More Seldom

Here's a little bit of poetry by E.E. Cummings (corrected for punctuation and missing capitals)

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.

i quote it only because there was a question on the Dear Dogberry page as to whether anything could happen more seldom.

Seldom is usually an adverb, like often. So let's have a look:

I often wash.

I wash more often.

Compared to:

I seldom wash.


I wash more seldom.

Oooh no! Can't do that. However, in America seldom is often used as an adjective. In fact, Shakespeare adjectivised it in the sonnets:

Blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

That's how Cummings seems to be using seldom in the poem above, as a straight synonym for rare, not rarely. The line means something like "Waves are very wet, and love is very rare; indeed the rareness of love is greater in extent than the wetness of waves".

However, more still feels awkward when applied to adjectives of diminution. As in:

Alice was more small now.


The pile is more little.

All of which leaves you with two options: you can be very simple, reasonably simple, or extraordinary.

The very simple solution is to replace more seldom with less. So "I washed less".

The reasonably simple is replace more seldom with more rarely. This still has echoes of awkwardness because it sounds like "more small" etc. So if you don't want to be extraordinary, you should just add -er and -est. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did this back in 1748 when she wrote:

Complainers are seldom pity'd, and boasters yet seldomer beleiv'd.

And Mark Twain kicked all common usage out of the door when he wrote that:

The seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.

And what Montagu, Cummings and Twain have done is seldomly utterly wrong. Here's that poem in full:

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.


It is most mad and moonly
And less it shall unbe
Than all the sea which only
Is deeper than the sea.


Love is less always than to win,
Less never than alive,
Less bigger than the least begin,
Less littler than forgive.


It is most sane and sunly,
And more it cannot die
Than all the sky which only
Is higher than the sky.


The only pop song I can think of that contains the word seldom.



P.S. I've written about seldom before here.

Jane Austen and Latin

Professor Kathryn Sutherland, who, through no fault of her own, is an academic at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire, has, in a paper much reported in the national press, suggested, to the surprise and consternation of many, that Jane Austen, who has for so long been regarded as the mistress of English prose, may have relied more than a little upon the corrections of William Gifford, a classical scholar in the employment of John Murray who was her publisher, a translator of Juvenal, and an imitator of Persius.

Christ, it's hard to write like Austen. Take the fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility:

But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

Now let's cut away the subordinated stuff:

Her death....produced a great alteration...for...he invited... the family 

The last seventeen words are apposite clauses relating to the possessor of the object of the second main clause. The extraordinary thing is that the prose is so readable, so lucid, despite being grammatically so distant from spoken English.

English doesn't like to be complicated. It's a bluff, crude language that likes to stride around in a series of main clauses. The spoken equivalent of that sentence would be something like:

She died ten years before he did. That changed things. He needed someone to replace her. So he invited Henry Dashwood's family to come and live with him. Dashwood was the legal inheritor...

In fact, spoken English isn't quite like that because the sentences of spoken English rarely end. But if you replace all the full stops with and then you'll end up with something approaching normal conversation.

As I say, it doesn't make sense in English, but it would in Latin. English likes to be simple because English has so few inflections. Unlike Latin (or German for that matter), you can't pin a suffix to the end of the word family to show how it relates to the main verb. This means that, in English, your grammar's complexity is your reader's confusion; unless you're very, very careful.

However, as Latin prose was thought the model of good writing, and Latin language the palace of good thinking, its grammar crept into our literature, if not our language. Milton read all the classics, and wrote poetry that Ezra Pound denied was English at all. Thomas Browne knocked out jormungandrian sentences that nonetheless delight. Over breakfast, De Quincey used to improvise translations of the newspapers into Greek. Dr Johnson wrote a Latinate English that nobody ever spoke, but which was, when Austen began writing, considered the peak, pinnacle and pineapple of prose perfection.

I always thought that that was where Miss Austen got her prose style. She imitated Dr Johnson and Dr Johnson imitated the Ancients and thus... well, thus that fourth sentence of Sense and Sensibility. But now I have a new suspect: William Gifford, possessor of a classical education, and the man to whom Austen's prose was entrusted.

I have, though, not read Professor Sutherland's paper and can't find it online, so this must be taken as nothing more than the suspicions of a suspicious suspecter.



