Plain Words (30 page)

The split infinitive bogy is having such a devastating effect that some people feel it must be wrong to put an adverb between any auxiliary and any part of a verb, or between a preposition and any part of a verb; but the infinitive can be split only by inserting a word or words between
to
and the word that, with
to
, forms the infinitive of the verb. ‘To fully understand' is a split infinitive. ‘To have fully understood' is not.

Rebels against the taboo will find themselves in good company. George Bernard Shaw was emphatically on their side. In a letter of 1892 to the
Chronicle
, he rounded on a ‘fatuous specialist' who had attacked the split infinitive, calling him ‘an ignoramus, an idiot' and ‘a self-advertising duffer'. In a similar letter of 1907, Shaw wrote to
The Times
:

There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly, or quickly to go, or to quickly go. The important thing is that he should go at once.

But the most vigorous rebel could hardly condone splitting so resolute as the crescendo of this lease:

The tenant hereby agrees:

Note
. In the quotation above, Shaw writes, ‘It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly, or quickly to go, or to quickly go'. But it is of
some
consequence, as any fatuous, self-advertising duffer might wish to protest. ‘He decides quickly to go' may mean his decision is made quickly (his decision to go in a year, perhaps). ‘He decides to go quickly' means he decides not only to go, but to go without delay. As for the third version, ‘to quickly go', there is neither further sense to be gleaned nor
lyrical advantage to be gained from this splitting of an infinitive. And the same could be said of Gowers's examples above—about gradual suicide, melting hailstones and a properly rewritten letter: though in all three sentences the adverb needs to be moved to make the intended meaning clear, there is no need in any of them to split the infinitive in order to accomplish this.

A standard example of a split infinitive that cannot be avoided—except by rewriting the sentence to eliminate the infinitive itself—is one on this pattern: ‘She managed to more than triple her output'. If ‘more than' is put anywhere else in this sentence, the meaning ceases to be watertight, or changes to something else. Either the subject is credited with achieving more and other than a tripling of output: ‘She managed more than to triple her output' (she also quadrupled her list of clients), or the subject triples more than her output alone: ‘She managed to triple more than her output' (she also tripled her orders).

Gowers wrote that the rule against the split infinitive was an ‘arbitrary fetish', yet he advised officials to stick to the rule on the ground that ‘readers will almost certainly attribute departures from it to ignorance of it'. He later admitted that this ‘safety-first' approach, which he followed in his own writing, had caused a friend to accuse him of being ‘little better than a coward'.

Not until the end of the twentieth century would the Civil Service choose to demonstrate in the most prominent way possible that it had the courage of Gowers's convictions, though he himself never did. The Queen's Speech of November 1999 was as usual dominated by infinitives, but for the first time in history the Queen herself was caused to split one of them. From a golden throne, she read out the words ‘to racially discriminate'. In the subsequent debate on the Speech in the House of Lords, objection was raised to the fact that such a monstrous utterance had been put into the Queen's mouth. The response to this was misleading in more ways
than one: ‘My Lords, what is good enough for Sir Ernest Gowers is good enough for the Sovereign'.

Though the highest grammatical authorities, aided by innumerable ordinary English speakers, have for decades attempted to demolish the prejudice against the split infinitive, there is great resistance to these efforts, and the taboo remains enormously popular. It follows that even today if you ignore Gowers's cowardly example and, as the Queen did, split an infinitive, you leave yourself open to being thought ignorant. It follows with equal force, however, that you have no great authority for judging others ignorant when they split theirs. ~

This is a large subject. Whole books have been written about it, and it is still true, as it apparently was some five hundred years ago, that no two authorities completely agree. Taste and common sense are more important than any rules. You put in punctuation marks or ‘stops' to help your reader to understand you, not to please some grammarian; but you should try to write so that your reader will understood you with a minimum of help of that sort. The Fowlers, in
The King's English
, say:

it is a sound principle that as few stops should be used as will do the work … Every one should make up his mind not to depend on his stops. They are to be regarded as devices, not for saving
him the trouble of putting his words into the order that naturally gives the required meaning, but for saving his reader the moment or two that would sometimes, without them, be necessarily spent on reading the sentence twice over, once to catch the general arrangement, and again for the details. It may almost be said that what reads wrongly if the stops are removed is radically bad; stops are not to alter meaning, but merely to show it up. Those who are learning to write should make a practice of putting down all they want to say without stops first. What then, on reading over, naturally arranges itself contrary to the intention should be not punctuated, but altered; and the stops should be as few as possible, consistently with the recognized rules.

