Real Grammar

David Milliband is a former British Foreign Secretary and, as it happens, the brother of the Leader of the Labour Party. Yesterday I heard him say on BBC radio ‘. . . invite Michael Howard and I . . .’ This is a construction which gets the harrumphers going. They claim that when the first person personal pronoun is in object position it has to be me, not I. That is true when the pronoun occurs on its own, but it does not follow that it must behave the same way when it is coordinated. As Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, the authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’ say, ‘The argument from analogy is illegitimate.’

Few, I suspect, would care to argue that David Milliband was not a speaker of Standard English. He was born into a middle class, if left-wing, family, and, as a graduate of the University of Oxford and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can, by any measure, be considered well educated. His use of this construction is clear evidence of Huddleston and Pullum’s claim that it ‘is used by many highly educated people with social prestige in the community; it should be regarded as a variant Standard English form.’

Real Grammar occasionally strays from the narrow path of grammar into other areas, and does so now in trying to sort out the spelling and pronunciation of nouns and adjectives that begin with ‘h’ and, more crucially, the form of the indefinite article that should be used with them.

There are some words of French origin in which the initial /h/ is not sounded. They include ‘heir’, ‘honour’ and ‘hour’. There is no difficulty with these. They are pronounced /ɛə(r)/, /ˈɒnə(r)/ and /aʊə(r)/, and so are preceded by ‘an’. Words beginning with a sounded /h/ can be divided into three groups, (1) those of one or two syllables, (2a) those of three or more syllables in which the first syllable is stressed and (2b) those of three or more syllables in which the second syllable is stressed. Stress is indicated in what follows by underling.

Words in the first group are normally preceded by ‘a’. They include ‘hotel’, ‘hostel’, ‘host’, ‘hearty’, ‘hero’,’hardy’ and many more. ‘Hotel’ is exceptional in two ways. The first is that pretentious speakers may not pronounce the initial /h/, perhaps thinking thereby to sound more French, and consequently more educated and sophisticated. The second, and more interesting, point is that the stress in ‘hotel’ falls on the second syllable. It is probably the only two-syllable word starting with 'h' in which that happens, but counter-examples would be welcome.

Words in group (2a) include ‘history’, ‘herbalist’, ‘heightening’ and ‘helicopter’.  These are always preceded by ‘a’. They contrast with words in group (2b), which include ‘historian’, ‘historical,  ‘hiatus’ and 'Hibernian'. It is here that uncertainty arises. There is a tendency among native speakers, including this one, (and I have noticed, that admirable commentator on current affairs, Andrew Marr) to use ‘an’ before words in this group.

We are of course free to pronounce words however we like, but how should we write the indefinite article when it occurs before words in group 2(b)? ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ is in no doubt. The initial ‘h’ (except in words those such as ‘heir’, ‘honour’ and ‘hour’ in which it is never pronounced)

‘may have been silent or varied in earlier times, leaving uncertainty as to whether an was required or not. But their pronunciation is no longer variable and provides no phonetic justification for an. Its use with them is a stylistic nicety, lending historical nuances to discourse in which tradition dies hard.’

I have the greatest respect for the Cambridge Guide, and it gives me no comfort to disagree with it, but in this one instance it ignores the crucial question of stress. The general guidance on a/an is that the choice between them should reflect pronunciation and not spelling. So I, at least, will write, when I have to, ‘a history book’, but ‘an historical discovery’.

I started re-reading Joseph Conrad's greatest novel, ‘Nostromo’, recently and noticed that in the first paragraph he writes

The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors . . . would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead . . .

It’s remarkable that any writer whose first language wasn’t English could both produce novels that have become part of the canon of English literature, and have such an intimate knowledge of the language that he could use the possessive determiner your in that very special way. How that is possible would be an interesting topic in any examination of second language acquisition.

As for such use of your itself, the OED says that it is ‘used with no definite meaning or vaguely implying “that you know of”’. It goes on to say that it corresponds

. . . to the “ethical dative”, as in the First Clown’s speech in Hamlet:  ‘If hee be not rotten before He be laide in‥He will last you, eight yeares, a tanner Will last you eight yeares full out.

The same scene has the First Clown using your in a similar way

Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that 'a will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.

In the previous century, Robert Ascham had written:

Euen the wisest of your great beaters, do as oft punishe nature, as they do correcte faultes.

