38. Good English and Bad (Part-4)

Today in England you can still find authorities attacking the construction

different than as a regrettable Americanism, insisting that a sentence such as

"How different things appear in Washington than in London" is ungrammatical

and should be changed to "How different things appear in Washington from how

they appear in London." Yet different than has been common in England for

centuries and used by such exalted writers as Defoe, Addison, Steele, Dickens,

Coleridge, and Thackeray, among others. Other authorities, in both Britain and

America, continue to deride the absolute use of hopefully. The New York Times

Manual of Style and Usage flatly forbids it. Its writers must not say, "Hopefully

the sun will come out soon," but rather are instructed to resort to a clumsily

passive and periphrastic construction such as "It is to be hoped that the sun will

come out soon." The reason? The authorities maintain that hopefully in the first

sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary—that it doesn't belong to any other part

of the sentence. Yet they raise no objection to dozens of other words being used

in precisely the same unattached way—admittedly, mercifully, happily,

curiously, and so on. No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning … and so on.

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an

uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the

eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one

person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb

and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is

clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Loath didn't

like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm

hurrying, aren't I?"—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect

English. Many is almost always a plural (as in "Many people were there"), but

not when it is followed by a, as in "Many a man was there." There's no inherent

reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of

grammar.

They are because they are.

Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the

split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British

Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the

Treasury in the early 80s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence

containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split

infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to

quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive.

1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the

grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.

2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without

the support of any recognized authority of the last zoo years, even at the cost of

composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.

It is exceedingly difficult to find any authority who condemns the split infinitive

—Theodore Bernstein, H.W. Fowler, Ernest Gowers, Eric Partridge, Rudolph

Flesch, Wilson Follett, Roy H. Copperud, and others too tedious to enumerate here all agree that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Otto Jespersen even suggests that, strictly speaking, it isn't actually possible to split an infinitive. As he puts it: " 'To' … is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would

think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative.

Lacking an academy as we do, we might expect dictionaries to take up the

banner of defenders of the language, but in recent years they have increasingly

shied away from the role. A perennial argument with dictionary makers is

whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how

language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used

without taking a position). The most notorious example of the descriptive school

was the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary (popularly called

Webster's Unabridged), whose editor, Philip Gove, believed that distinctions of

usage were elitist and artificial. As a result, usages such as imply as a synonym

for infer and flout being used in the sense of flaunt were included without

comment. The dictionary provoked further antagonism, particularly among

members of the U.S. Trademark Association, by refusing to capitalize

trademarked words. But what really excited outrage was its remarkable

contention that ain't was "used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many

cultivated speakers."

So disgusted was The New York Times with the new dictionary that it

announced it would not use it but would continue with the 1934 edition,

prompting the language authority Bergen Evans to write: "Anyone who

solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English

usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious

nonsense," and he pointed out that the issue of the Times announcing the

decision contained nineteen words condemned by the Second International.

Since then, other dictionaries have been divided on the matter.

The American Heritage Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a usage

panel of distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage,

which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others have been more

equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how you view it). The revised

Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meaning for most words, though often noting that the newer usage is

frowned on "by many"—a curiously timid approach that at once acknowledges

the existence of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. Among

the looser meanings it accepts are disinterested to mean uninterested and infer to

mean imply. It even accepts the existence of kudo as a singular—

prompting a reviewer from Time magazine to ask if one instance of pathos

should now be a patho.