N.B. I'm working on the basis that Jane Austen herself didn't know Latin. This is reasonably safe, as she once wrote in a letter that she didn't know Latin. However, some scholars think that she only pretended not to know Latin in order to avoid getting a job.

We Few, We Lesser Few

Just in case you didn't know (and I'm sure you did) if you have fewer pints you have less beer. You cannot have fewer beer and you cannot drink less pints.

If you are talking about items that you can count - one, two, three, four - you use fewer (in mathematics this is called a discrete variable). If you are talking about an amount you use less. With that in mind, from the sullen quagmire of the Dear Dogberry page comes this query from Eleus:

The other day I wrote a comparison of Mozart and Schumann (not just for fun). The whole essay was coming together really well, except for one sentence that I just couldn't resolve.



I wanted to say something along these lines: "Schumann was born less than 20 years after the death of Mozart". But I had a sneaking suspicion that it should have been "fewer than 20 years", and it niggled at me for hours until I went back and re-wrote the paragraph so I didn't have to say it that way at all.


Still, I'm a bit befuddled.


I know that we say there is "less time" - but years are finite, aren't they, so surely it's "fewer years". What happens then if the years aren't whole years? For instance what if he was born 19 and a half years after Mozart - is that really "fewer"? - because it seems more of a continuum to me.

Or what if one person has 3 litres of water and someone else has only 2.9 litres of water. I know the second person has less liquid but do they really have fewer litres?



I've been thinking the issue over so much it's become obnubilated and I just can't straighten it out.


Am I making a simple thing complicated?

Well, Eleus, I think that in your wisdom you have pretty much answered your own question. It would be "less than a year" because, though a year is a discrete variable, the time that you are now subtracting from it is not, it is an amorphous amount. The same, I think, applies to twenty years.
 
This could not be said of "less than twenty people", which would be wrong because you could only subtract one person at a time from the crowd.
 
Just to be complicated. If, rather than using years, you were using markers of a year's passing (like winters) you would need to use to fewer. Schumann was born fewer than twenty winters after Mozart's death, but less than twenty years.

There's a Cowboy Junkies song about a long marriage that goes "It's been thirty summers that I've spent with him", meaning not that they spend winters apart, but that they've been married thirty years. Had their marriage been shorter, they would have spent fewer summers together. As Wordsworth put it:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters!

I hope that clears it up.

Incidentally, I love obnubilated, which, dear reader, means beclouded.

Obnubilated

P.S. I'm sorry that this reply has taken so long, I am now back in England and clearing the backtwig (which is like a backlog, but smaller).

Coming, I Saw and Conquered

Contemplate the title of this post. It is less natural than the original. It is less clear than the original. It is less snappy than the original. In short, it is worse.

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, Moptop has been complaining about a novel filled with sentences like this:

Doing something, he did something else.

That structure is extraordinarily common in written English, and rare in spoken. Sometimes the order is reversed and you get:

He did something, doing something else.

Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant. "I'll give you £100 pounds for the trunk," cried the Inky Fool, flicking frantically through a dog-eared book of recipes.

There are two problems with sentences like this. The first is well known, indeed it's one of the few bits of grammar that still get taught in schools: the dangling modifier.

In the sentence "Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant" we understand that it is Aloric who is doing the puffing. The participle belongs to the first noun after the comma.

Therefore, in the sentence "Walking up the street, my mobile phone began to ring" it is technically my mobile phone that is walking up the street.

That sentence is on the cusp of alrightness. Grammatically it's wrong, but it would be hard to misunderstand. Indeed it would require a small effort of will. Some dangling modifiers are so much part of the language that they cannot be faulted.

Speaking of which, the weather's nice today.

You would have to be a pedant of Himalayan proportions to ask how the weather could speak. Indeed, if you asked me that, your body might never be found*. The problem with danglers is not one of Absolute Grammar, the problem is that they can be unintentionally comic or offensive.

Beautiful yet simple, the Inky Fool will perform Fur Elise in the bakery at midnight.

Is, to be honest, correct however you read it. Bill Bryson cites this lovely line from Time magazine.

In addition to being cheap and easily obtainable, Crotti claims that the bags have several advantages over other methods.

Which makes poor Crotti a cheap slut.

The second problem with such sentences was rather nimbly pointed out in a comment on yesterday's post. The Antipodean was correcting one of my myriad typos.

"Prophecy?" she says, sipping from her chipped fine bone china coffee-mug. Actually I probably wouldn't talk and sip at the same time, but you get the gist.