The symbols we shall have to consider in this chapter are the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, full stop, hyphen, inverted commas, question mark, semicolon. It will also be a suitable place to say something about capital letters, paragraphs, parentheses and sentences.

The only uses of the apostrophe that call for notice are (1) its use to denote the possessive of names ending in
s
, and of pronouns; (2) its use before a final
s
to show that the
s
is forming the plural of a word or symbol not ordinarily admitting of a plural; and (3) its use with a defining plural.

(1) There is no universally accepted code that governs how one forms the possessive case of names ending in
s
, but the most desirable practice (especially with monosyllables) seems to be not just to put an apostrophe at the end of the word, as one does with an ordinary plural (strangers' gallery), but to add a second
s
—Mr Jones's room, St James's Street, not Mr Jones' room, St James' Street.

As to pronouns, all these except the pronoun
one
dispense with
an apostrophe in their possessive cases—
hers
,
yours
,
theirs
,
ours
and
its
, but
one's
not
ones
(and
someone's
,
anybody's
,
everyone's
,
nobody's
etc.).
It's
is not the possessive of
it
but a contraction of ‘it is': the apostrophe is performing its duty of showing that a letter has been omitted.

(2) Whether an apostrophe should be used to denote the plural of a word or symbol that does not ordinarily make a plural depends on whether the plural is readily recognisable as such. Unless readers are really likely to need help, it should not be thrust upon them. This practice is clearly justified with single letters: ‘there are two o's in woolly'; ‘mind your p's and q's'. Otherwise it is rarely called for. It should not be used with contractions (e.g. MPs), or merely because what is put into the plural is not a noun. Editors of Shakespeare do without an apostrophe in the line from
Richard
III
, ‘Talk'st thou to me of “ifs” '. And Rudyard Kipling did not think it necessary when he wrote, in the
Just So Stories
:

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

   And seven million Whys!

(3) Whether one should use an apostrophe in such expressions as ‘thirty years imprisonment' is a disputed and not very important point. The answer seems to be that if
thirty years
is regarded as a descriptive genitive or ‘possessive', as
busman's
is in
busman's holiday
, we must write
thirty years' imprisonment
. But if ‘thirty years' is taken to be an adjectival phrase (equivalent here to ‘three-decades-long'), there must be no apostrophe but the words must be hyphenated:
thirty-years imprisonment
.
*
The singular form (‘a year's imprisonment') can only be a descriptive genitive, but in such phrases as ‘games master' and ‘customs examination', the words
games
and
customs
are clearly adjectival, and need no apostrophe.

Several correspondents have asked me to write about the use of capital letters. The difficulty is to know what to say. No one needs telling that capitals are used for the first letter in every sentence, for proper names and the names of the months and days, and for the titles of books and newspapers. The only difficulty is with words that are sometimes written with capitals and sometimes not. Here there can be no general rule; we are free to do what we think most fitting. But two pieces of advice may perhaps be given:

(1) Use a capital for a particular and a small letter for the general. Thus:

It is a street leading out of Oxford Street.

I have said something about this in
Chapter I
; I shall have more to say in later chapters.

In this case the Judge went beyond a judge's proper functions.

Many parliaments have been modelled on our Parliament.

(2) Whatever practice you adopt, be consistent throughout any document you are writing.

Colon

About the use of the colon there is even less agreement among the authorities than about the use of other stops. All agree that its systematic use as one of a series of different pause-values has almost died out with the decay of the formal ‘period': the single sentence that contains a number of well-balanced clauses. One person will hold that the colon is still useful as something less than a full stop and more than a semicolon; another will deny it. We need not enter into this. It will be enough to note that the following uses are generally regarded as legitimate:

(1) To
mark more sharply than a semicolon would the antithesis between two sentences:

In peace time the Civil Service is a target of frequent criticism: in war time the criticism is very greatly increased.