Its use was perhaps perpetuated in the 1970s by Alf Garnett in the British television series 'Till Death Us Do Part'. In other instances when it is used in this way it can collocate with actual when it is, as the OED’s comment says, found chiefly as a British colloquialism and ‘used to emphasize the authentic or archetypal status of the specified thing; genuine, real, typical.’ Here are the supporting citations:

1966    B. Took & M. Feldman Round the Horne (1974) 97   Well chacun à son goût—that's your actual French you know.

1973    Time Out 2 Mar. 14/1   It was somewhere beyond extreme rudeness, but short of your actual NAS physical assault.

1986    R. Sproat Stunning the Punters 103   Your actual Wild Romantic Gael was lying out on the hill after Culloden getting his Wild Romantic Arse frozen off.

2007    N.Z. Herald (Nexis) 6 Jan.,   This isn't some third-world gangster state and they're far too civilised to trample on our freedoms like your actual practising dictator.

Looking in  a corpus for instances of this use of your when it occurs without actual is particularly difficult. There are 27,930 records including your in the OED and 134,361 in the British National Corpus. In all of them your will inevitably be followed by a noun, sometimes modified by an adjective. It’s therefore hard to know just how alive and well it is, but I hope it thrives. If so, your Joseph Conrad would no doubt be pleased.

Confession time. I have a peeve. It’s the use of deliver where provide will serve perfectly well. I use deliver for tangible things and provide for intangible things. Like other peeves, this one has no basis in etymology or usage. Deliver is from Old French deslivrer and elsewhere, with the sense of setting free. Deliver as of goods is at least as far removed from the etymology as is deliver as of services. There are only a few instances where the word is faithful to its origin: one of them is Deliver us from evil.

What do the dictionaries tell us? The OED is conservative, having as its definition 8a only

'To hand over, transfer, commit to another's possession or keeping; specifically to give or distribute to the proper person or quarter (letters or goods brought by post, carrier, or messenger); to present (an account, etc.)'

The strong suggestion here is that delivery is of things. Oxford Dictionaries Pro, on the other hand, is more liberal, giving us as its second definition

‘provide (something promised or expected)’.

Mirriam-Webster, after giving us as its definition 2a,

‘to take and hand over to or leave for another’,

also give us

‘to come through with’ (‘the new car delivers high gas mileage’) and, used intransitively, ‘to produce the promised, desired, or expected results’: (‘can't deliver on all these promises’).

The weight of evidence seems to be against my peeve. Like it or not, ‘deliver’ as of a service seems to be here to stay. Its meaning is clear and it can still be used for goods as well. My objection to it, I suppose, is to do with the way in which language is manipulated to hoodwink the public. Deliver is a more dynamic word than provide, capable of getting us to believe that the supply of something mundane is exciting and desirable. It is beloved of the writers of mission statements, as in, for (made-up) example: ‘Striving to deliver a world-class refuse collection service.’ But we’ll get used to it and it will lose its force to deceive.

Now, about those people who say referenda rather than referendums . . .

There are those who would have us use words only in the sense they were used when they first appeared. According to them, we should use ‘decimate’, for example, only to mean reduce by one tenth. Why, I wonder, do they not insist that we use ‘silly’ to mean only ‘deserving of pity’, or ‘spill’ to mean only ‘put to death’? Words change to meet changing needs, as the attached little game shows. It's based on an exercise in 'From Old English to Standard English' by Dennis Freeborn.

Click here to download:

changesinmeaning.htm (33 KB)

For a couple of months or so, I’ve been contributing to the Stack Exchange Q&A site English Language and Usage. You might like to take a look at it if you have questions about English or if you think you have answers.

Spotted on Facebook this week: I need out of my parents house but can't afford to go it alone. I was vaguely aware of the construction need out, but can’t recall having seen it in print.  Ngrams shows a sharp increase in the occurrence of the collocation from the mid-1980s, but the data is not reliable because it will include such combinations as what we need out there. Data from the COCA, and the BNC is similarly inconclusive.

On the other hand, COCA has 81 records of I want out and, as definition 5f of want, the OED gives: With ellipsis of a verb of motion, to want out (in, etc.) : to wish to go out (in, etc.). colloq. (orig. Sc., north. Irish, and U.S. colloq.). There are supporting citations from 1835 onwards, with this from ‘The Times Literary Supplement’ in 1985: If you want out, it is just about possible to live, if only internally, a better life. So, if ‘want out’, why not ‘need out’?

