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| Like anyone else who writes for the public, I get a lot of letters and emails from readers complaining about errors of grammar, usage or fact. Some of these are justified; some are well-intentioned but wrong-headed; some are plain silly. On this page I shall put my responses to some of the commoner complaints. Who, whom. (A famous remark of Lenin's by the way. It transliterates from Russian as kto, kogo? but is actually pronounced more like: "ktaw, kaVAW?" A perfect encapsulation of the left-wing mindset. Who is the oppressor, who the oppressed? Who is doing what to whom? Lefties believe that wherever two or more human beings are gathered together, one group must be beating up on another group... But that's not what I'm talking about here.) Generally speaking, I go with the slogan I once saw on a lapel button: "I FAVOR WHOM'S DOOM". I think "whom" is a relic, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better. "Who" is the natural pronoun in almost all circumstances, as Steven Pinker points out in The Language Instinct. However, I was educated by old-school prescriptive grammarians, and still say "whom" sometimes from sheer habit, or when I know for sure that an editor will change a "who" to a "whom" anyway. Remember the old vaudeville favorite: "Who Were You With Last Night?" Will, shall. "Shall" is very fast going the way of "whom". I am not quite so willing to say "good riddance" in this case as I am with "whom," because a subtle and useful shade of meaning is being lost here, and because when it has finally been lost, English literature from past times will be read with less understanding. However, there is no doubt that "shall" and "should" can now, in all but a small number of artificial constructions, pretty much be dispensed with in spoken American English. This is not news: H.L. Mencken in The American Language (1949) said that "except in the most painstaking and artificial varieties of American" the distinction between shall/should and will/would "may almost be said to have ceased to exist". There is a large literature on this, which you can read for yourself. Not only Mencken, but also Follett (Modern American Usage) and Fowler (Modern English Usage) give over acres of space to it. Here I am only going to apologize--or rather, decline to apologize--for my own inconsistency. Those same teachers who hammered "whom" into my infant head also taught me the shall/will rules, and some of what they taught stuck. I hear myself say: "I should be sorry to see...," "They shan't trick me..." and similar things, naturally and unselfconsciously, at least to the point where my American listeners break out in smiles. If you can't be bothered to read Fowler, Follett, Mencken etc. (and if you can't, I don't blame you), the root difference between "shall" and "will" is that the first carries a flavor of obligation, the second a flavor of volition. My schoolmasters used to tell us the story of two drowning men. The first had fallen into the river accidentally and was struggling for his life. "I shall drown!" he cried out in desperation. "Nobody will save me!" The second, however, was a suicide, determined to quit this life. He deliberately threw himself into the most treacherous part of the current, and as he went down for the third time was heard to shout: "I will drown! Nobody shall save me!" That only scratches the surface, though, as you will see if you read Follett etc. Early 21st-century Americans have clearly decided that they have better things to do with their time than memorize pettifogging distinctions of this kind, and on balance, with the slight reservation entered in my first sentence, I think they are wise to have done so. Gender, Sex. For some reason, mixing these two up is one of the worst crimes a writer can commit. It drives people crazy. I am a chronic confuser of the two, and shall probably continue to be until some enraged grammarian comes round with a shotgun and blows my head off. I am sorry. This is a blanket apology, to which in future I shall refer all complainers. Dirty Tricks. A few weeks ago I wrote a column titled "Less Guns, More Gun Crime". That brought out the language nuts in droves. In a subsequent column I said "Phooey!" to the lot of them and posted the following rebuttal at the top of that column when I reproduced it for my personal web site: I got approx. 875,000 emails from readers telling me that this piece should have been titled: “Fewer Guns, More Gun Crime”. I understand that they meant well; and, given the current state of the language (Am I the last person in the civilized world who knows that “criteria” is a plural noun, or is there someone else? Hello?) I am in general sympathy with their feelings. Furthermore, I do make grammatical bloopers, sometimes very horrible ones; and these lapses occasionally even get past the gimlet-eyed editors of NR and NRO. In a magazine piece on the Crusades a few weeks prior to this, I wrote “whence” when I should have written “whither,” and this faux pas actually made it into print. When gross errors like that are pointed out to me, first I cringe, then I offer snivelling apologies. OK? Now: Permit me to give a wee lesson in rhetoric. It is perfectly all right to deliberately mangle usage, grammar, and even spelling to make a stylistic or rhetorical point. It is, in fact, so all right that rhetoricians have fancy names for these dark arts. The substitution of one grammatical form for another is “enallage”: “But see where Somerset and Clarence comes!” (Henry VI Part 3, 4.2.3 — just to ram the point home, all my examples will be taken from the Swan of Avon). The substitution of one part of speech for another is “anthimeria”: “Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not.” (Cymbeline, 5.4.146). Substitution of the wrong noun or adjective for effect is “catachresis”: “Look with thine ears.” (King Lear, 4.6.154). Insertion of superfluous words for euphony or reinforcement is “pleonasm”: “When that I was and a little tiny boy.” (Twelfth Night, 5.1.398). There are a dozen others, but I hope these are sufficient to make the point. English is not a computer code, in which the slightest deviation from prescribed rules brings down the system. It is a live thing, a thing that wants to be teased and played with, as all the great masters knew. I hereby declare my intention to follow their example, to the best of my meager abilities: “With little risk of being misunderstood, but with much risk of being thought illiterate.” (That is from Arthur Quinn’s invaluable handbook to English rhetoric, Figures of Speech, from which all the above examples were lifted.) Got all that? Now: “Less Guns, More Gun Crime” was a deliberate play on the title of John Lott’s well-known book, More Guns, Less Crime, which I mentioned further down the piece. Deliberate, and perfectly legitimate; unless you want to argue with Bill Shakespeare — or with Joe Jacobs, whose memorable (though I grant you, in his case probably unintentional) enallage “We was robbed!” probably expresses the feelings of any of my would-be correctors who have read this note. |
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