The participle implies synchronicity. This means that you have to be dreadfully careful about what actions you yoke together. Sloppy novels are filled with lines like: "Skidding to a halt, he leaped out of his car", which is simply a dangerous and irresponsible way of parking, especially on the school run. One of the sentences Moptop cited on Dear Dogberry ran:

Opening his eyes, he watched Lazar.

The frustrating thing about that sentence is that it could so easily be recast.

He opened his eyes and watched Lazar.

Is that so hard? Is that so odd? As I said at the beginning of this post, these participle sentences are pretty rare in spoken English. People tend to chat in short simple sentences connected by conjunctions (speech, if you listen carefully, has very few full stops)**. It is only when a fellow sits down to write that he suddenly starts converting every other verb into a participle. As well as sounding slightly unnatural, this exposes him to the dangers described above and is Utterly Unnecessary.

It is so easy to avoid these dangers. It is so much more natural to have two verbs connected by and. Here are the other sentences Moptop cited along with the natural alternative:

Standing over him, Zoya raised the knife.
Zoya stood over him and raised the knife.

Hearing the guards at the window, Malysh picked up a slate.
Malysh heard the guards at the window and picked up a slate.

Standing up, she glanced into the hallway.
She stood up and glanced into the hallway.

That's how you'd say it, so why not write it that way?
 
Of course there are times when the actions are simultaneous. More specifically, there are times when one continuous action acts as the background for a shorter one. "Reading Hamlet, I came across this line" should not be recast, because the actions are not consecutive. One occurs during the other and so the participle is dandy and fine. I am not attempting to outlaw the practice, merely to observe the overuse and the risk.
 
I once read (and cannot now find) an essay by Clive James on writing for the radio. He observed that English is a basically linear language. Perhaps a more inflected language like Latin or German would allow for more grammatical complexity, but it is unnatural for English. Though we can subordinate our clauses we tend not to. This, he said, counts doubly for the radio. The reader of a book can always check back to the beginning of a sentence to work out who or what is doing the verb, a listener cannot. So sos, ands and buts beat commas.


Sell participles and buy conjunctions. Or: selling participles, buy conjunctions.

However, I should conclude by saying that the rules of English are neither hard nor fast. Consider the following from Paradise Lost. Brave young grammarians, intent on making a name for themselves, have set off into this sentence hoping to find a main verb and never been heard of again. But it's wonderful. This is a fallen angel addressing Satan in Hell.

"If thou beest he--but O how fallen! how changed
From him who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright!--if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what height fallen: so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder; and till then who knew
The force of those dire arms?"

The Inky Fool contemplating a typo

*Although I might post it back, piece by piece, to your nearest and dearest.
** Far commoner is "I was walking down the street when my mobile began to ring". However, neither of the dangers described in this post can apply to such sentences.

Prepositions The End Of Sentences At

There is an old, old joke about a chap who asks a librarian what section a particular book is in. 'I'm afraid', says the librarian, 'that I can't answer questions that end with a preposition.' 'All right,' says the chap. 'What section's the book in, you twat.'

This joke is terribly unfair on librarians, because any literate person knows that there is no rule saying that you can't end a sentence with a preposition. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on. Yet it remains one of those errors that flesh is heir to.

That there is no such rule should be obvious to any English speaker. How would you go about using a phrasal verb in the imperative? 'Out look!' you would scream. 'Down get! On we're being fired!'

Referees would say 'On play.' Off would take planes. And nobody would be allowed to sleep in.

No grammarian supports this wild rule. Fowler calls it a "superstition". Bernstein said that anyone who propounded it didn't have a leg on which to stand. Winston Churchill, who knew his way around a sentence, said it was the kind of nonsense up with which he would not put.

So why, you may ask, is it such a common misconception? Why do so many fools, however inconsistently, assert that there is such a rule? Did they just make up it?

Not exactly.

The rule is utterly unfairly blamed on a chap called Robert Lowth. Lowth was an eighteenth century scholar of ancient languages who believed that it was rather silly that schoolboys learnt their grammar from Latin and that it would be easier for everybody if they learnt English grammar first. So he wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar. This book is much and misleadingly cited. But for you, dear reader, for you I sat down yesterday and read it cover to cover*.

Here is the actual section on prepositions, and it's well worth reading the whole thing.