R L Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He was born in New York State in 1944 and died in 2004. He was an authority on the Basque language and on historical linguistics. His books include ‘Language: The Basics’   and ‘Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts’. The first is an accessible introduction to the study of language, the second a reliable work of reference. He also wrote the ‘Penguin Guide to Punctuation’  (now available online). It’s much clearer and more authoritative than Ms Truss’s intemperate offering, and it predates it by a year.

In another of his books designed for a wider market, ‘Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English’, published in 2001, he takes what is, for an academic linguist, a somewhat prescriptive approach. I show below his advice on a number of points of popular contention and contrast them with comments by Pam Peters in the corpus-based ‘Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ published in 2004. I should, however, first say that on at least two points he takes a position of which Pam Peters would approve. Of hopefully, he says 'Probably no one would prefer it is fortunate that to fortunately, so why should anyone prefer it is to be hoped that to hopefully?’ And on the ‘split infinitive’, ‘First of all, this traditional term is a misnomer, since, in this construction, nothing is split, least of all the infinitive, which is a single word . . . So, if the grammar checker on your word processor flags a ‘split infinitive’, my advice is to turn off your grammar checker: it’s only a dumb program and knows nothing about good English style.’

FEWER / LESS

Trask: ‘Though colloquial English is different, standard written English uses fewer with things that can be counted and less with things that cannot be counted.’

Peters: ‘. . . it was and is essentially a stylistic choice, between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less. Fewer draws attention to itself, whereas less shifts the focus on to its more significant neighbours.’

DIFFERENT TO / THAN / FROM   

Trask: Different to or different than . . . should be avoided in careful writing.

Peters: Different from has no exclusive claim on expressions of comparison. Writers and speakers everywhere use different than as well, depending somewhat on the grammatical context.

LIKE / AS

Trask: In formal English, like cannot be used as a conjunction.

Peters: There never was a general principle as to why like could not be used conjunctively, and it is now strongly supported by corpus data from around the English-speaking world.

DECIMATE

Trask

‘. . . you should never use decimate to mean “annihilate” or “destroy”.

Peters

Decimate is thus becoming a general-purpose synonym for “devastate”.

DISINTERESTED / UNINTERERSTED

Trask:  ‘. . . standard English makes a clear distinction. To be uninterested is to be apathetic, to have no trace of enthusiasm, while to be disinterested is to have nothing to gain or lose from any outcome.

Peters: Given that disinterested carries several meanings, we effectively rely on the context to show which is intended – as is true of many words.’ (She does, however, concede that ‘with all the controversy, it may be better to seek a synonym for it, if you aim to communicate clearly and directly.’)

LITERALLY

Trask: Something which is literally true is true in fact: you can only write She was literally foaming at the mouth if there was indeed foam coming out of her mouth.

Peters: In grammatical terms, it’s an intensifier or emphasize like “really” – whose use as such is registered as such in the dictionaries.

As with language, so with books about language: they are to be judged on how well they achieve the purpose the author intends. If 'Mind the Gaffe' does nothing else, it will protect novice writers from the wrath of the harrumphers. As Trask writes in his Introduction 'I advise you to refrain from using a form which will annoy the minority of readers with conservative tastes, and to choose instead a form that will annoy no one.' 'The Cambridge Guide', on the other hand, gives us a better understanding of the way English is developing and will make us less inhibited about breaking the taboos of the past. The important thing is that those who aspire to appear knowledgeable about English will do well to read both authors, and others like them.

An esteemed commentator on national and international affairs has drawn my attention to three examples of current usage which I believe he views with less than enthusiasm and which might merit a little investigation. They are head off to, kick-start and quote (as an alternative to quotation).

The only use of head off that the OED records is the sense of getting in front of someone or something so as to impede their or its progress. However, the British National Corpus contains 291 instances of it.  Of the 50 which are available to non-subscribers, five are in the sense of 'go away in a particular direction'. Of these five, one is from an academic publication, while the others are from more popular sources. The collocation of off with a verb expressing movement from a particular place is commonplace (go off, run off, drive off, be off) so to that extent at least head off is unexceptionable.

Kick-start comes to us from the way in which motor cycles were once started. In place of a starter motor, the foot was used to smartly strike a lever which got the pistons moving, the sparks sparking and the petrol flowing. It was a sudden and violent action, so it is no surprise to find that it came to be used figuratively, as in kick-start the economy.

