. If a former cabinet minister can go on national television, on Lord Reith's BBC (purpose: to educate, inform and entertain) and misuse the word disinterested, then it is quite deceased. It is an ex-word; it has gone to meet its maker, which quite soon will be spelt 'it's maker', because no one gives a damn about the apostrophe either.

I am not one of those dead hand of language people. I am not for things cast in stone. I am not much for exceptionalism either (I have to go and hide behind the sofa when people talk about America being the greatest nation on earth) but I will hang out a flag for the exceptionalism of English. I think it is an extraordinary, supple, various carnival of a language, and I think this is because, like a shark, it never stops moving. We have no stern Academy, like the French, which litigates on neologisms (just say non). English ruthlessly steals anything it can get its hands on and makes it its own. It pinches from a multitude of other tongues, from Japanese (tycoon, tsunami), to Malay (gong, cockatoo), to Hindi (bungalow, thug), to Norwegian (ombudsman, quisling). I love that it borrows and shifts; it makes the very use of words feel playful and surprising. I love that to google is now a verb.

Every schoolgirl knows that Shakespeare made up thousands of words for fun, although this might be a bit of an urban myth. Whether or not he actually invented gnarled and bedazzled and lacklustre and eyeball does not really matter. What is certain is that he picked up the language by the scruff of the neck and threw it about the room. Take this, from Love's Labour's Lost:
'Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany,    some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick.'

Zany, which is one of the words people attribute to Shakespeare, is the only one of that list that survives to this day, but don't you wish that mumblenews and carrytale had caught on?

Excessive reverence is death to language, and a too-strict reliance on grammatical rules can act as a straitjacket. Occasionally, I throw my Strunk and White out of the window and go crazy. I start sentences with prepositions (don't faint at the back); I leave out commas for the sake of momentum; on my nuttier days I sometimes split an infinitive. I'm with James Thurber, who once wrote: 'When I split an infinitive, it is going to damn well stay split'.

My deity is not correctness, but clarity. It is for the sake of clarity that I shall hunt down dangling modifiers until I have no more breath in me. I think there is an intrinsic ugliness in them, but the real sin is that they make you go back and read a sentence again, to check the meaning.  It is why I believe the usage of the apostrophe really does matter. It is why I care about disinterested. Now Ms Jowell has done her worst, every time someone uses the word, we shall have to stop and ask ourselves: are they bored, or do they not have a dog in the hunt? We shall have to resort to unbiased or neutral instead, which do not carry the same nice distinction. That is why I am mourning the loss.

According to the New York Times, people were worrying about this as long ago as 1954. In the eighties, Anthony Burgess blamed the hapless USA, calling the use of disinterested to mean uninterested 'the worst of all American solecisms'. See what excellent company I keep? But the fate of pedants is to get hoist with their own petard. Here is the awful irony: when I go to the dictionary I discover that the original meaning was 'not interested'. All my carefully juggled balls fall crashing to the floor. No less an authority than the American Heritage dictionary tells me that the word started in the sixteenth century with its meaning of not interested, and only shifted its definition in the eighteenth. It turns out that disinterested is merely going back to its roots.

Now I have to find something else to get cross about.

In the meantime, I leave you with a picture of lovely Will Shakespeare, the zaniest of the zanies:




PS Thank you all so much for your enchanting birthday wishes from yesterday. They made me quite teary.