PREPOSITIONS have Government of Cases; and in English they always require the Objective Case after them: as, "with him; from her, to me."

The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as, "Horace is an author, whom I am much delighted with." "The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of." This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing;

[Any objections so far, dear reader? Notice the "strongly inclined to"?]

but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.

[That's it. Doesn't sound like a rule to me. It's a little stylistic tip for a particular kind of writing. And just to show that he understood, I shall quote further.]

...But in English the Preposition is more frequently placed after the Verb, and separate from it like an Adverb; in which Situation it is no less apt to affect the Sense of it, and to give it a new Meaning; and may still be considered as belonging to the Verb, and a part of it. As to cast is to throw;  but to cast up, or to compute, an account, is quite a different thing: thus to fall on, to bear out, to give over &c. So that the Meaning of the Verb, and the Propriety of the Phrase, depend upon the Preposition subjoined.

I can't tell whether it is more foolish that that little half-sentence has been taken up by generations of fatuous pedants as an iron law of English, or that for a stylistic suggestion poor Lowth has become the object of so many grammarians' scorn.

Lowth's book has also been blamed for the (utterly fatuous) idea that you can't split an infinitive, which he doesn't mention once. In fact, he toddles along merrily beginning sentences with Ands and Buts and being a good clear writer of English.

So Lowth is less read than condemned. And next time anybody tells you that you can't end a sentence with a preposition, tell them to off piss.

Not Guilty

*The title doesn't lie. It's very, very short.

Data, Singulars and Plurals

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world...

I nearly spilled my coffee all over the Sunday Times article. A typo? No.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away...

I know all about the notion that data is plural. I have seen the complaints; but I had never before seen data used as a plural outside of the pages of a style guide. It's like graffiti: any Italian will tell you it's plural and so will Fowler and his ilk, but nobody writes like that. I mean style guides are all very pleasant to read, but nobody, I thought, acted on them. Data is there to complain about, not actually pluralise.

Data is one of those words that have been picked out at random for special pleading. It is, in Latin, a second declension neuter plural nomintative. But the same argument is never made about agenda and stamina, both of which are also Latin plurals. Nobody ever says, 'My stamina are failing,' nor does any pedant or grammarian suggest that one should. There's a list of 55 Latin plurals here.

Gallows was originally a plural (because a gallows is made from several pieces of wood or galgi). But the word was already singular in Shakespeare's time (the gallows is built stronger than the church).

I even used to know an enthusiastic scholar of breakfasts who insisted that porridge was plural as it was a shortening of porridge oats: so 'How are your porridge?'

Etymology is no guide to number, and the grammar of a dead and foreign tongue cannot be applied to English (otherwise you would have to say "interpretations of the datorum vary" (it is strange that the rules tend to stretch to the little learning of the pedant)). Fjords would have to be fjorder, as in the Norwegian. When discussing Alans Hansen and Shearer you would have to go further and discover what the Hindi plural of pundit is.

We would all have to return to proto Indo-European grammar and there would be a great hush.

People write angry letters to the paper when data is singular, but the reader receives a strange jolt when the word is plural. One maniac correspondent wrote "I rebel at the phrase 'the data shows' which has become well-nigh universal", which means I suppose that he is reacting against the universe. If a usage is universal, it is correct. Fowler said that the word was 'plural only', but that was half a century ago. One might as well insist that the second person singular be thou.

The truth?

All of this comes under one simple rule that Bill Bryson and Kingsley Amis both agree on: number in English grammar is controlled by thought.

A gin and tonic is a drink, despite there being two nouns, because the drink is a single idea. One could conceivably say that gin and tonic are both ingredients in a gin and tonic, but it would be awkward. Fish and chips is a meal. Law and order (if considered as a single idea) is breaking down. The long and the short of it IS that:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps [singular] into this petty place

The Telegraph is therefore correct to write that "ministers have insisted that the Olympics is 'on budget'", because the budget would be for the games as a whole: a single idea.

Conversely, a singular noun can be treated as a plural. The couple are in love with each other. One could not reasonably say that the couple is in love with itself. The National Youth Orchestra are all in their teens, but the National Youth Orchestra is 61 years old. It depends how you're thinking about it/them.

Data is singular so long as I consider it so and plural when the whim strikes me. Teams, orchestras, armies, quintets, convocations, councils, countries, sets, groups, flocks, herds, prides and opera must bend  and bow to my ineffable will.