Quote as a noun with the obsolete meaning 'a marginal reference' is first recorded, acording to the OED, in 1600. It is first recorded as meaning 'a quoted passage or remark' in 1885. In 1888 it occurs as describing a quotation mark and in the twentieth century it becomes an alternative to quotation to describe the price given for a stock, a commodity or a piece of work. Whether it is a shortened form of quotation, or whether it derives from the verb quote is of little consequence. Both are legitimate types of word formation, the first known as ‘clipping’, the second ‘conversion’.

So much for the facts. What should we make of these expressions as they are currently used? What all three have in common is that they are informal and colloquial. We can well imagine one of a group of friends saying ‘Well, OK, guys, we’re heading off to the pub now’. That is an entirely natural and appropriate use of language. In a heavyweight academic text, on the other hand, we might normally expect to find ‘As the Pilgrim Fathers set out for America, they can have had little idea of what awaited them.’ That, too, is an entirely natural and appropriate use of language in a way that ‘As the Pilgrim Fathers headed off to America . . .’ might not be. So, then, with kick-start. We can imagine Nick Robinson (the BBC’s political editor) saying ‘What the government has to do now is find a way to kick-start the recovery.’ What we can only with great difficulty imagine is a scientific paper starting with the words ‘We kick-started the experiment by collecting the samples to be studied.’ As for quote, my modest little blog of quotations is called ‘Baz’s Quotes’, because I wanted to keep it short and friendly.  ‘Barrie England’s Quotations’ would not have achieved that. There’s a BBC radio programme called ‘Quote . . .Unquote’. ‘Quotation . . . End of Quotation’ would hardly be an improvement. But I would expect to find in, let us say, in a list of ackowledgements in a book something like ‘Finally, I am indebted to the publishers for allowing me to include numerous quotations from her work.’ However, given the tendency to greater informality more generally, I think we can expect to find a greater incidence of quote, and of the other two expressions, in contexts where we would not have found them previously. Not only Tempora mutantur et nos in illis mutamur, but also Tempora mutantur et lingua in illis mutatur.

If we remove informal expressions from our discourse, far from improving the language, we impoverish it. We are entitled to have opinions about words and constructions and not to use them if we don’t like them. We all find certain expressions tiresome when they are used excessively, but that is not an argument against the expressions themselves. What we have no grounds for saying is that a common usage is not part of the language and that its continued use will result in the decline of English as we know it. People have been saying that for centuries and they have all been proved wrong.

None of this is to say that anything goes. The opposite is the case. We need to know what to use and when and where to use it, for language does far more than communicate. It both expresses and reflects the topic under discussion, the context in which it is found and the relationship between the interlocutors. Only when we take these aspects into account as well are we able to judge with any authority the effectiveness of any piece of speech or text.

The news that Oxford University has advised against the use of the eponymous comma has had a disproportionate reaction. Among the better informed and more rational comments are those by Johnson of the ‘The Economist’ (‘You'll just have to find something else to get worked up about today’) and Stan Carey  (‘Even in jest, the reactions seemed pretty extreme and obsessive to me’). Here's my contribution. 

Punctuation helps the reader make sense of what is written and a battery of marks is available to the careful writer. In the case of commas, it is the serial, or listing, comma that has caused so much fuss. Suppose we want to mention in a single sentence that we like a number of items such as:

A
B
C
D

If we write ‘I like A, B, C, and D’, the comma following C is the Oxford comma, so called because it is favoured by Oxford University Press (and continues to be so: it was the university rather than the publishing house that advised against its unthinking use). Given its provenance, it is odd that British practice more widely is actually to omit it, and write ‘I like A, B, C and D’, whereas American practice is to include it.

There are certainly instances in which a comma before and or or can remove ambiguity. In a sentence such as ‘I like A, B and C and D’, it is unclear whether B and C go together, or whether C and D do. A comma after B would show that the latter was the case (‘I like A, B, and C and D’), a comma after C, the former (‘I like A, B and C, and D’). This, however, is  poor justification for always inserting a comma before and or or in a sentence containing a list. The Oxford Dictionaries website tells us ‘The general rule is that one style or the other should be used consistently’, but why? Where a comma clarifies, I’m all for it. Where it adds nothing it is a distraction, clutters the page and leads to tedious discussions such as this.