In some cases the executive carries out most of the functions: in others the delegation is much less extensive.

(2) To precede an explanation or particularisation or to produce a list or series: in the words of Fowler, to deliver ‘the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words':

The design of the school was an important part of the scheme: Post Office counters with all the necessary stores were available and maps and framed specimens of the various documents in use were exhibited on the walls of light and cheery classrooms.

News reaches a national paper from two sources: the news agencies and its own correspondents.

For the second purpose the dash is the colon's weaker relative.

The use of commas cannot be learnt by rule. Not only does conventional practice vary from one period to another, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves. Moreover, stops have two kinds of duty. One is to show the construction of sentences—the ‘grammatical' duty. The other is to introduce nuances into the meaning—the ‘rhetorical' duty. ‘I went to his house and I found him there' is a colourless statement. ‘I went to his house, and I found him there' hints that it was not quite a matter of course that he should have been found there. ‘I went to his house. And I found him there' indicates that to find him
there was surprising. Similarly you can give a different nuance to what you write by encasing adverbs or adverbial phrases in commas. ‘He was, apparently, willing to support you' throws a shade of doubt on his bona fides that is not present in ‘He was apparently willing to support you'.

The correct use of the comma—if there is such a thing as ‘correct' use—can only be acquired by common sense, observation and taste. Present practice is markedly different from that of the past in using commas much less freely. The sixteenth-century passage that heads this chapter, translated to keep its original punctuation intact, is peppered with them with a liberality not approved by modern practice.

I shall attempt no more than to point out some traps that commas set for the unwary. First I shall deal with some uses of the comma that are generally regarded as incorrect, and then I shall consider various uses which, though they may not be incorrect, need special care in the handing, or are questionable.

A. Incorrect uses of commas

(1) The use of a comma between two independent sentences not linked by a conjunction. The usual practice is to use a heavier stop in this position:

The Department cannot guarantee that a license will be issued, you should therefore not arrange for any shipment.

You may not be aware that a Youth Employment Service is operating throughout the country, in some areas it is under the control of the Ministry of Labour and National Service and in others of the Education Authorities.

I regret the delay in replying to your letter but Mr X who was dealing with it is on leave, however, I have gone into the matter …

On the principle that in workaday writing of this kind, sentences should be short and should have unity of thought, it would be better to put a full stop after
issued
in the first quotation,
country
in the second and
leave
in the third. (See also the entry below on the semicolon,
pp. 264
–
5
.)

(2) The use of one comma instead of either a pair or none. This very common blunder is more easily illustrated than explained. It is almost like using one only of a pair of brackets. Words that are parenthetical may be able to do without any commas, but if there is a comma at one end of them there must be one at the other end too:

Against all this must be set considerations which, in our submission are overwhelming. (Omit the comma.)

The first is the acute shortage that so frequently exists, of suitable premises where people can come together. (Omit the comma.)

We should be glad if you would inform us for our record purposes, of any agency agreement finally reached. (Either omit the comma or insert one after
us
.)

It will be noted that for the development areas, Treasury-financed projects are to be grouped together. (Either omit the comma or insert one after
that
.)

The principal purpose is to provide for the division between the minister and the governing body concerned, of premises and property held partly for hospital purposes and partly for other purposes. (Omit the comma.)

(3) The use of commas with ‘defining' relative clauses. Relative clauses fall into two main classes. Different authorities give them different labels, but ‘defining' and ‘commenting' are the most convenient and descriptive. If you say ‘the man who was here this
morning told me everything', the relative clause
who was here this morning
is a defining one: it completes the subject
the man
, which conveys no definite meaning without it. But if you say ‘Jones, who was here this morning, told me everything', the relative clause is commenting: the subject
Jones
is already complete, and the relative clause merely adds a bit of information about him (it may or may not be important, but is not essential to the definition of the subject). A commenting clause should be within commas. A defining clause should not. This is not an arbitrary rule; it is a utilitarian one. If you do not observe it, you may fail to make your meaning clear, or you may even say something different from what you intended. For instance:

A particular need of the moment is provision for young women, who owing to war conditions have been deprived of normal opportunities of learning homecraft …