There is, of course, mistakes in number. Often a writer forgets, after a subordinate clause, how many subjects their verb had.  People forget that neither or nor nor give the plural. There are cases, occasional and rare - perhaps once in a century, that requires that two words distant in meaning cannot reasonably be considered a single idea. I even noticed in a previous post that I had made a country singular and then plural with no reason for the change, a shift that Fowler rightly objects to.

As a bit of trivia (another second declension nominative neuter plural), plus, being a preposition, does not change the number of a noun. One and one are two, but one plus one is two. "Tom, plus his friends, has arrived."

And then there are those confused serpents like Mr Fry who think that none has to be singular. It does not. Evidence and video are to be found in my previous post here.

How many legs?

P.S. There's a Polish word that's plural but used as a singular in English, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. Anybody?

Railways: On the platform edge

Railway-speak is a peculiar dialect, characterised by tortuous phrasing, a fondness for neologism, and a seeming reluctance to take responsibility for delays, unscheduled stops, failure to stop and indeed anything else that might go wrong. Announcers follow the principle that they should never use one word when two might do. Take, for example, the exhortation to “mind the gap between the train and the platform edge”. Why “platform edge”, and not simply “platform”? And, if you have to mention the edge, why do so in the odd phrase “platform edge” and not the far more natural-sounding “edge of the platform”?

The strangeness of the construction becomes clear when you apply it to other phrases. The Carpenters were standing “on the top of the world”, not “the world top”. And in the words of Kenny Price, everyone likes to be at “the front of the bus, the back of the church… [and] the middle of the road” – not the “bus front”, the “church back” and the “road middle”.

The rules governing the possessive and the use of noun combinations are incredibly complex, and there are exceptions – mountaintop, hilltop and table top sound natural, as do cliff edge and knife edge (although knife edge in particular seems more common as a metaphor). But, in general, possessives referring to a particular part or area of an object seem to use the “of” form (or, less frequently, “‘s”, as in “Land’s End”).

Here is an interesting discussion about the possessive and noun + noun combinations. It makes a distinction between objects belonging to living things (which typically take “’s”) and objects or parts of non-living things, where the possessive is formed through by using “of” or through a noun + noun combination.

The T.S. Eliot Defence

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

Is without doubt one of the finest couplets in English poetry (by "without doubt" I mean that if you doubt it I will track you down and punch you on the jaw); the only problem with it is that the grammar is wrong - irrefutably and indubitably wrong.

"You and I" is apposite to "us", so it should be "you and me". Put another way: "let you and I go" is as wrong as "let I go". It should be "me".

Me, me, me, me, me.

Let us go then, you and me,
When the evening is a tumpty-tee...

No.

This is a problem for a pedant. What, really, is the point of all this grammatical, syntactical, linguistic brou-ha-ha if you can ignore it all and still write some of the finest lines in English?

What, indeed, about Our Mutual Friend? When two things are mutual each stands in the same relation to the other. There can be mutual love and mutual hate but there can be no third party in a mutual relationship. It should, were the rules obeyed, be called Our Shared Friend.

A Dickens-loving pedant would probably proffer the excuse that the line is attributed in the book to Silas Wegg and that the whole joke is that Wegg is illiterate yet pretentious. They would then return to altering the punctuation in Shakespeare, muttering that dear old Charles do the police in different voices.

Such defenders of Dickens would, I am afraid, be no more convincing than Mr Curdle. Dickens got it wrong. Eliot got it wrong. I do not even believe that he sacrificed "me" for the rhyme.

Yet their wrongness did not detract from their genius because the beauty of the lines and the clearness of thought were not impaired. I would not alter a jot or even a tittle of Eliot's lines any more than I would point out to Botticelli how wrong the anatomy is in the Birth of Venus. Beauty cannot be wrong, nor can the deliberate be mistaken.

So, it's probably worth saying something about the subject of this blog. I am not here to assert by force of arms the hegemony of grammar over sense or by dint of pandiculation the rule of dictionary definitions over perfectly good new uses. Oblivious may be defined in the dictionary as forgetting, but everybody now uses it to mean never having noticed and that is, quite simply, that.

It is only the lazy uses, the meaningless swathes, the casual use of casual, ubiquitous axes and vacuous vibrancies to which we take (odd phrase when you think about it) exception.

Note her left shoulder and arm